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NEWS INSIGHT
De Klerk's resignation, place in history by Chido Nwangwu The sudden resignation by one of South Africa's two deputy presidents Party leader FW de Klerk (the other is president Nelson Mandela's protege Thabo Mbeki) as the influential National Party leader and departure from politics on Tuesday August 26 came as a jolt to many. Also, it holds significant lessons and implications for the country and the African continent First, this transformative historical figure who, with the venerable Mandela, played the most catalytic roles in the establishing of a post-apartheid, selflessly believes his resignation frees his party of its last personification of apartheid. Why many saw him and his key lieutenants as the henchmen of brutalities of South Africa's, immoral, violent, discriminatory and guilt-laden past. According to him, this view "remains a problem for our party." When on November 7, 1994 1995 I asked him a question at a luncheon hosted in his honor by the Greater Houston Partnership regarding the way forward for his country, he said "we must show we all can forgive the horrors and mistakes of our country's past." To a large extent, the process of arriving at the gates of collective atonement and historical forgiveness repeatedly re-enacted horrors executed at the subtle and sometimes formal engagement by De Klerk's regime of hired killers and gangs of hateful lowlifes enacting their acts of cold devilry and wickedness on helpless and poor Black South Africans and some of so-called 'coloreds.' Atonement via the recollections at on-going Truth and Reconciliation Commision require re-presenation of those "horrors and mistakes" mentioned by De Klerk in his answer to my question. Fact is thousands of those horrors happened under his watch as president (before Mandela succeeded him). Hundreds of thousands of others happened under his predecessor Pieter'Pik' Botha and other arch-deacons of criminal and evil theology of apartheid (state sanctioned violent methods of governing through discrimination and seperation set against Black South Africans and coloreds by White, Caucasian Afrikaans and other racist bullies of Dutch and European extraction. De Klerk whose concilatory manner of partaking in politics earned him the privilege of sharing the Nobel Peace prize with statesman Nelson Mandela remains in the African continet, an example of a man who knows when to move on rather than be swept into additional, continuing class, regional, or racial confrontations and slaughter. He could have, if he lusted for personal power and the pomp of presidential position, fought a little longer, more violently, against Mandela's the African National Congress. He could have dithered a while about white power and "white fears," demanding with it a concessional apparition in the name of a multi-racial democracy, deliberately made unstable and bifurcated by race and economic classes. De Klerk chose and led the road to a multi-racial democracy based on egalitarian principles which led up to the man (Mandela) his forebears and patrons and his regime had jailed in the noon of his youth to became the president in the evening of his life, through fair elections, of the same South Africa! Such is the historical place of de Klerk in the annals of world history. Second, he is a commendable example that social and political redemption is possible. From being a high priest of the hallucinatory idiocies embedded in the apartheid cathecism to playing a major role in the deconstruction of its structures of hate and inequity. Third, in his later years, de Klerk's functional realism and ability to live beyond the heady trappings of privilege and state power needs to be noted by the confederacy of uncouth brutes and dicatorships urinating on the face all that is good about the African continent and Africans. To De Klerk, I believe that history will certainly recall your roles as a caretaker of the ill-fated apartheid rule, better, it will recall more your courage as a visionary beyond racial clans, it will remember you more as a selfless statesman who have done so much to put South Africa before and beyond self in a continent dotted by characters who will rather rule in hell, jail and kill responsible opposition leaders. Enjoy your retirement beyond those "horrors and mistakes" of your past. You have made Africa better!
Chido Nwangwu is founder and publisher of Houston-based USAfrica The
Newspaper and USAfricaonline.com, first African-owned, U.S-based
professional newspaper to be published on the world wide web covering
Africa and U.S public policy and business issues. |