: How Nelson Mandela Came to Work with F.W. de Klerk to End Apartheid #WorldNEWS In 1991, two years after he became president of South Africa, F. W. de Klerk, who died at the age of 85, secretly met

How Nelson Mandela Came to Work with F.W. de Klerk to End Apartheid #WorldNEWS
In 1991, two years after he became president of South Africa, F. W. de Klerk, who died at the age of 85, secretly met with Nelson Mandela at Tuynhus, the South African president’s residence in Cape Town. Mandela was then prisoner number 466/64 at nearby Victor Verster prison. Mandela may have been a prisoner, but he was by then the most famous political prisoner in the world. De Klerk was a longtime National Party functionary who had succeeded the ferocious P. W. Botha as the head of the racist apartheid government of South Africa.
It was the first time they had met, and prison officials had hurriedly ordered a three-piece suit and tie for Mandela. The meeting was formal, but cordial. The two discussed the future of South Africa and Mandela’s possible release. De Klerk and the National Party had recently released a five-year plan that enshrined the idea of “group rights,” a version of traditional apartheid policy that said whites and blacks would remain separate with neither dominant. South African Blacks saw this as a way of avoiding majority rule.
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Mandela didn’t hesitate. He said that was unacceptable.

Alexander Joe—AFP/Getty ImagesSouth African President Nelson Mandela shakes hands with F. W. de Klerk, the former president and one of Mandelas deputy presidents, after the inaugural sitting in May 1994
Mandela recalled all of this to me in 1993 when I was working with him on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. We discussed de Klerk many times during our sixty plus hours of taped interviews, but here he was describing that first meeting, and doing so with enthusiasm. All of Mandela’s quotes are from the transcripts of those interviews.
“I told him that I totally rejected that. I referred to an article which was written in Die Burger, which is an Afrikaner newspaper—the mouthpiece of the National Party in the Cape—in which the editor said that the concept of groups rights was conceived as an attempt to bring apartheid in through the back door. And I said to Mr. de Klerk that if your own paper says that, then you can imagine what we say. ”
He then paused.
“I was then tremendously impressed because he immediately said, ‘Well, my aim here is no different than yours…If you don’t want the concept of group rights, I will remove it. ’”
And then Mandela added, “The result of that meeting was that I was able to write to our people to say, ‘I have met de Klerk and I think that he is the type of leader we can conclude an agreement with. ”
That proved to be an understatement. De Klerk released Mandela later that year, and after five years of tempestuous and difficult negotiations, Mandela became the first democratically elected president of South Africa—and de Klerk became the last minority white one.

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