últimas notícias

Frederik Willem de Klerk was born in Johannesburg on March 18, 1936, to a family steeped in the politics of the Afrikaners, descendants of the Dutch and Huguenot settlers who arrived in southern Africa in the 17th century. His father, Jan de Klerk, a headmaster, became a cabinet member under three prime ministers and president of the senate. His uncle, Hans Strijdom, a vehement advocate of apartheid, was prime minister in the 1950s.

His grandfather, also named Willem, was a proud Afrikaner, having been arrested on treason charges by the British before becoming a minister and founding member of the National Party.

“Politics,” Mr. de Klerk wrote in his autobiography, “was in my blood.”

Trained as an attorney at Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, Mr. de Klerk became a member of P.W. Botha’s cabinet and of B.J. Vorster’s administration before that. He sometimes sided with racial hard-liners within his party, and he was one of the cabinet ministers who went to Mr. Botha in 1986 and demanded that Foreign Minister Roelof F. Botha be ordered to recant a prediction that South Africa might one day have a Black president.

In his book “Move Your Shadow,” Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of The New York Times, recalled asking Mr. de Klerk, then a young cabinet member, about the death in police custody of a white man accused of sympathizing with the A.N.C. Mr. de Klerk told of being angry upon learning of the death. Why? “I knew how it would be used against us,” he said.