(REUTERS): South Africa’s last white president Frederik Willem (FW) de Klerk, the last leader under apartheid and a key actor in the country’s transition to democracy, on Thursday morning at his home in Cape Town, the FW de Klerk Foundation said.
“Former President FW de Klerk died peacefully at his home in Fresnaye earlier this morning following his struggle against mesothelioma cancer,” the FW de Klerk Foundation said in a statement.
“He is survived by his wife Elita, his children Jan and Susan and his grandchildren,” it said, adding the family would in due course announce the funeral arrangements. He was 85 years old.
De Klerk won praise worldwide for his role in scrapping apartheid and he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela in 1993. The following year Mandela won South Africa’s first multi-racial elections with his African National Congress (ANC).
However, while he was feted globally and shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the revered Mandela, de Klerk earned only scorn from many Blacks outraged by his failure to curb political violence in the turbulent years leading up to all-race elections in 1994.
Many right-wing white Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch and French settlers who had long ruled the country under de Klerk’s National Party, viewed him as a traitor to their causes of nationalism and white supremacy.
The negotiations on a peaceful transition to non-racial democracy that followed Mandela’s release were held against the backdrop of mounting political violence and often looked as though they would be derailed, a scenario that would almost certainly have plunged the nation into a bloody race war.
He retired from active politics in 1997 and later apologised for the miseries of apartheid before Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
He divorced his wife of 39 years, Marike, in 1998, and married Elita Georgiadis, the wife of a Greek shipping tycoon. In December 2001, Marike was murdered in her luxury beachfront home in Cape Town, an incident that underscored South Africa’s rampant rates of violent crime.
