Cautious Architect of a Cloudy Future

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.