F. W. de Klerk

Biography

Frederik Willem de Klerk was born in Johannesburg in 1936 into an influential Afrikaner family with close ties to the National Party. He studied at Potchefstroom University from 1954 to 1958, graduating in arts and law, and after articles in Klerksdorp and Pretoria built his own law practice in Vereeniging from 1962.

In 1972 he was elected to parliament for Vereeniging. He joined the cabinet in 1978 and held a run of portfolios under John Vorster and P. W. Botha, among them posts and telecommunications, sport, mines and energy, home affairs and national education, supporting apartheid as a minister. In February 1989 he succeeded Botha as National Party leader, and in August as state president.

On 2 February 1990 he announced to parliament that the ANC and other banned parties would be legalised, and Nelson Mandela was released soon after. His government negotiated the end of apartheid with the ANC, won a whites-only referendum in March 1992 to continue the talks and dismantled the country's nuclear weapons. He shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela.

After the 1994 election he was one of two deputy presidents in the Government of National Unity until 1996, when he took the National Party out of the coalition into opposition; he retired from politics in 1997. He objected to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's limited amnesty, lectured abroad, and died in Cape Town in 2021.