F. W. de Klerk

F. W. de Klerk

F. W. de Klerk, born in 1936, president of South Africa (1989-1994) and Nobel laureate, whose reforms led to the end of apartheid. Frederik Willem De Klerk was born in Johannesburg and earned a law degree from Potchefstroom University in 1958. He was elected to the South African parliament in 1972 for the National Party and later held a number of cabinet posts. When P. W. Botha resigned as the country's president in August 1989 because of ill health, de Klerk, as the leader of the National Party, succeeded him. De Klerk was elected to the presidency in September. In 1990 he ended the ban on the African National Congress (ANC), a largely black South African nationalist group, and other opposition parties. In a further effort to solve South Africa's racial and political problems, de Klerk ordered the release of some political prisoners, including ANC leader Nelson Mandela, who had been in prison since 1962 and who was later to become the country's first black president.

Under de Klerk's leadership, the government repealed the last of the laws that formed the legal basis of apartheid in 1992. In March more than two-thirds of the voters in a whites-only referendum endorsed his policy of negotiating a new constitution to extend political rights to blacks. He and Mandela were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for negotiating the country's transition to a nonracial democracy. After extensive talks between black and white political leaders, the country's first multiracial elections were held in April 1994. The ANC emerged with an overwhelming majority, and in May Mandela succeeded de Klerk as president. De Klerk, however, continued to serve in the government as one of two deputy presidents until 1996. A new constitution was ratified on May 8, 1996, under which minority parties in the parliament would not be guaranteed positions in the executive cabinet, as they had been since 1994, under the interim constitution. In June de Klerk and other National Party members withdrew from their cabinet posts in order to establish the National Party as a formal opposition party. De Klerk stepped down as leader of the National Party and retired from politics in September 1997.