"So apartheid was wrong, I say as we push back our chairs. Even now this National Party scion chooses his words carefully. The idea of separate homelands for South Africa’s black tribes – “nation states”, as he describes them – was “morally defensible”, he says. But it failed for three reasons: the whites were too selfish; as the economy grew so the races became intertwined – “we became an omelette and you can never unscramble an omelette”; and the ANC did not want to accept division along tribal lines. “In the end, because we failed we ended in the place which was totally morally unjustifiable.”
It is classic de Klerk. Most modern politicians would have concocted a more disingenuous response but he doggedly insists apartheid in its purest form just might have worked. At dinner that night, I ask my oldest South African friend, a liberal Afrikaner lawyer, about FW. He was not an inspirational politician, the lawyer reflects. And yet, at a critical moment in his country’s history, he conquered his fear of the unknown and acted in the best interests of his country and not of his party – and that, we agree, marks him out with greatness."
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