De Klerk didn’t embrace democracy. He surrendered to its inevitability

As people on Twitter fell over themselves to celebrate the death of FW de Klerk, our last apartheid president, I chose the high road of keeping the man’s name out of my mouth and leaving it to those directly harmed by him to accurately express their pain and schadenfreude.

What did strike me, briefly, was that whatever De Klerk was – enabler of murderers, nexus of crimes against humanity, strategist, opportunist, Nobel Peace Prize winner… he was not an inspirational leader.

His decision to release political prisoners, unban liberation organisations and begin negotiations for a democratic transition did usher in a short, inspirational period of non-racial, New South Africanism.

ALSO READ: OBITUARY: Life and times of FW de Klerk – apartheid’s last president

But his was largely a pragmatic call. I’m sure almost any apartheid prime minister would have made a similar decision at that point, given the economic and moral bankruptcy of the apartheid state and its global isolation.

Following his one iconic speech, on 2 February 1990, he remained at the helm of a government that continued sponsoring and directing mass killings across the nation, until the very eve of the first democratic election in 1994.

Thereafter, he withdrew almost immediately from the government of national unity, and spent the rest of his life dodging responsibility for the apartheid system that killed, enslaved and oppressed South Africans for decades.

There is nothing inspirational about that. His main achievement was doing the rational thing when it was the only thing to do.

Not that he ever clearly expressed his reasons for doing what he did.

In the same way the courts will often probe a complex matter and determine what happened, it is often not possible to determined why.

And so, while political prisoners were released, a democratic dispensation was launched and the beginnings of a free, democratic, non-racist and non-sexist country were established in 1994, it was never entirely clear whether De Klerk even supported it.

One constantly had the feeling that, well, handing over power was the only option, and democracy was the unavoidable outcome.

This perception was not helped by his attempts, in his latter years, to cast apartheid as something less than a crime against humanity. A statement released after his death, apologising for apartheid, has done little to change this.

If you apologise for apartheid, why?

Even in the final statement, when De Klerk speaks of “the wrongness of apartheid” and how it was morally unjustifiable, he does so without advocating for something. The right of every person to achieve their full potential? The vision of building a prosperous society where each of us can live free? A world based on love, not fear, power or hatred?

Despite the role he played in dismantling apartheid, the murderous system he helped to refine, De Klerk provided little in the way of an alternative vision.

Glaringly, he failed to support the idea of material reparations for the crimes of colonialism and apartheid. Despite occasional apologies, he failed to take ownership of his role in apartheid oppression, death squads and assassinations, and provided no assistance to investigators of those crimes.

He drifted back to defending apartheid and then making heartfelt retractions in moves that were more about burnishing his legacy than any type of leadership.

De Klerk was a major player during an inspirational period of our history, but he always came across as cold, calculating, almost shifty, when compared to his partner in negotiating our democracy, Nelson Mandela.

Mandela’s fight for freedom was based on a compassionate, loving urge to help humanity be all that it could be. De Klerk was grudgingly, almost incidentally, part of the freedom process.

He could have played a far greater role in reconciliation but chose not to. Our nation remains deeply polarised – because of what he did and what he did not do. And so we move on.