Many would, though seldom able to describe the reasons and the moment that granted them that realisation, refuse to call former president Frederik de Klerk a hero. I myself, having just mused over the term "hero(n)", its ancients roots and their ramifications, and with that basis decided very much against it. For in the world of Hellenic myth and deed, he belongs on the Olympus, not as a muscle-bending Heracles - nor as Zeus. But with Minervine qualities of wisdom, properly defined and utilised, sprung out of, and in defiance of father Zeus, and more broadly being a man for the hour, rather than - as Robert Bolt undoubtably would have preferred - for all times, he expressed a rare and cherished-in-the-abstract quality of heroic unifier, pragmatist and conscientious to his bedrock, yet utterly moving and consequential.
This all, as detractors have been moderate in expressing - with certain exceptions sure to be less about Frederik de Klerk himself as about the legacy of apartheid or even, more importantly, contemporary racial and cultural and above all economic transmutations undergoing in the United States - came out of a desire to save a white minority and their legal and economic privileges, for certain. But more clearly, as one would need to state when South Africa is the question and not North America, is the twilight hour of the Afrikaner people; hunted and scavenged into exile among the brutest corners of the earth, ruthless in clashing with the natives of the new land (Transvaal) they now claimed for theirs, equally admired as Africans - their preferred nomina in their own tongue - by their new competitors and ultimately, through the hail of British intervention, subjects. This critique strikes a parallell, though, because what ultimately doomed the system under which he was to grow, and outgrow, was not the inequities of the system itself, which indeed slowed and ground to more equal economic standing and life expectancy throughout the 1970s and 1980s (itself, of course, because of the dysfunctional presuppositions of the system itself, as defined through economist Paul Krugman as a gigantic boondoggle meant to ensure the employment, under Western European wage conditions, of the white, again, Afrikaner populus of the new republic) but the contemporary struggles and machinations in the United States, which by no means spelled the end of racial tension, but the public discourse monogamy of American citizenship and polity to a non-racial, if not exactly post-racial, national identity. South Africa has undergone no such thing, nor would it be fair to assess the Afrikaners - subjected and haunted, still, by a cruel expansionist tutelage which saw the coining of the term concentration and camp into a compound word - as mere colonialists (Verwoerd, symbolically, being something of an exception). As children and grandchildren and great-great-great-great grandchildren of colonisers, sure, but so are the Americo-Liberians to ruled a non-colony christened equally cruelly as Liberia for 150 years, without the anti-racists of the world rolling over in defiance of its participation in international organisations. Here, another point of contention could be raised too; if Mandela had challenged the Liberian regime of Tolbert in 1964, or his later friends Castro and al-Qathafi, we may never have known his name, except as a footnote, and any treason trial initiated in 1956 in any of the dictatorships or single-party states around the globe was certain not to last five years, let alone end in acquittal. In this regard, if not exactly by its own accord, British-inherited law and institutions, as well as the longstanding South African parliamentary tradition, managed to cull some of the excesses
But I am both losing and getting ahead of myself. But it was in this environment, a barrister and graduate from Potchefstroom on the outskirts of Transvaal, age 20 at the commencement of said Treason Trial, that he grew into being, and well set for a career in the burgeoning new land of mirth and providence for the Afrikaner people. The rebellious Senate was being culled and swelled into impotency, the last hopes of the Cape Coloureds once a potent voting bloc, the judicial system undergoing its first obliterations of check and balancing the regime in Pretoria as resistance had mounted throughout the 1950s. Parliamentary opposition from lukewarm confused whites collapsed, being surpassed in media, and importance, by revolutionary zeal already destined to mark the arriving 1960s.
He began his career, predictably in the ethnocracy that was the Nasionale Party - also undoubtedly, sine qua nullum, as a member of the mystical esoteric Broederbond - as a secretary . And in 1972, foregoing the 1970 election that was the baptism of fire of blood-born Prime Minister Vorster, "F.W." was selected for the NP nomination for the constituency of Vereeniging. He had already attempted in 1958, hoping to be dragged by the coattails of his father and the unending successes (and trickery) which solidified the NP:s position as the truly (if falsely) "national" party, at least to the white man. A 22-year old, he failed. If Mandela had been able to do so at the same age, he might have spoken out agains the Munich agreement - or indeed praised it sullenly - but this showed, from the start, that F.W. would not, at any stage, be received as a saviour, or be that refreshing, renewing spirit which Kennedy displayed a few short years later. Boer aristocracy or not.
For all of these reasons, and more than most laureates of that contested prize, we should offer to De Klerk our thanks.
