TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020590/0205009.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 11.9 KB | 256 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 32

Cautious Architect of a Cloudy Future


Faced with the challenge of bringing racial harmony to his
country, State President F.W. de Klerk seeks a middle path that
will satisfy blacks without alienating whites

By RICHARD STENGEL -- Reported by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town and
Scott MacLeod/Pretoria


    For the Afrikaner, one of the great comforts of apartheid
was that it left no room for doubt. Everything was accounted
for in an elaborate system that measured a man's race by the
kink of his hair and plotted the future as a cluster of
indentured black homelands surrounding a wealthy white state.
But those certainties are beginning to feel like relics of an
embarrassing past. The future is now clouded, and Afrikaners
are uneasy. For them, the architect of what lies ahead is not
the revolutionary Nelson Mandela but a quiet, cautious lawyer
who seems to demonstrate more loyalty to the past than to a
vision of the future.

    Although he has been a National Party politician for 17
years and State President for the past five months, Frederik
Willem de Klerk, 53, is still something of a cipher. His
five-year plan for constitutional change, presented at the
National Party congress last summer, is empty of specifics; his
rhetoric is soothing but ambiguous and dotted with the charged
code words of apartheid. Yet this mild, bland politician
startled the nation upon taking office with a display of bold
pronouncements and a previously undiscovered talent for doing
the unexpected. Although the changes he has made are still
largely cosmetic, he has succeeded in transforming the
atmosphere of South Africa and nudging his reluctant white
countrymen to accept the idea that change is inevitable.

    F.W., as almost everyone calls him, is a fourth-generation
Afrikaner nationalist. A descendant of the Calvinistic
Voortrekkers, who valued independence more than enlightenment,
he was raised in the northern Transvaal, the heart of the most
conservative area of South Africa. His father, grandfather and
great-grandfather were National Party politicians, and his
uncle J.G. Strydom was a Prime Minister. He was twelve years
old in 1948, when his father became a Member of Parliament and
the National Party rose to power on the platform of Grand
Apartheid. While he modeled himself on his stern and unyielding
father, his brother Willem, 61, who became a journalist and
a vocal critic of apartheid, took after their more moderate
mother. F.W., says his brother, "was always part of the
Establishment, always a conformist."

    De Klerk duly went to law school, built a prosperous
practice in the Transvaal and was ready for politics in 1972
when he was tapped by the Afrikaner elite to stand for
Parliament. He served as a solid but undistinguished member of
a host of committees, later becoming a dutiful Cabinet minister
holding such portfolios as sports and home affairs. His closest
brush with the wretchedness of apartheid came when he was
Education Minister during the 1976 Soweto riots protesting
compulsory Afrikaans instruction in the schools. He stood
resolutely behind the principle of separate but equal -- in
practice unequal -- education. To the liberal press he was
verkrampte -- unenlightened -- no different from the blunt and
stolid Nationalists who never questioned the boilerplate of
apartheid.

    De Klerk was a late-blooming reformer. "All of us were very
much committed to separate development," says Education
Minister Stoffel van der Merwe, a friend and colleague. "Each
of us at some time or other had to change his mind. Somewhere
along the line De Klerk changed his." The futility of apartheid
probably came to him in the same gradual way it dawned on many
whites: as hundreds of thousands of blacks flooded the cities,
separation was no longer practical.

    De Klerk has one enormous advantage over his predecessors:
he is an inheritor, not a creator, of the system. His is the
first generation of Afrikaner leaders who did not fight to
impose apartheid in 1948. He also has had more intellectual
contact with the outside world than his insular elders. "De
Klerk," says a Western diplomat, "is younger-minded, more in
the pragmatic mold than the ideological generation of Afrikaner
politicians." Still, it was only after his surprise selection
to succeed P.W. Botha -- De Klerk was the choice of the
conservative Old Guard -- that he began to exhibit much
willingness to depart from the past.

    Unlike Botha, who always brandished a metaphorical swagger
stick, De Klerk is not a creature of the powerful South African
security establishment. Botha relied on the threat of military
power and ironfisted retaliation, but De Klerk stands for law.
In an action both symbolic and concrete, President de Klerk
quickly dismantled the shadowy National Security Management
System, which controlled the black townships, and downgraded
the State Security Council. "The most important thing about De
Klerk," says a senior Western diplomat, "is that he is a
civilian. He believes in civilian control and getting away from
the junta way of doing things."

    But the most obvious contrast between F.W. and P.W. is
temperament, not ideology. Die Groot Krokodil -- the Great
Crocodile -- as Botha was not so affectionately called, was an
irascible and imperious man who listened less as he grew older.
De Klerk is an amiable fellow who prefers consensus to
dogmatic, one-man rule. He has restored the Cabinet to the role
of the premier policymaking body, and he has held more Cabinet
sessions in five months than Botha did in his final two years.
More refined than the boorish Botha, De Klerk has done away
with some of the trappings of autocracy: the plumes and
feathers of the State President's Ruritanian guard have been
relegated to a museum. While Botha relaxed by shooting wild
animals, De Klerk plays golf.

    Some black antiapartheid leaders, such as Archbishop Desmond
Tutu, find De Klerk a man they might be able to do business
with. "He does appear to be someone who does hear," said Tutu
in an interview with TIME. Tutu offered an example from a
meeting between black church leaders and the President last
fall: "De Klerk said, `The purpose of government is the
establishment of law-and-order.' And others said, `No, in our
religious tradition, which you and I share, the purpose of
government is the establishment of justice.' De Klerk replied,
`You are right.' P.W. Botha would never have admitted that
someone else could be right and he wrong."

    Since taking office, De Klerk has often spoken of a "new
South Africa." The shape of that new nation is still --
deliberately -- undefined. But one phrase is firmly inked in:
"group rights," De Klerk's code name for the preservation of
white privilege. In South Africa, when whites talk about
"minority rights" they mean the protection of white power and
wealth, and when they refer to "the tyranny of the majority"
they mean black rule. De Klerk's so-called multiracial state
does not denote racial integration but a system in which each
race will have its own rights and freedoms -- one of those
being the right to live in a white enclave. Just as much as his
hard-line brethren, De Klerk is loath to relinquish what may
be the world's most comfortable way of life. That, as much as
anything else, is what animates the white position.

    So the great conundrum of the Afrikaner politician is that
the starting point of black demands -- one man, one vote --
exceeds the end point of white flexibility. Moderate Afrikaners
find the idea of black rule fearsome primarily because they are
convinced it would lead to economic chaos. De Klerk's real
mandate from his Afrikaner supporters is to find a way to give
power to the black man without rendering the white man
powerless.

    De Klerk has his own way of explaining this. "Over the
years," he said in an interview with TIME, "it became clear
that the [National Party] policy of separate development could
not be realized within the framework of the realities of South
Africa. It became clear that the interests of all the people
of this country have become so interwoven that it is impossible
to totally extricate the various groups and nations from each
other. As early as 1986, the National Party specifically
adapted its policy and discarded the concept of total separation
of political power, and exchanged it for the concept of the
sharing of power. In the '89 election, we refined the concept
of the sharing of power, and we really moved into the phase
that we will now have with the clear mandate to build a new
South Africa."

    De Klerk occasionally apologizes for his lumpy English
(Afrikaans  is his first language), but the obfuscation is not
accidental. "Sharing power" means that whites may be willing
to give blacks equal, but not superior, power. Even so, De
Klerk objects to anyone questioning his commitment to change.
Like many Afrikaners, he gets angry when the outside world
criticizes South Africa for not doing enough rather than
acknowledging what it has done. "Anyone who says that we are
just looking for another way in which to entrench white
domination has either not taken note of what has been said and
what is happening or is willfully distorting the truth," he
says. "On the one hand, they put up stumbling blocks that make
it difficult for us to meet the expectations. On the other
hand, they test us against expectations we never intended to
raise."

    But expectations have been raised. For many, the release of
Mandela is meant to signal the beginning of the end of
apartheid. Now anything less than an agreement between white
and black about the shape of the future will be a bitter
disappointment. De Klerk knows this, and he must find some
middle path that will satisfy both sides. Yet it must be more
than apartheid with a human face. "His mandate is somehow to
maintain white supremacy without alienating the black
majority," says Alan Morris, an anti-apartheid activist and
sociology lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand. "How
he does that, no one knows."

    Like many Afrikaners, De Klerk talks about the "reservoir
of goodwill" that still exists between black and white in South
Africa. This is more wishful thinking than reality, but if the
idea is that the black majority will give him more time, De
Klerk is probably right. But how much more time is the
question.

    De Klerk counts himself an optimist. Last week he went home
to the Transvaal to see his newborn first grandson, and
expressed his hope for the future. "I think he's going to be
part of a country on its way to greatness," said the State
President. A country on its way to something, yes, but no one
knows precisely what. That newborn baby is among the first
generation of Afrikaners whose future is not assured. While the
past in South Africa appears to be dying, the future is yet to
be born.



____________________________________________________________
WHAT DE KLERK HAS DONE

    -- He released several prominent political prisoners, such
as A.N.C. leader Walter Sisulu, without restricting their
activities.

    -- He lifted a 30-year ban on black political
demonstrations, giving banned antiapartheid organizations more
freedom to operate.

    -- He called for rescinding the Separate Amenities Act and
has already ordered municipalities to integrate their beaches.


WHAT HE HASN'T DONE

    -- The Population Registration Act still legally classifies
all South Africans by race as white, black, colored or Asian.

    -- The Group Areas Act still bars blacks from living in most
white neighborhoods or attending white government schools.

    -- The land acts, dating back to 1913 and 1936, still
reserve 87% of the country for whites, who today constitute 14%
of the population.