Zukile Majova
To anyone who cared to listen, Frederik Willem De Klerk sold the narrative that he was the president who brought an end to the evil apartheid system and released Nelson Mandela.
End of story.
In an interview with the BBC last year he said: “It’s not for me to write my own epitaph. But I would like to be remembered as somebody who made a positive, constructive difference at a crucial time in our history. And that I played a role in averting a catastrophe in South Africa.”
This version of his story has helped him escape prosecution locally and internationally for crimes against humanity.
Yes, De Klerk killed apartheid itself, but he is no hero to black South Africa.
Over the years, especially during his battle with cancer, it was largely assumed that De Klerk would finally take personal responsibility for the killings that occurred while he was the Internal Affairs Minister and later the head of state.
Numerous times he apologised and denounced apartheid as wrong but not once did he accept responsibility for his complicit involvement in the apartheid state crimes.
One of these crimes being the murder of the Cradock Four by apartheid police in 1985.
It later became public that De Klerk attended a meeting of the State Security Council during which a decision was taken to kill anti-apartheid activist Matthew Goniwe and three others.
De Klerk’s decision to stick to his narrative is the reason he was able to go to his grave clutching his Nobel Prize for Peace despite his fingers dripping bloods of thousands killed by the apartheid State Security Council and the security forces.
For years he claimed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission absolved him of any crime yet the TRC found that De Klerk was “an accessory to the commission of gross human rights violations” and “contributed to creating a culture of impunity within which gross human rights violations were committed.”
Now that FW has died, black South Africans who had allowed him a peaceful retirement will now remember him as the apartheid apologist who claimed that the racist system was not a crime against humanity.
It was this comment that pricked former ANC Youth League firebrand Julius Malema to oppose President Cyril Ramaphosa’s invitation of De Klerk to an opening of parliament.
“We have a murderer in the House… an apartheid apologist… with blood on his hands”.
