VICTIM OF HIS OWN REFORMS

A conservative, dark-suited son of Afrikanerdom, President Frederik Willem de Klerk could not have rocked the political world more when, in 1990, he unbanned the African National Congress, released Nelson Mandela and set South Africa on the road to the end of apartheid and a black-majority democracy. And when De Klerk, who with Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize for engineering the transition to a new South Africa, surprised his nation last week by announcing that he was retiring as head of the opposition National Party, South Africa had more to reflect on than his role in the historic transition process. De Klerk's departure has not only left his party without a leader but has also spurred a scramble for realignment among Mandela's political opponents.

De Klerk, 61, gave as a reason for his retirement the fact that despite his huge contribution to the salvation of his country, he is demonized as a symbol of the apartheid past and is therefore more of a liability than an asset to today's multiracial National Party. Last week he told TIME: "I've always adhered to the management philosophy that a top manager shouldn't be in the job too long." The remark was characteristically De Klerk: low key, declining the chance to paint himself as a large figure in history.

It was De Klerk who held together a party long divided between conservatives and moderates--in the Afrikaans parlance the verkramptes (inflexible right wing) and verligtes (enlightened moderates). In May one of the National Party's leading verligtes, Roelf Meyer, whom De Klerk had appointed head of a task team to redesign the party for the future, resigned when his ideas, including the disbanding of the party altogether, were rejected as too radical. Meyer, 50, heads a movement that will form a new political party later this month with a black group led by an ex-anc dissident. De Klerk believes Meyer is making a mistake in trying to rally an opposition political alliance. "You don't disband the second biggest party in the country in order to work with smaller parties," he says. But he also concedes that with the divisions in South African politics no longer just about race, political realignments are inevitable.

The departure of De Klerk, who has been described as South Africa's Gorbachev because he began a reform process that swept him from power, is unlikely to have any effect on the powerful majority commanded by the ANC. But, says De Klerk, a reformed and renewed all-race National Party has a leading role to play in the restructuring of the political landscape in South Africa. There is a belief in the opposition camp, meanwhile, that like De Klerk, the National Party could become a victim of its own reforms.

As he cleared his desk, he was asked how he would like to be remembered. De Klerk reached higher than usual: "As a leader who prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths and who made a quantum leap that fundamentally changed our country for the better and brought justice to all South Africans." Fair enough.

--By Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town