Quote of the Day (F.W. de Klerk, on Ending Apartheid)

“How would South Africa have looked today if we had not signed the agreements which were reached? We would not have exported one case of wine this year. [Wine is now one of South Africa’s healthiest export sectors.] We would have been totally isolated. South Africa would have been on a downward slope towards calamity and catastrophe. So the new South Africa, warts and all, is a much better place.”—F.W. de Klerk, quoted in Alec Russell, “Lunch With the FT: F.W. de Klerk,” The Financial Times, January 23, 2010

F.W. deKlerk, former President of South Africa, states in the Financial Times interview what would seem obvious to many in the West, but not to those in the unrelentingly racist state he once headed. That’s why his release on this date 20 years ago of Nelson Mandela is rightly celebrated as a major historical event.

Mandela might be the most widely admired leader of the past several decades—a civil-rights figure who, unlike Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was not only able to see the destruction of apartheid in his country but also to participate in his land’s new power arrangements.

Mandela endured 27 years in prison, but his patience had limits, as deKlerk bluntly admits. Once outside, the African National Congress leader pressed the man who freed him for further concessions to South Africa’s black majority.

Several times, Mandela called deKlerk out publicly for his go-slow, halfway measures. Though friends today, the two men—who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 “for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa"—had a testy relationship for quite a while in the mid-1990s.

The tenor of that relationship recalls a similar one between a human-rights icon and an ambivalent transformational agent in a rights-abusing state: Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov and the last leader of the old Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. From 1986, when he was released from prison, to his death in 1989, Sakharov acted as a burr in the side of the Communist Party’s General Secretary in urging greater democratization.

DeKlerk is scorned by Afrikaners who feel disenfranchised in the new South Africa born from the agreements with Mandela referred to in his quote, and Gorbachev is a non-person as far as most of the Russian electorate is concerned. (The nation’s loss of influence in Eastern Europe, along with the economic vertigo that ensued when Gorbachev tried to reform the government, remained in voters’ minds in the 1996 Russian Presidential election, when he received less than 2% of the vote.)

Both leaders will surely be judged more positively by historians, for actions that were not only morally right but—their internal hard-line critics to the contrary—were also absolutely necessary if their country desired legitimacy in the community of nations.