De Klerk, South Africa’s last apartheid leader, dies at 85

F.W. de Klerk, who as president of South Africa played a significant role in dismantling the apartheid system that he and his ancestors had helped put in place, died at his home near Cape Town on Thursday. He was 85.

He had been receiving treatment for cancer.

De Klerk had vehemently defended racial separation in his political career, before stunning his deeply divided nation upon assuming power in 1989 by making a U-turn on South Africa’s policy of apartheid and releasing Nelson Mandela from prison.

He was aware that unless he stopped the system, South African would face racial civil war. South Africa in the 1980s then had become a pariah of the international world, its internal strife and tainted reputation disruptive to the economy.

Although he apologised for the harmful effects of apartheid in 1994, De Klerk was questioned by many South Africans until his death about the extent of that apology. He had been a right-hand man to predecessor P.W. Botha, one of a long line of repressive white leaders.

After his release, Mandela assumed power in an election against De Klerk four years later. De Klerk was invited into his transitional government as second deputy president, but he later quit.

He attempted to transform the National Party, which his grandfather helped create, from a white-dominated organization into a multiracial one, but failed.

He was not in favour of Mandela’ss Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated the country’s past, and bowed out of politics in 1997.

He and Mandela shared the Nobel peace prize in 1993, for their joint efforts at remaking the country, although their relationship was less than cordial. “It was ironic that we had both travelled so far to be granted the world’s highest accolade for peace and reconciliation — while the relationship between us was characterized by so much vitriol and suspicion,” he wrote in his autobiography.

Mandela always considered De Klerk an ‘enemy’. “Despite his seemingly progressive actions,” Mandela wrote, “Mr. de Klerk was by no means the great emancipator. He was a gradualist, a careful pragmatist. He did not make any of his reforms with the intention of putting himself out of power. He made them for precisely the opposite reason: to ensure power for the Afrikaner in a new dispensation.”

In a final video message released by his foundation hours after his death, De Klerk clarified his stance on apartheid, and apologised once again “without qualification.”

“Allow me in this last message to share with you the fact that since the early ’80s, my views changed completely,” De Klerk said, looking frail. “It was as if I had a conversion and in my heart of hearts realized that apartheid was wrong.”

He is survived by his wife, Elita, and his children Jan and Susan, his foundation said.

Frederik Willem de Klerk was born in Johannesburg on March 18, 1936, to a family steeped in the politics of the Afrikaners, descendants of the Dutch and Huguenot settlers who arrived in southern Africa in the 17th century.

His father, Jan de Klerk, was cabinet member under three prime ministers. and president of the Senate. His uncle, Hans Strijdom, a fervent advocate of apartheid, was prime minister in the 1950s.

His grandfather, also named Willem, was a proud Afrikaner, having been arrested on treason charges by the British before becoming a minister and a founding member of the National Party.