How do you celebrate a life of a person who represents the worst of your being and yet played midwife to the being you struggled to be. This is a South African question in the aftermath of the passing on of its first Deputy President in a non-racial democracy. Not all that do midwifery to the many babies that bring joy to families are themselves the best of parents, and yet are good at managing transitions of childbirth. As we reminisce on the life and times of former President FW de Klerk, as a nation-state without a nation, we will revert to our rainbow nature and sharpen our different colours into how we memorialise him.
His was a life whose path was a result of a socialisation he could not have escaped its intentional impact on the youth of his times. At the ascendance of apartheid into political power in 1948 he was 14 years old and a nephew of Prime Minister Hans Strijdom. It follows therefore that he would have gone through the then rapportryer camps, and potentially already recruited into the ruiterwag, all of whom were organisations that institutionalised Afrikanerskap as a social base that would later be abused to sustain apartheid as an ideology. His family networks, and their involvement in the activities of the Afrikaner political elite could only propel him through the pecking order established within the then National Party. He was NP royalty.
Peer legitimation and general human success in the networks he lived in required of him to rationalise his relationship with what was in the social of his life with the political that was his crafted path. His socialisation at the University of Potchefstroom, now North West, and through Christian National Education, an education philosophical approach that became a sieve within which apartheid could find religious justification, could not have produced a different person than who he was until later in his life.
In the political of his life, he served under the worst of Heads of State after South Africa became a republic. Being part of a conservative verligte grouping in the national executives he served, as well as being rooted into the CNE orientations, any political strategy he employed required of him to display the hawkishness that justified his BJ Vorster and PW Botha approval to be in their prerogative Cabinet. Notwithstanding his newfound stance on apartheid, which his generation rationalised as separate development, he had to craft his political trajectory by displaying the hawk he is able to be. Through that he was able to outsmart many an obvious suitors to the National Party throne when the time for PW Botha to go arrived, and he turned out to be the most ready to volunteer political power to a multi-racial majority government, albeit pressure induced.
His navigation of the political terrain after he took over from PW Botha was characterised by a reluctance to accept the inevitability of what he had started in the 1989 referendum, especially his promise to negotiate with all political leaders unconditionally. Anchored by a strategy that had a constituency of liberals in all political formations, including within the ANC, his project soon became a project of instituting a liberal order in South Africa. The global content at the objects of his negotiations, and those of the liberation movement led by the ANC, as well as those of the foremost concentrate of liberalism represented by inheritors of the PFP, defined the agenda of negotiations away from his conservative verligte position. The path to a liberal order was begun by a government he headed, and consolidated by the next he became its Deputy President.
As the convergence of the 1912 and 1913 established nationalists that were divided by the narrow definition of nation adopted by the National Party happened upon the platform of creating a new liberal order, the relevance of disagreement on the type of a Constitutional Democracy both protagonists wanted got liquidated. As the heat of negotiations caught up with the 'nation', South Africa went through the psychological barrier of accepting that indeed it will henceforth 'belong to all who live in it'. The basis of this acceptance was for both the reasons of insurance to those that dispossessed others and those that expected restitution, and a magic platform to engage was created. This is what the FW de Klerk called the accord struck to establish a constitutional democracy.
The accord was about the establishment of a constitutional value system with which the dream of a new and better South Africa could be sculptured. As principles undergirding the Constitution, the leadership cohort of South African that drew up the constitution agreed to "heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights; lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law; improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and build a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations". These principles became the dream they delivered for South Africa.
Whilst the governance legacies of the South African State as an institution upon which predictability of government could be derived by the investor community instructed support for the structure of the negotiations process, the social legacies of apartheid have for a while become a permanent discount rate to gains made. In FW de Klerk's parlance, these legacies of government, and he believed, the post 1994 Constitution of South Africa provides a continuity of the State, whilst allowing the normative guidance of government, its largest agency, to provide executive authority. The negotiations were in the main about the sustainability of the democracy and its institutions. He judged the performance or otherwise of government or the governing party, or any policy, on the basis of its variance with these principles, and founding values.
As a construct, he consistently argued, the South African Constitution remains the foremost instrument and outcome of the accord, that leaders who were in the CODESA process and the in-Mandela-Parliament Constituent Assembly believed would bring about socio-economic transformation, radically or otherwise. To this effect, he maintained was the reason they chiselled in a provision that "South Africa is one, sovereign, democratic state founded on the values of; human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms; non-racialism and non-sexism; supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law; and universal adult suffrage, a national common voters roll, regular elections and a multi-party system of democratic government, to ensure accountability, responsiveness and openness". This, and beyond his apology proffered that apartheid was wrong in all respects, he believed was the best he could agree to, and in some instances remonstrate for inclusion in the Constitution, to practically communicate his remorse for posterity's sake.
The above define a legacy FW de Klerk was part of crafting and bequeathing to a future those he abandoned their path in 1989, and subsequent years, were not keen to allow. What makes this noble legacy questionable, and a challenge to the current cohort of leaders have, is the extent to which the templates of economic domination are responding to the intents of the Constitution. The mixed reactions to his passing on, despite most making reference to the decisions he took as an apartheid head of state, are in the main a proxy of the discontents emanating from the social legacies of what he was deeply part of. Unless the economic establishment take the moral route the political establishment did, the promise of the Constitution will be problematic to those that should embrace it. It is what happens at diner tables of this country that will define its future and stability.
His South Africaness is thus indisputable. His contributions evoke both scorn and endearment. How we judge him as incumbents in the history he has made is in itself a history we are all writing or making. How we treat humans that have contributed at the level he did is what he deserves as a distinguishable member of our society. If it is a State Funeral out established criteria for such defines him to be deserving, the nation should oblige. Like any social decision South Africa has to take on these matters, his, will always be a contested legacy. Incumbents can't agree on the definition of legacies, yet consensus is what makes nations move on.
This is the first instalment of renditions on and about FW de Klerk that I will be doing as he 'lies in his state of a Special type. President Mbeki went to pay respects to PW Botha. President Ramaphosa cannot abdicate this responsibility, our nationness saluted FW de Klerk when it could. History has no blank pages
Rest in Peace FW.
🤷🏽♂️A ndzo tivulavulela
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