The Sunday News
On Thursday, 11 November 2021 news broke that the last President of apartheid South Africa Frederik Willem de Klerk had died of cancer at his home in Cape Town.
The significant news broke when the South African population was still coming to terms with the results of local government elections that for the first time saw the African National Congress lose support to a low of less than 50%.
But what has also become commonsensical to political novices is that the political opposition in South Africa is not only divided but has not presented a credible alternative to the leadership of Africa’s oldest liberation movement.
The news of De Klerk’s death dropped at such a moment of rupture in South African history where the difficult past, troubling present and uncertain future of the Republic are in stubborn perspective. The Republic is caught in a typical Gramscian interregnum where the past is slowly dying while the future is struggling to be born and in that gap morbid political symptoms appear to haunt the present, leaving the polity and the economy in uncertainty.
Death divides nation into three camps
In my observation the reactions to De Klerk’s death at the age of 85 divided South Africans into three camps. With a cryptic tweet: “Thank you God!” Julius Malema led the camp that forcefully felt that the death of the last apartheid president was an event to be celebrated, and this is a big camp.
Some in this angry camp flooded the social media with threats that if government gave De Klerk a state funeral they will mount the mother of all protests and turn the funeral into never before seen chaos. This group of South Africans feels it strongly that to commemorate the life and celebrate the legacy of an otherwise unapologetic apartheid leader would be to laugh at the wounds, tears, blood and graves of the victims of apartheid that include the mass of the poor black part of the population in the country.
This group is largely made out of those South Africans that understand Nelson Mandela to have errors as he preferred reconciliation ahead of justice and became a hero for white people that he protected from black anger and revenge.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela were some of the prominent South Africans that visibly and audibly led the mourning of a man that has a real but difficult political legacy, especially in the eyes of the victims of apartheid. Tutu is on record publicly complaining that De Klerk failed to take full advantage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission platform to make a “more wholesome apology on behalf of the National Party” for apartheid as a crime against humanity in South Africa.
As time went by friendship grew between Tutu and De Klerk, both Nobel Peace Prize laureates. Both men became political elites of South African history who understood themselves as heroes that helped in their different ways to bring apartheid to an end.
This group understands Mandela to have been the political saint who chose conciliation ahead of revenge and magically turned blood enemies into friends in a country with a dark and bloody history of conflict and crimes against humanity.
The third camp is occupied by moralists who feel that the death of anyone should not be celebrated while apartheid crimes against humanity should neither be understood nor be forgiven without unconditional apology from such apartheid leaders and perpetrators as De Klerk. This clique claims high moral ground and religious wisdom in the belief that judgement should ultimately be left to God and not fallible human beings that can anytime become De Klerks themselves.
While De Klerk should not be mourned, this group asserts, his death should not be celebrated as celebrating death, any death, makes us the same with those who perpetrate mass murders and spill the blood of the innocents.
The last message
Most observers of world politics remember in March 2016 when Fidel Castro addressed the Congress of the Cuban Communist Party and announced that it was his last Congress as he was soon to die. That was Castro the brave revolutionary and hero. Dying heroes are a phenomenon. On the day of his death the F.W De Klerk Foundation released a video of an ailing De Klerk delivering his last message to South Africa. “It is true that in my younger years
I defended apartheid” and “I apologise for the pain, hurt and indignity that this caused to black, brown and coloured people of South Africa.” South Africans were told that after all De Klerk “disliked the term apartheid,” but preferred “separate development.” To conclude his deathbed speech he expressed how “proud of our Constitution” he was and sent a “plea” to all South Africans to “once again embrace the Constitution” and use it as a pedestal to pave a future for the Republic.
It was some legacy-building effort from a man who sounded frail, even deathly, but keen to be remembered as a statesman and a hero.
It might have been too little too late. It even sounded cowardly and selfish that only at the very end of his life the man gathered the courage to condemn apartheid and apologise for his role in it. It seems that the man could not live with the truth that apartheid was evil but now wants to be remembered after death as a hero that condemned the crime against humanity.
The obscenity of understanding
Leaders that perpetrate and defend crimes against humanity sometimes do so believing that they are advancing great causes, defending their nations against some enemies and forces of darkness. It takes courage to admit wrong and apologise to victims.
The French philosopher and film-maker, Claude Lanzmann spent eleven years directing the documentary film, Shoah, about Adolph Hitler and the Holocaust. He interviewed bystanders, survivors and some perpetrators. He acknowledged the impossibility of understanding why some ordinary human beings, even if they have power they remain ordinary, get persuaded to commit heinous crimes for some questionable causes based on the imagined inferiority of other human beings. Lanzmann noted how “there is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding” such people and the causes that they drive and which also drive them.
Concerning De Klerk the obscenity is deepened by how one who participated in such crimes and refused in good time and place to apologise would be so desperate to be loved and wish to leave a legacy of a grand hero amongst multitudes of his victims.
He missed an opportunity to tell the truth, confess his crimes and those of the people he led, to solicit the forgiveness of the victims.
He worked hard to protect the benefits and privileges accrued by the white population from apartheid and celebrated the Constitution that allows perpetrators and beneficiaries of apartheid to keep their benefits from the crime against humanity in the name of democracy, property rights and reconciliation.
That he unbanned political organisations, released political prisoners, and paved the way for talks about the end of apartheid might not make him a hero because opponents of apartheid should not have been jailed and their organisations banned in the very first place.
Rectifying one’s crime may not be heroism. The heavy political truth is that any one of us, left unchecked and surrounded by fawning flatterers and enterprising sycophants, can commit a holocaust and perpetrate such evils as apartheid crimes against humanity.
The Hitlers and the De Klerks of this world are not born but they are made by their supporters and enablers.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].
