Grace Marks Concession by De Klerk

From the beginning, many blacks and whites doubted Frederik W. de Klerk’s promises. How, they asked, could this white man, this scion of an Afrikaner family who helped maintain apartheid, put an end to the system of racial separation?

But no doubters were left in South Africa on Monday, when De Klerk, misty-eyed, his voice choking slightly, conceded to Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader whom he released from prison four years ago. And, with the grace and pragmatism that have been his hallmark, De Klerk wished the new leader well in one of South Africa’s most historic speeches.

“Mr. Mandela has walked a long road and now stands at the top of the hill,” De Klerk told a quiet gathering of his supporters in words that were broadcast live across this country. “A traveler would sit down and admire the view, but a man of destiny knows that beyond this hill lies another and another. The journey is never complete.

“As he contemplates the next hill, I hold out my hand to Mr. Mandela in friendship and in cooperation,” De Klerk added. The president concluded by saying: “God bless South Africa. Nkosi Sikelele iAfrika (God Bless Africa).”

For South Africa, the clear victory of Mandela’s ANC marked the end of 350 years of white minority rule.

But for De Klerk, a 58-year-old lawyer, it was the end of a courageous 4 1/2-year presidential term and the beginning of a new life as an opposition leader.

Though criticized and threatened by many of his fellow Afrikaners, and doubted by many black South Africans, he played a critical role in dismantling apartheid and, effectively, negotiated himself out of power.

De Klerk, who will officially relinquish power to Mandela at the presidential inauguration next Tuesday, said the election completed the program he launched upon his ascension. But he is by no means gone from the political scene, where he has flourished for the past two decades.

His National Party has polled second behind the ANC, with about a fourth of the vote. That is good enough to land him a job as one of two executive vice presidents in the new government. (The ANC, by winning the election, is empowered to appoint the other.)

De Klerk now will serve in the government of Mandela, with whom he shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year. And perhaps, he has hinted, he will begin preparing a campaign for the presidency in the next election, in five years.

“My political task is just beginning,” De Klerk said Monday. “The past four years have simply been preparation for the work that lies ahead. It will be a great challenge to defend and nurture our new constitution . . . and ensure that our new democracy takes root and flourishes.”

Tom Lodge, a political analyst in Johannesburg, said De Klerk spoke Monday “with grace and dignity, but also as a man who is confident that he is still an important figure in the country.”

De Klerk had pulled off what most thought impossible. He unlocked the chains of black leaders, freed black political groups and, most important, persuaded the majority of whites to accept an all-race democracy in a country where they are outnumbered 5-to-1.

De Klerk was virtually unknown when, as education minister, he was selected by the National Party caucus in 1989 to replace President Pieter W. Botha as party chief. Of two main candidates for the job, he was considered the more conservative and less reform-minded. But the political bookmakers were stunned when De Klerk quickly promised dramatic reform.

The president’s conservative credentials turned out to be invaluable in convincing the white electorate to follow him. “It helped him take actions that would be unthinkable, almost unacceptable, from somebody with a slightly more liberal hue,” said Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

F.W., as he is known by friend and foe alike, grew up in the cradle of white privilege on a farm a dozen miles west of Johannesburg, part of an Afrikaner family that settled in southern Africa in the 17th Century. Politics was more than dinner-table conversation in his parents’ household. It was part of the family album.

He was 12 years old when the National Party came to power in 1948 and was still in high school when the party, citing Scripture as its moral support, set out to engineer a new society by legalizing racial discrimination. His father, Jan, joined the Cabinet in the new government and his uncle, J. G. (Hans) Strijdom, was the party’s second prime minister.

The young De Klerk studied law at Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, a small, all-white campus on a prairie plateau about 90 miles southwest of Johannesburg. He remains a deeply devout Christian and member of a small, politically liberal and theologically conservative Afrikaner church.

De Klerk, a married father of three, took his first leap into politics in 1972, winning the Vereeniging seat in the white Parliament. Six years later, he was tapped to join the Cabinet of Prime Minister B. J. Vorster.

Political analysts have tried without success to place a neat label on the president’s ideology. As education minister, De Klerk threatened to close the country’s universities in 1987 for allowing anti-apartheid protests. During a 1982 party crisis, he tried to keep right-wing whites from bolting by promising that the government would never abandon its “own affairs,” the government’s phrase for racial segregation.

Why did De Klerk change his mind?

Friends say one reason is that he was always less interested in hard-core political ideology and more inclined toward political pragmatism. Many of them describe him as nutger, or “sober-minded” in Afrikaans, the first language of De Klerk and the other 3 million Afrikaners.

And this sober-minded man came to the conclusion that compromise with the black majority was the only alternative to chaos and revolution.

“There will be those who will be frightened,” De Klerk once told a group of Afrikaners. “But you have to understand that there are no other alternatives that work.”