Newell Stultz takes a look how F.W. de Klerk transcended the South African government's frame of mind
It wasn't clear that he was a moderate at that point. That's one of the great questions about de Klerk. There are two questions about him that I find quite fascinating. One is related to what you're asking. How could an individual who grew up in the bosom of Afrikaner nationalism, whose uncle was one of the creators of apartheid in the 1950s, Prime Minister Strëydom; whose father was a Cabinet minister in various National Party governments at the worst of the apartheid period, who showed nothing in his upbringing or his family relationships or in his early political pronouncements that he was going to be anything other than another in a long line of party loyalists? He was younger, to be sure, because the generations were changing, but still very much in the mold of unimaginative Afrikaner, ethnic loyalists who had relatively little sense of the outside world and the changes that were going on in it. So how such a person ended up doing what he did is one question.
The second question is, what did he think that he could produce in the way of an eventual system which he kept saying would have a guaranteed political role for whites forever? His public pronouncements throughout the period of the changeover suggested that he believed that at the end of the day, if they played their cards right, the whites would not be totally subordinate to the black majority - which is the situation they are essentially now in.
It was quite extraordinary that he could believe that. It was secondarily extraordinary that he could then persuade the whites rather generally of the same view. It may not be that the whites rather generally had the same view. I'm rather of the opinion that whites were somehow more realistic than de Klerk was in his public statements- that they had just grown tired of hanging on to their position at the cost of increasing violence and isolation and economic chaos. They had resolved themselves that a peaceful transition to even a black-controlled majority situation was preferable to trying to persevere in the existing situation. I think everyone realized that this couldn't last indefinitely.
Did the sanctions, such as divestment by outside corporations, have any effect on de Klerk?
Yes it did. And I have to say that in retrospect, I misread the situation. My feeling was, and I expressed that occasionally at Brown during the whole divestment debate, that the campaign of sanctions and economic boycott and cultural isolation from the world would have the effect of bringing intransigent people to power in the country, everybody would hunker down and circle the wagons - which is an Afrikaner metaphor from the pioneering days - and would make things less flexible and ultimately more violent and more destructive. I didn't think that in the end, the existing situation could endure forever, but I hoped that people such as de Klerk might come to power. But I thought it was more likely that such people would come to power if they were not backed into a corner and essentially told by the external world, "Do it our way, or else." When de Klerk was announced, I thought this was the least promising possibility.
Why?
Because he was a Transvaaler, and the Transvaal had a reputation of being historically a more rigid, doctrinaire part of the Cape; and there were several other individuals who seemed to have more flexibility in them, and maybe even - horror of horrors - a little liberalism! So I was quite disheartened. I was also disheartened when P. W. Botha came to power. He was minister of defense, a very authoritarian kind of figure. So de Klerk became president. And no one at the time he became president anticipated what was going to happen or what did happen.
He almost immediately started dismantling apartheid.
That's right. There had been a lot of talk about reform in South Africa, even under P.W. Botha - but from the standpoint of the people who were supposed to benefit from the reforms - the Africans - it was fraudulent - like shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic. And it was initially imagined that de Klerk was that kind of reformer. That is to say, he was trying to dress up apartheid in new ways.
The Berlin Wall was coming down - 1989 was a pivotal year. How much did that contribute to de Klerk's resolve to do away with apartheid?
How much the collapse of the Soviet Union, and particularly the coming of peace, relative peace to Angola, and the independence of Namibia contribute to all this - it made things easier for de Klerk, but it didn't fundamentally change the situation he was dealing with, namely a white minority in a country where that only constituted about 10 or 15 percent of the total population. ...It meant that the wolf, that is, African troops armed with Soviet weapons, was not quite at the door the way that had been easy to imagine they were when the Soviet Union was sending arms - a lot of arms - to Angola, and where they were engaged with South African forces until quite late in this process.
I think Namibia may actually have been more illustrative, because that was a situation where the demographics were very much the same as in South Africa, or from a white point of view, even worse. And they eventually worked things out and blood didn't run in the streets, and the terrible things that historically many whites had supposed would happen didn't happen.
Was de Klerk a pragmatist in all of this or was he morally motivated to dismantle this system?
I think it's a combination of both. It's a pragmatism of realizing that the path they were on was clearly heading toward disaster - some would say that it had already arrived at disaster, and couldn't work, and couldn't succeed, and they could wiggle and squirm and hold on for 10 years, but there was no escape from the course of events if they persevered in what they were trying to do. ...meaning bloodshed, economic chaos, loss of life, political tumult, the risk of a military coup, conceivably military intervention by the outside world - that would not have been indefinitely off the table.
Many in the country, those with influence, had the sense that clearly things were not working out and were getting worse by the day and by the week, and no minor adaptation in state policy was going to change that.
And that's probably the overwhelming theme in de Klerk's mind. Then there was the willingness to contemplate different perspectives on what South Africa should do. De Klerk's uncle-in-law used to say, "When the white man ceases to be the boss in South Africa, he will be eliminated altogether." And that essential frame of mind - that power-sharing or democracy meant ultimately the elimination of perhaps even one's right to be in the country - was pervasive among whites. De Klerk was able to transcend that and say that these other ways were not necessarily suicidal.
If Botha never had his stroke, and de Klerk never came to power, would South Africa look anything like it does today?
No, it wouldn't. If Botha hadn't had his stroke, he would've continued on for a while, but he was still pretty elderly, so he would've gone at some point. But if a more ordinary or more familiar figure had come to the fore, as frankly, I expected, then the developments that were characteristic of the 1980s would've continued: more sanctions, more international ostracism, more violence at home, more economic dislocation, more gravitation of power from the civilian to the military and police - a garrison state.
What happened in South Africa, which is in some ways de Klerk's genius, was that a negotiated settlement was reached, which has allowed far more continuity in the situation, to the despair of the far left, in South African life. So that while the National Party is fated, I'm sure, to disappear as a viable political organization, capitalism and white property ownership - property ownership in general - is likely to continue relatively unimpacted by all of this.
When de Klerk freed the ANC prisoners - and ultimately Mandela - do you think he did calculate that this would ensure that he and the National Party would have a place in the new South Africa?
I've said that. He kept saying, "I'm not negotiating with Mandela and these other folks to negotiate myself out of a position." It was not going to be the same position; it was not going to be an exclusive position - but it would be some position. And, in fact, his party has some position, but it's not an executive role, it's a legislative role. ...the effect of that is to make sure that something like 20 percent of the seats in Parliament will be held by whites and coloreds [i.e., multiracial citizens] and Indians. ... It's not significant, but it means that there's always someone there who can articulate what these folks are thinking.
A place at the table?
Well, a place looking at the table. The people who are actually governing, who are making the decisions, practically speaking, this is a government controlled by Mandela and the African National Congress, and everyone in the country realizes that. These various constitutional arrangements which provide some kind of representation by whites are not powers but are window dressing.
Now that de Klerk is no longer on the international stage, how will he be remembered?
There will likely be a different perspective internationally on de Klerk than domestically. I think internationally, the Nobel Prize he co-won with Mandela is symptomatic of the stature he has. He is clearly one of the great historic figures of South Africa as seen by the rest of the world. But in the country, I suspect it depends on who you are and where you sit. Between the release of Mandela and the election and installation of the new government was a period of about four years. There was an awful lot of violence in that period, a lot of people died, the government of the day was implicated in some of the violence, in some of the massacres - which is now a topic of concern by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
From the standpoint of Mandela, whose tribute [of de Klerk] was a little guarded, and with blacks in general, de Klerk still has blood on his hands. He played an historic role for which they are grateful, but he is not absolved of any responsibility for the terrible things that went on in that period - that's their perspective.
In the perspective of some on the far right of South Africa, who would be whites, he's responsible for such dissatisfaction as is present in the current situation. There's a lot of worry about crime in the country. Relatives of mine write me to say there are no jobs for people like them - my niece and nephews. No jobs for whites, young people coming along, particularly in government, which I think is to be expected because of the unemployment among Africans and their historic exclusion from government. But lots of white young people are thinking whether to emigrate or not.
So people on the right wing of South Africa life look at de Klerk as someone who was gullible at the least, and at the worst, a traitor to his people. I don't think that's a significant block of opinion in the country and won't endure. Then there are a lot of people in the country, who are not perhaps highly politicized, who think, as indeed I do, that de Klerk was a godsend who got the country off dead center and moved it to a situation which though difficult, probably ensures for the future as much of the old order as it would've been possible peacefully to have ensured. Whether he did that inadvertently or deliberately, it happened on his watch.