Cautious Architect of a Cloudy Future

By Richard Stengel

For the Afrikaner, one of the great comforts of apartheid was that it left no room for doubt. Everything was accounted for in an elaborate system that measured a man's race by the kink of his hair and plotted the future as a cluster of indentured black homelands surrounding a wealthy white state. But those certainties are beginning to feel like relics of an embarrassing past. The future is now clouded, and Afrikaners are uneasy. For them, the architect of what lies ahead is not the revolutionary Nelson Mandela but a quiet, cautious lawyer who seems to demonstrate more loyalty to the past than to a vision of the future.

Although he has been a National Party politician for 17 years and State President for the past five months, Frederik Willem de Klerk, 53, is still something of a cipher. His five-year plan for constitutional change, presented at the National Party congress last summer, is empty of specifics; his rhetoric is soothing but ambiguous and dotted with the charged code words of apartheid. Yet this mild, bland politician startled the nation upon taking office with a display of bold pronouncements and a previously undiscovered talent for doing the unexpected. Although the changes he has made are still largely cosmetic, he has succeeded in transforming the atmosphere of South Africa and nudging his reluctant white countrymen to accept the idea that change is inevitable.

F.W., as almost everyone calls him, is a fourth-generation Afrikaner nationalist. A descendant of the Calvinistic Voortrekkers, who valued independence more than enlightenment, he was raised in the northern Transvaal, the heart of the most conservative area of South Africa. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were National Party politicians, and his uncle J.G. Strydom was a Prime Minister. He was twelve years old in 1948, when his father became a Member of Parliament and the National Party rose to power on the platform of Grand Apartheid. While he modeled himself on his stern and unyielding father, his brother Willem, 61, who became a journalist and a vocal critic of apartheid, took after their more moderate mother. F.W., says his brother, "was always part of the Establishment, always a conformist."

De Klerk duly went to law school, built a prosperous practice in the Transvaal and was ready for politics in 1972 when he was tapped by the Afrikaner elite to stand for Parliament. He served as a solid but undistinguished member of a host of committees, later becoming a dutiful Cabinet minister holding such portfolios as sports and home affairs. His closest brush with the wretchedness of apartheid came when he was Education Minister during the 1976 Soweto riots protesting compulsory Afrikaans instruction in the schools. He stood resolutely behind the principle of separate but equal -- in practice unequal -- education. To the liberal press he was verkrampte -- unenlightened -- no different from the blunt and stolid Nationalists who never questioned the boilerplate of apartheid.

) De Klerk was a late-blooming reformer. "All of us were very much committed to separate development," says Education Minister Stoffel van der Merwe, a friend and colleague. "Each of us at some time or other had to change his mind. Somewhere along the line De Klerk changed his." The futility of apartheid probably came to him in the same gradual way it dawned on many whites: as hundreds of thousands of blacks flooded the cities, separation was no longer practical.

De Klerk has one enormous advantage over his predecessors: he is an inheritor, not a creator, of the system. His is the first generation of Afrikaner leaders who did not fight to impose apartheid in 1948. He also has had more intellectual contact with the outside world than his insular elders. "De Klerk," says a Western diplomat, "is younger-minded, more in the pragmatic mold than the ideological generation of Afrikaner politicians." Still, it was only after his surprise selection to succeed P.W. Botha -- De Klerk was the choice of the conservative Old Guard -- that he began to exhibit much willingness to depart from the past.

Unlike Botha, who always brandished a metaphorical swagger stick, De Klerk is not a creature of the powerful South African security establishment. Botha relied on the threat of military power and ironfisted retaliation, but De Klerk stands for law. In an action both symbolic and concrete, President de Klerk quickly dismantled the shadowy National Security Management System, which controlled the black townships, and downgraded the State Security Council. "The most important thing about De Klerk," says a senior Western diplomat, "is that he is a civilian. He believes in civilian control and getting away from the junta way of doing things."

But the most obvious contrast between F.W. and P.W. is temperament, not ideology. Die Groot Krokodil -- the Great Crocodile -- as Botha was not so affectionately called, was an irascible and imperious man who listened less as he grew older. De Klerk is an amiable fellow who prefers consensus to dogmatic, one-man rule. He has restored the Cabinet to the role of the premier policymaking body, and he has held more Cabinet sessions in five months than Botha did in his final two years. More refined than the boorish Botha, De Klerk has done away with some of the trappings of autocracy: the plumes and feathers of the State President's Ruritanian guard have been relegated to a museum. While Botha relaxed by shooting wild animals, De Klerk plays golf.

Some black antiapartheid leaders, such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, find De Klerk a man they might be able to do business with. "He does appear to be someone who does hear," said Tutu in an interview with TIME. Tutu offered an example from a meeting between black church leaders and the President last fall: "De Klerk said, 'The purpose of government is the establishment of law- and-order.' And others said, 'No, in our religious tradition, which you and I share, the purpose of government is the establishment of justice.' De Klerk replied, 'You are right.' P.W. Botha would never have admitted that someone else could be right and he wrong."

Since taking office, De Klerk has often spoken of a "new South Africa." The shape of that new nation is still -- deliberately -- undefined. But one phrase is firmly inked in: "group rights," De Klerk's code name for the preservation of white privilege. In South Africa, when whites talk about "minority rights" they mean the protection of white power and wealth, and when they refer to "the tyranny of the majority" they mean black rule. De Klerk's so-called multiracial state does not denote racial integration but a system in which each race will have its own rights and freedoms -- one of those being the right to live in a white enclave. Just as much as his hard- line brethren, De Klerk is loath to relinquish what may be the world's most comfortable way of life. That, as much as anything else, is what animates the white position.

So the great conundrum of the Afrikaner politician is that the starting point of black demands -- one man, one vote -- exceeds the end point of white flexibility. Moderate Afrikaners find the idea of black rule fearsome primarily because they are convinced it would lead to economic chaos. De Klerk's real mandate from his Afrikaner supporters is to find a way to give power to the black man without rendering the white man powerless.

De Klerk has his own way of explaining this. "Over the years," he said in an interview with TIME, "it became clear that the ((National Party)) policy of separate development could not be realized within the framework of the realities of South Africa. It became clear that the interests of all the people of this country have become so interwoven that it is impossible to totally extricate the various groups and nations from each other. As early as 1986, the National Party specifically adapted its policy and discarded the concept of total separation of political power, and exchanged it for the concept of the sharing of power. In the '89 election, we refined the concept of the sharing of power, and we really moved into the phase that we will now have with the clear mandate to build a new South Africa."

De Klerk occasionally apologizes for his lumpy English (Afrikaans is his first language), but the obfuscation is not accidental. "Sharing power" means that whites may be willing to give blacks equal, but not superior, power. Even so, De Klerk objects to anyone questioning his commitment to change. Like many Afrikaners, he gets angry when the outside world criticizes South Africa for not doing enough rather than acknowledging what it has done. "Anyone who says that we are just looking for another way in which to entrench white domination has either not taken note of what has been said and what is happening or is willfully distorting the truth," he says. "On the one hand, they put up stumbling blocks that make it difficult for us to meet the expectations. On the other hand, they test us against expectations we never intended to raise."

But expectations have been raised. For many, the release of Mandela is meant to signal the beginning of the end of apartheid. Now anything less than an agreement between white and black about the shape of the future will be a bitter disappointment. De Klerk knows this, and he must find some middle path that will satisfy both sides. Yet it must be more than apartheid with a human face. "His mandate is somehow to maintain white supremacy without alienating the black majority," says Alan Morris, an anti-apartheid activist and sociology lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand. "How he does that, no one knows."

Like many Afrikaners, De Klerk talks about the "reservoir of goodwill" that still exists between black and white in South Africa. This is more wishful thinking than reality, but if the idea is that the black majority will give him more time, De Klerk is probably right. But how much more time is the question.

De Klerk counts himself an optimist. Last week he went home to the Transvaal to see his newborn first grandson, and expressed his hope for the future. "I think he's going to be part of a country on its way to greatness," said the State President. A country on its way to something, yes, but no one knows precisely what. That newborn baby is among the first generation of Afrikaners whose future is not assured. While the past in South Africa appears to be dying, the future is yet to be born.

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town and Scott MacLeod/Pretoria