F.W. de Klerk was a hero of our time

FW de Clerk, the last president of apartheid South Africa, has died at the age of 85. In 2010 Rian Malan wrote the following piece for The Spectator about his part in history.

I almost punched an Englishman the other day. We were sitting in a bar, talking about the 20th anniversary of F.W. de Klerk’s Great Leap Forward of 2 February 1990 — the day he rocked the world by announcing that he was about to unban the revolutionary movements, free Nelson Mandela and turn South Africa into a land of peace and justice. I was explaining why I thought de Klerk’s move was an act of heroism almost unparalleled in the history of humankind, but the Englishman didn’t want to know. ‘De Klerk was a loser,’ he said, ‘a racist battered into submission by sanctions, township violence and global isolation, and then forced to do a decent thing that should have been done decades earlier.’