November 11, (THEWILL) – Former South African President Frederik Willem De Klerk, the last leader under apartheid and a key actor in the country’s transition to democracy, is dead. He was 85.
The former president’s death was confirmed by the F.W. de Klerk Foundation, which said in a statement that he had been receiving treatment for cancer.
“FW de Klerk died peacefully at his home in Fresnaye earlier this morning following his struggle against mesothelioma cancer”, the FW de Klerk Foundation said in a statement.
Together with Nelson Mandela, De Klerk oversaw the end of white-minority rule in South Africa.
A member of a prominent Afrikaner family, de Klerk had vehemently defended the separation of the races during his long climb up the political ladder. But once he took over as president in 1989, he stunned his deeply divided nation, and the wider world, by reconsidering South Africa’s racist ways, a step that led to him and Nelson Mandela, whom he released from prison, being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
South Africa had become such a pariah in the eyes of the world by the 1980s, its internal strife and tainted reputation so disruptive to the economy, that Mr. de Klerk argued that the country’s future depended on a new course.
“He didn’t say apartheid was bad or immoral but that he had decided it wasn’t going to work”, said Herman J. Cohen, who held talks with Mr. de Klerk during that tumultuous time as the State Department’s top Africa adviser in the administration of President George H.W. Bush.