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- <text id=90TT0304>
- <title>
- Feb. 05, 1990: Cautious Architect Of A Cloudy Future
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990
- Feb. 05, 1990 Mandela:Free At Last?
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- WORLD, Page 32
- Cautious Architect of a Cloudy Future
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>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
- </p>
- <p>By Richard Stengel--Reported by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town and
- Scott MacLeod/Pretoria
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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."
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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."
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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."
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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."
- </p>
- <p> 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."
- </p>
- <p> 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."
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p>WHAT DE KLERK HAS DONE
- </p>
- <p>-- He released several prominent political prisoners, such
- as A.N.C. leader Walter Sisulu, without restricting their
- activities.
- </p>
- <p>-- He lifted a 30-year ban on black political
- demonstrations, giving banned antiapartheid organizations more
- freedom to operate.
- </p>
- <p>-- He called for rescinding the Separate Amenities Act and
- has already ordered municipalities to integrate their beaches.
- </p>
- <p>WHAT HE HASN'T DONE
- </p>
- <p>-- The Population Registration Act still legally classifies
- all South Africans by race as white, black, colored or Asian.
- </p>
- <p>-- The Group Areas Act still bars blacks from living in most
- white neighborhoods or attending white government schools.
- </p>
- <p>-- The land acts, dating back to 1913 and 1936, still
- reserve 87% of the country for whites, who today constitute 14%
- of the population.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
-