F.W. de Klerk, South African Nobel Prize winner for opening government, dies at 85

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Washington Post

F.W. de Klerk, who as South Africa’s last White president opened the door to Black majority rule in one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most prosperous nation by releasing Nelson Mandela from prison, died Nov. 11 at his home in Cape Town. He was 85 years old. The FW de Klerk Foundation announced his death Thursday and said it came after his battle with mesolthelioma cancer.

A son of a politically prominent family within South Africa’s White Afrikaner minority, Mr. de Klerk saw himself as a moderate reformer who hoped to preserve the old white-dominated political order even while loosening the reins of repression. Like Mikhail Gorbachev in his attempts to reform the Soviet Union, Mr. de Klerk unleashed a process of rapid transformation that he could not control and that inevitably led to the toppling of the old regime.

Still, under Mr. de Klerk’s stewardship the changes came without large-scale bloodshed, which many observers hailed as near-miraculous. Although he and Mandela shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, the two men became bitter antagonists during the grueling negotiations over the shape of South Africa’s future government. At the peace prize ceremony in Oslo, though, Mandela graciously praised his fellow Nobel winner.

“He had the courage to admit that a terrible wrong had been done to our country and people,” said Mandela, and “the foresight to understand and accept that all the people of South Africa must, through negotiations and as equal participants, together determine what they want to make of their future.”

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/fw-deklerk-death-south-africa/2021/11/11/761faa64-8fd4-11e6-a6a3-d50061aa9fae_story.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=wp_main

---

Hadn't heard his name mentioned in years. R.I.P.

[DavidDvorkin]

1. South Africa was extremely lucky

We left SA because my parents were convinced that Apartheid would end with terrible bloodshed. If the two men leading the two sides had been other than de Klerk and Mandela, it might have.

[IronLionZion]

2. That's how it happened in Zimbabwe and a few others

Those 2 didn't want to see a repeat of that.

[hunter]

3. He quietly dismantled South Africa's nuclear weapons program and its bombs.

The racist world was terrified that a Black African leader would have nuclear weapons.

In all these discussions of apartheid South Africa, the U.S.A. rarely acknowledged it's own version of apartheid.

I grew up in places that were 99% white and kept that way by various legal and illegal means, including overt police harassment of people who were not white. And some of the people in these communities, people living in an apartheid world themselves, were out protesting against White South Africa, entirely oblivious to the racism around them.