TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100989/10098900.018

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.9 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 49

SOUTH AFRICA

Brother Against Brother


President F.W. de Klerk and his sibling Willem offer starkly
different visions of their country's future

By Scott MacLeod/JOHANNESBURG


    When State President F.W. de Klerk speaks of his vision of
a new South Africa, the country's voteless 26 million blacks can
be forgiven for being skeptical. The reform policies of De
Klerk's predecessor, P.W. Botha, unleashed disappointment and
nearly three years of violent unrest before grinding to a halt.
But one of the most vocal critics of De Klerk's reluctance to
abolish apartheid is a prominent Afrikaner who sat only a few
feet behind him on inauguration day last month: his elder
brother Willem.

    A wild-eyed liberal by the standards of his family and its
Dutch settler forebears, Willem de Klerk publicly -- and
constantly -- urges that apartheid be replaced by black majority
rule.  A former Dutch Reformed pastor and editor who now teaches
journalism at Rand Afrikaans University, he helped establish the
liberal opposition Democratic Party in April. Although his
brother's career was at stake, Willem voted for the Democrats
in September's election. After the ballots were counted, F.W.'s
National Party barely retained its four-decade grip on power.

    Despite the broedertwis (Afrikaans for a brotherly falling
out), F.W., 53, and Willem, 61, retain great affection for each
other. They see each other once a month, often at the Pretoria
home of their 86-year-old mother, and speak on the phone weekly.
Two days before last month's election, F.W. asked, "Don't you
want to consider voting Nationalist and making it public?"
Recalls Willem: "Then he said, `That's only a joke between us.'
He tries to persuade me, and I try to persuade him. We agree to
disagree."

    The De Klerk family tree is deeply rooted in politics. A
great-grandfather sat in the now defunct Senate, and Uncle
Johannes Strijdom served as Prime Minister from 1954 to 1958.
The family often vacationed at Strijdom's summer estate in the
Kruger National Park. The brothers' indomitably conservative
father Jan de Klerk played a pivotal role in the Nationalists'
dramatic victory  in 1948 as the party's secretary in the
Transvaal. F.W. was only twelve at the time, and his father's
passion for electoral politics made an indelible impression on
him.

    Willem, influenced by the less strident opinions of his
mother's family, began veering leftward while editing a
Calvinist monthly, Word and Deed, in the mid-1950s. "I gained
this insight that apartheid is not a just dispensation, not a
solution for South Africa, not founded in morality, not common
sense," he recalls. He began speaking out against such National
Party measures for entrenching apartheid as the Group Areas Act,
the Population Registration Act and the move to give blacks
voting rights in so-called black homelands rather than in South
Africa proper. He has committed what many Afrikaners consider
an act of treason by holding discussions with officials of the
outlawed African National Congress, which calls for the end of
white rule.

    Willem's opinions became so intolerable to conservatives
that in 1987 the owners of the Afrikaans newspaper Rapport
forced him to resign as editor. On the other hand, F.W., a
lawyer by training, remained a conformist. He entered parliament
in 1972, became a political boss in the Transvaal and slowly
moved up the ladder to become leader of the National Party last
February and then State President. "He identified very strongly
with my father," Willem says. "I can see in him the same kinds
of attitudes. He is a very strongly bound Afrikaner
establishment man."

    Currently, the brothers' biggest disagreement concerns the
principles underpinning the country's next constitution. F.W.
now accepts the idea that blacks must be given the right to vote
in South Africa, but he advocates a political system featuring
"group rights" along racial lines as a means of safeguarding the
interests of whites, who would be outnumbered at the polls.
Among the "rights" would be segregated schools and
neighborhoods, as well as possibly a white body in Parliament
that could veto black initiatives. Willem would permit only a
transitional form of limited group rights before a nonracial
democracy was established. "The accent on race groups will not
be accepted by the majority of South Africans," says he, "and
will not be accepted by the world."

    Willem says he is encouraged by F.W.'s inaugural promise to
consider easing the 1986 state of emergency and begin releasing
political prisoners, possibly including black nationalist
leader Nelson Mandela. "Under the pressure of the realities of
South Africa, there has been a development in F.W.'s political
philosophy in the last two or three years in the direction of
more open-minded, liberal values," he says. "Afrikaner supremacy
is out of the question, and one must adapt and find solutions."

    In recent weeks, Willem has written letters and sent faxes
to his brother urging him to launch a dialogue soon with leaders
of the A.N.C. He has suggested to F.W. that he announce that
South Africa plans "to get rid of apartheid in the next ten
years." Observes Willem: "My brother acknowledges that to
succeed, he must introduce solutions. The dynamics of finding
a solution will definitely move him."

    Willem has no illusions about the competing pressures
coming from other Afrikaners, who constitute only 9% of the
citizenry. "He must be very cautious to take his people with
him," he says. "The Afrikaner has accepted the fact that he is
outnumbered. But he is afraid that his political power, his
security, the capitalist system, will be threatened under a
black government." Whether his influence will push F.W. further
along toward the abolition of apartheid, neither Willem nor
anybody else can say.