FW must accept responsibility for his utterances

In the week that people were remembering FW de Klerk’s momentous speech at the opening of parliament in 1990, it should have been his time to bask in the limelight, deserved or not.

But the murky waters that are South Africa’s history have allowed the opportunistic red berets an opening through which to assume a superior moral stance. The totally predictable interruption of the State of the Nation address (Sona) by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) focused on two things: the irrational demand that Minister of Public Enterprises Pravin Gordhan be fired and that De Klerk leave the house for his apartheid denials.

How both these affect Sona only Julius Malema and his lieutenants know. De Klerk’s half-hearted apologies for apartheid do need to become part of South Africa’s dialogue though.

First things first. FW is the last president of apartheid South Africa. He is also one of two deputy presidents of the government of national unity that took power in 1994. He won the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize alongside Nelson Mandela, despite presiding over a country that was undergoing what was sometimes described as a low-intensity civil war.

Together with Mandela, he guided South Africa through a violent period of negotiations. In short, it is impossible to write De Klerk out of South Africa’s history.

History judges people. For one to be on the right moral side of history, one needs to have acted morally in the course of one’s life.

For public figures like De Klerk, their public utterances need to match their actions. And for a while they did, to such an extent that a man of Mandela’s stature risked being ostracised by his own movement by referring to De Klerk as a “man of integrity.” Although Mandela was forced to qualify what he meant, it is true that his words and actions at the time did show some integrity. But that has not always remained the case.

As far back as 1996, De Klerk has sought to explain away apartheid as justifiable. He has offered half-hearted apologies for apartheid at every opportunity, insinuating that the violence and suffering suffered by the oppressed were a result of the apartheid state retaliating against “revolutionary” organisations.

His latest polarising utterance was his denial that apartheid is a crime against humanity. And this was all the EFF needed to disrupt Sona on Thursday.

De Klerk and his foundation for a while remained unrepentant in claiming it was only Soviet propaganda that claimed apartheid was a crime against humanity.

Embarrassingly for De Klerk, former president Thabo Mbeki has offered to show him some documents on the matter.

What De Klerk was missing is that any denial of the atrocities of apartheid is not just an academic exercise. It has a bearing on the current lives of people who lived under apartheid rules.

For the victims of the ’90s political violence, the trauma is still too fresh. Deaths in detention and hit squad murders are very recent.

De Klerk, and other denialists like him, fail to see that playing down the effects of apartheid on its victims is tantamount to kicking a person and then wanting to choose for that person how they should react to the kick.

It is not for De Klerk to determine how bad things were for black people under apartheid. His is to accept full responsibility and, maybe then, he will avoid negative publicity.

Sydney Majoko.

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