Profile of Frederick Willem de Klerk

Frederik Willem de Klerk goes into the annals of history as the President of the last white minority government who was bold enough to lead white South Africa out of an unsustainable and untenable apartheid system towards a non-racial, non-sexist, prosperous and democratic South Africa.

During his reign, Mr De Klerk went about dismantling many of the provisions of apartheid and setting the stage for the first democratic general election in 1994.

In February 1990, he lifted a 30-year ban on the ANC and other liberation movements and released Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison. De Klerk and Mandela worked together for political transformation that ended the nation’s era of white minority rule and in 1993, he and Mandela agreed on a timetable for a transition to a non-racial democratic state.

Nelson Mandela called Mr De Klerk ‘a man of integrity’. Through the F W De Klerk Foundation he currently focuses his attention on peace, national reconciliation and nation-building in the Republic of South Africa.

De Klerk together with Mandela were joint recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1993.