Apartheid Is Swept Away, a Nation Is Transformed

On the first Friday in February 1990, the South African Parliament opened its annual session the way it had for decades--with a speech by a white president to a legislature without a single black member.

South Africa-based foreign correspondents, including me for The Times, weren’t expecting much news that day. In fact, I considered skipping the speech to watch an anti-apartheid protest march outside, on the streets of Cape Town.

As it turned out, though, that speech was the critical turning point in South Africa’s 20th century history.

President Frederick W. de Klerk, in office just six months, stunned his white minority supporters as well as the voteless black majority that day by lifting a 30-year-old ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid groups. He swept away a state of emergency that had suspended civil rights for more than three years. And he promised to release Nelson Mandela, who had been imprisoned for 27 years.

As news of his speech reached the streets, the protest march turned into a celebration. Anglican Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu said de Klerk had “taken my breath away.”

“Our world,” Mandela would later say, “changed overnight.”

The release of Mandela a week later, on Feb. 11, would propel South Africa forward, toward constitutional talks, the Nobel Peace Prize for Mandela and de Klerk, and a free election in 1994.

Historians will argue well into the 21st century over de Klerk’s motives. Was he driven by a sense of what was right and democratic? Was his hand forced by international pressure? Or did he simply conclude that the only way to protect whites and their property from a bloody uprising was to reach out a hand in peace to his enemies?

The answer is probably all three.

In fact, government officials had been talking with Mandela in prison for more than a decade, during which they came to realize that the country’s future depended on freeing him. But Mandela was no longer a young man; he had turned 71 in prison in July 1989. If he were to die there, the government realized, the country would explode. The clock was ticking.

In the months before his release, Mandela was allowed extraordinary opportunities to communicate with ANC leaders, then living in exile in Zambia. He was installed in a three-bedroom home on the prison grounds and met regularly with a secret negotiating committee from the government.

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In December 1989, two months before his release, Mandela and de Klerk met for the first time. Mandela urged the government to begin formal, unconditional talks with the ANC.

De Klerk did not agree immediately, but “from the start, I noticed that de Klerk listened to what I had to say,” Mandela said later. “This was a novel experience.”

Mandela wrote to his colleagues in Zambia that de Klerk “was a man we could do business with.”

After de Klerk’s Feb. 2, 1990, speech to Parliament, a full week passed before the president summoned Mandela to his Cape Town office, a meeting Mandela later recounted in his autobiography.

De Klerk told Mandela that he would be flown to Johannesburg the next day and set free there. Mandela objected; he wanted to wait a week so his colleagues could prepare for his return. He also wanted to walk out the gates of prison.

De Klerk excused himself and returned with a long face. It was too late to change the date because the media already had been informed, he said, but Mandela could walk out the gates of Victor Verster Prison.

Mandela agreed and de Klerk poured two tumblers of whiskey to toast his prisoner’s impending freedom.

The day of Mandela’s release was warm and sunny. He left prison on foot into a cheering throng.

The ensuing weeks and months were a whirlwind of speeches and interviews. Mandela embarked on a series of trips, including one to the United States, to thank those who had pressed for his release.

The next four years would be characterized by hope and bloodshed. Constitutional talks were punctuated by violence in the country. Chris Hani, a widely respected black ANC leader, was slain in his driveway by a white radical operating at the behest of a former Conservative member of Parliament. Hundreds died in horrific massacres in the province of Natal, riven by animosity between Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha movement and ANC followers.

But in April 1994, the ANC swept to victory in nationwide elections and Mandela, at 75, became South Africa’s first black president. De Klerk became a deputy president, but he would later resign and fade from the scene.

It took de Klerk to dismantle the system of racial separation in South Africa. But it took Mandela, emerging from jail without bitterness toward his captors, to lead a nation to freedom.