Who was Frederik de Klerk, the Afrikaner who freed Mandela and brought about the end of apartheid in South Africa?

The former South African president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Frederick William de Klerk, the leader who led to the end of the racist system of “apartheid”And set his most iconic enemy free, Nelson Mandela, passed away today at the age of 85, leaving behind a complex but crucial legacy in the history of South Africa.

The clerk died this morning at his home in the suburb of Fresnaye, in Cape Town (southwest), as a result of a mesothelioma -a type of cancer that affects the tissue that lines the lungs- that had been diagnosed.

Whoever was the last white president of South Africa will be especially remembered for his speech on February 2, 1990, with which he triggered the country’s transition from one of the most brutal and racist regimes in contemporary history to a multiracial democracy.

“Our country and its people have been embroiled in conflicts, tensions and violent struggles for decades. It is time for us to get out of the cycle of violence and make our way to peace and reconciliation. The silent majority yearn for it ”, claimed Frederik de Klerk that day.

Born in Johannesburg in 1936, into an Afrikaner family, he was the son of the senator and minister on several occasions Jan De Klerk.

He studied law and in 1972 he was elected deputy for the National Party, the formation that defended the interests of the Afrikaner community in South Africa and had been building “apartheid” since 1948.

In the following decades, De Klerk held ministerial portfolios, but it was in 1989 when his leadership within the party was consolidated, by imposing on the continuity formula that the then president of the country, Pieter Willem Botha (staunch defender of “apartheid”), wanted for officialism.

AN “ENIGMA” FOR ANTIAPARTHEID FIGHTERS

A few months after his election as the leader of the National Party, Botha resigned and this promoted De Klerk to the South African Presidency.

For anti-apartheid leaders – like himself Mandela, who described him as an “enigma” – nothing made us think then that in that pragmatic and party man was going to be the key to the reforms.

“National Party leaders usually heard only what they wanted to hear in their conversations with black leaders, but Mr. De Klerk seemed to be making real efforts to understand what they were saying to him,” Mandela explained about his first meeting with De Klerk, in December 1989, while he was still incarcerated.

The De Klerk government was consolidated in the general elections of September of that year and, with it, the legitimacy to initiate the transformations that South Africa, economically drowned and internationally isolated by its racist policies, urgently needed.

This is how the leader arrived Afrikaans to Parliament on February 2, 1990 and delivered the speech that forever changed the destiny of South Africa, although the country is still debating whether that move away from “apartheid” was the result of genuine goodwill from De Klerk or whether it had no alternatives left. .

Among the measures announced that day, the most prominent was the immediate release of political prisoners and the legalization of movements against the oppression of the white minority, including Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC).

“The Government has made the firm decision to release Mr. Mandela without conditions”, announced the president, communicating a long-awaited news throughout the world and, surely, the most symbolic of the beginning of the end of “apartheid”.

Not everything, however, would be easy. That speech was followed by four years of complex negotiations under the constant threat that a civil war would break out in South Africa.

In this file photo taken on April 27, 1996, President Nelson Mandela holds the hand of Vice President Frederik de Klerk.

THE NOBEL TOGETHER WITH MANDELA AND THE ARRIVAL OF DEMOCRACY

De Klerk’s efforts would earn him recognitions such as the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation (1992) from Spain or the Nobel Peace Prize (1993), both shared with Mandela, his symbolic counterpart in the complicated transition.

“For his work for a peaceful end to the ‘apartheid’ regime and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa”, highlighted the Norwegian Nobel Committee on both.

In 1994, South Africa would finally hold its first democratic and multiracial elections, with a landslide victory for Nelson Mandela’s ANC (62.65%).

The clerk, second with 27.81% of the votes, would become vice president of Mandela within a unity government, as previously agreed.

From that position, which he held not without strong tensions with the famous first black president of South Africa, he retired in 1996 and, shortly after, questioned also within his own party, he left politics (1997).

In 2000 he created the foundation that bears his name to promote his work for peace and the defense of his legacy.

His views, however, did not cease to create occasional controversy in democratic South Africa, for example, in the form of public comments justifying the segregationist principles of “apartheid” or by his outright opposition to the policies of the ANC, which has never lost power. since 1994.

Last March, coinciding with his 85th birthday, the De Klerk Foundation had announced that the former president suffered from the aggressive cancer that finally ended his life.