Lunch with the FT: FW de Klerk
By Alec Russell
Published: January 22 2010 16:56 | Last updated: January 22 2010 16:56
For a moment, seen from afar, it could have been the quintessential apartheid tableau: black servant summoned by Afrikaner patriarch. But this is 21st-century Cape Town and, apart from on remote farms on the veld, that relationship is of the past. The waitress confidently looks de Klerk in the eye. There is none of the pre-emptive cringing that once marked such inter-racial encounters . It is, I reflect over a replacement glass of Sauvignon, a reminder of the revolutionary changes that my lunch guest set in motion almost exactly 20 years ago.
TRANSCRIPT
History is moving rather fast in South Africa. In June the country hosts football’s World Cup, as if in ultimate endorsement of its post-apartheid progress. Yet on February 2 1990, when the recently inaugurated state President de Klerk stood up to deliver the annual opening address to the white-dominated parliament, such a prospect was unthinkable. The townships were in ferment; many apartheid laws were still on the books; and expectations of the balding, supposedly cautious Afrikaner were low.
How wrong conventional wisdom was. De Klerk’s address drew a line under 350 years of white rule in Africa, a narrative that began in the 17th century with the arrival of the first settlers in the Cape. Yet only a handful of senior party members knew of his intentions.
Today, seated at his regular table in the white-washed premises of Aubergine, his favourite restaurant and just a five-minute walk from parliament, Frederik Willem de Klerk, or FW as he is universally known, smiles to recall his momentary mastery of spin. His hapless spokesman was dispatched to brief journalists to expect nothing special. Even his then wife, Marike, was in the dark. The first inkling she had that anything was up was when, as he took the salute outside parliament, he told her: “After today South Africa will never again be the same.”
Having cannily played down expectations, de Klerk’s address then turned history on its head: bans against the African National Congress and the Communist party were to be lifted after 30 years; ANC leader Nelson Mandela was to be freed from jail after 27 years; negotiations on a new South Africa would begin forthwith. De Klerk had calculated brilliantly. He became the toast of the world. Only a week later, with the release of Mandela, did the focus change.
Why did he do it, I open, as the waiter takes our order? Did he have no last-minute doubts? “No,” he insists. “I wasn’t taking a chance. I believed I was doing the right thing. It was a rational decision. I thought it through properly ... There was nothing opportunistic. It was no sudden impulse.”
But, I press, as he takes his first sip of a red Stellenbosch blend, was he not an arch conservative? Little about his background suggested he was the man to persuade his people to abandon power. He was, after all, a blue blood of the National Party that had governed since 1948. A forefather had come to South Africa in the late 17th century as a Huguenot fugitive from Europe. An uncle, JG Strijdom, had been prime minister, and his father, Jan, was a government minister and Senate president. After practising as a lawyer, FW entered parliament in 1969 and then the cabinet nine years later. What is more, he was from the strict Dopper branch of the Dutch Reformed Church, which for so long gave a theological underpinning to apartheid.
We misjudged him, he contends. He was “a middle of the road man” who made conservative statements to keep the right on side. Also, he argues, he spent much of his career trying to reform apartheid. There is a whiff of selective history here. He did have a hand in the 1985 repeal of the Mixed Marriages Act, which barred marriage between different races and which his father, he points out, had put on the statute book in 1949. But the National Party’s reforms were agonisingly slow and his argument reminds me of the claim of so many whites that they themselves never backed apartheid.
Yet de Klerk’s address to parliament was remarkable. There was nothing inevitable about his decision to lift the ban on the ANC. Though the apartheid regime was economically and diplomatically under siege, it was far from defeated on the battlefield. There were many in the security forces, he says, who thought they should hold out. But he had looked into the future and, ultimately, seen only disaster if they dug in their heels. “It had to end and we brought it to an end in a way which prevented upheaval.” Encouraged by the fall of the Berlin Wall, which took away the rooi gevaar (red danger), or fear of a communist takeover, de Klerk was emboldened to press ahead.
De Klerk does not encourage the romantic media line of granite Afrikaner having “road to Damascus” experience and suddenly recognising the evil of apartheid. It was a gradual process, he insists. By the mid-1980s he had “reached the final conclusion” that apartheid was “unjust towards the majority of the population”. That was rather late in the day, I suggest. He stresses the word “final” and says his reappraisal of apartheid was a long process.
We choose springbok carpaccio for a starter. It is hard to imagine the Boers of yesteryear having much truck with this sort of cooking, let alone with “rose geranium brioche” and “cherry vinaigrette” and I reflect on the symbolism of de Klerk’s choice of venue. In the early 19th century, this was the home of the first chief justice of the Cape. In decor and cuisine, Aubergine is a fusion of the contemporary and the traditional – scrubbed yellowwood tables offset by Africana art on the walls. De Klerk, too, is a blend of the old and the new. Indeed, that was the key to his success in leading his fractious tribe to cede power to the black majority.
In his heyday he was seldom seen without a cigarette. But he gave up a few years ago and now chews intensely on Nicorette gum. Otherwise he is, at 73, little changed from the dramatic years we are discussing, when his stocky physique, clipped English and heavy Afrikaans accent were staples on international news bulletins. Four years after his address, in May 1994 – following thousands of deaths in political violence, a joint Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela, the repeal of apartheid’s laws and the negotiation of an interim constitution, not to mention his admission that South Africa had dismantled a secret atom bomb project – he did what had been unthinkable to his adamantine predecessors and handed over power to a black man.
As our main courses arrive – grilled Cape salmon for me, duck for him – I reflect on how astonishing it is for a politician to step down. Surely there must have been some emotion stirring within him on that chilly morning when Mandela took over? De Klerk, however, is not one to ham up his feelings. There is no foraging into his soul. A “positive emotion” is all he will confess to feeling on that extraordinary day.
I suggest, mischievously, that February 2 1990 was the high-water mark of his career. For a moment a trace of the old political warhorse returns. It is as though I am an impish young National Party MP challenging the great leader. His career has “many, many other high points”, he says, including the interim constitution in 1993 and the Nobel Prize in that same year.
But had he not initially wanted to retain some form of a minority veto for the whites before being worn down by ANC negotiators? He dismisses out of hand the argument of some National Party insiders that he had originally hoped to share power with the ANC long into the future. Yes, he made concessions but, he says, that is “the essence of a true compromise”. It was vital they struck a deal when they did. “How would South Africa have looked today if we had not signed the agreements which were reached? We would not have exported one case of wine this year. [Wine is now one of South Africa’s healthiest export sectors.] We would have been totally isolated. South Africa would have been on a downward slope towards calamity and catastrophe. So the new South Africa, warts and all, is a much better place.”
Yet in the week before our lunch, the Afrikaans press buzzed with an angry debate over the post-apartheid settlement. Prominent Afrikaners on the left and right, who suspect the ANC of undermining the constitution and fear for the future of their language and their children, think de Klerk ceded too much and should have enshrined minority rights in the constitution. He shrugs off the critique and says the Afrikaners are as “divided as ever. Not all Afrikaners feel the same, just as not all Scotsmen feel the same about independence for Scotland.”
What of Mandela, I ask, and their famously tetchy relationship? In the early 1990s Mandela regularly accused de Klerk of not caring about black lives, and even suggested that PW Botha, FW’s predecessor, was a more reliable interlocutor. Does Mandela, despite his saintly image, still have a very human and bitter streak?
“The charm is there,” says de Klerk. “It’s real and his commitment to reconciliation is above any doubt. He’s one of the all-time greats. But he is like all of us a human being and I saw him at times also being unreasonable, unfair ... Nobody’s perfect.” He says he was “deeply offended” by Mandela’s intermittent tongue-lashings but now they have a good rapport. Mandela, who is 91, spoke at de Klerk’s 70th birthday party three years ago and joked that given he’d had 27 years of contemplation in prison, while de Klerk was in the “rough and tumble” of politics, they were about the same age.
De Klerk argues that the ANC’s current affirmative action policy is too extreme and is unjust on whites. He also believes they have been trying to erode “by stealth” some rights in the constitution. Yet, to his credit, he is a loyal ambassador for South Africa. He describes Jacob Zuma, the charismatic yet controversial new president, as “a good communicator ... astute and pragmatic”.
Briefly, we are distracted by a text message on my phone. De Klerk is as keen as I am for the news. An epic game of cricket is unfolding in Johannesburg, where Afrikaner fast bowlers are pummelling English batsmen on the way to victory in the final match of the recent Test series. More than a century after the Anglo-Boer war, Afrikaners still enjoy humbling the old colonial foe. De Klerk chuckles as the message heralds another South African triumph on the pitch.
As he polishes his legacy, de Klerk is enjoying life. He runs the Global Leadership Foundation, which advises developing states on good governance, and is a popular figure on the international lecture circuit. He was divorced from Marike in 1998 and, a week later, married Elita Georgiades, the former wife of a wealthy Greek businessman and an old friend of the de Klerks. The disclosure of the relationship titillated Afrikanerdom. Three years later Marike was murdered in her apartment, a victim of South Africa’s appalling crime rate.
We drain our espressos and I venture further on to sensitive ground. The ANC accuses him of being evasive over responsibility for apartheid. Should he not have given a blanket apology for all the abuses carried out by the apartheid state? And what of the charge that he did not do enough to curb those security forces who were fostering violence? De Klerk repeats his familiar legalistic riposte, one which still enrages many in the ANC: the assassinations were aberrations carried out by rogue agents and not state policy.
So apartheid was wrong, I say as we push back our chairs. Even now this National Party scion chooses his words carefully. The idea of separate homelands for South Africa’s black tribes – “nation states”, as he describes them – was “morally defensible”, he says. But it failed for three reasons: the whites were too selfish; as the economy grew so the races became intertwined – “we became an omelette and you can never unscramble an omelette”; and the ANC did not want to accept division along tribal lines. “In the end, because we failed we ended in the place which was totally morally unjustifiable.”
It is classic de Klerk. Most modern politicians would have concocted a more disingenuous response but he doggedly insists apartheid in its purest form just might have worked. At dinner that night, I ask my oldest South African friend, a liberal Afrikaner lawyer, about FW. He was not an inspirational politician, the lawyer reflects. And yet, at a critical moment in his country’s history, he conquered his fear of the unknown and acted in the best interests of his country and not of his party – and that, we agree, marks him out with greatness.
Alec Russell is the FT’s world news editor and author of ‘After Mandela: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa’ (Hutchinson).
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