John Carlin Writes on FW De Klerk’s “Free Mandela” Speech in the Guardian

February 2nd, 2010 by Tracey

By freeing Mandela, Carlin writes, de Klerk helped South Africa take a first step into becoming a place where “respect has replaced hatred”. He was at Mandela’s first post-imprisonment press conference:

FW de Klerk, South Africa’s last white president, stunned the world on 2 February 1990 when he announced the lifting of the ban on the African National Congress, after three decades of illegality, and the imminent release of its leader, Nelson Mandela, after more than 27 years in prison. Black South Africans reacted with joyful stupefaction; white South Africans, programmed to view Mandela as the vengeful terrorist who would thrown them all into the sea, were in shock, none more so than the parliamentary caucus of the far right Conservative party.
The caucus held an emergency meeting at which their leader, Andries Treurnicht, better known as “Dr No”, read a thunderous passage from the Old Testament, preparing his co-religionists for holy war. A conservative MP there recalled later that they had long been fearing the day might come when they would have to unleash “the Afrikaner tiger”. “And, well,” the MP said, “this was the tiger moment.”
Nine days later, Mandela was out and the next morning he gave a press conference which I attended in the garden of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Cape Town home. If Mandela had ever been a “terrorist” – he was jailed for founding and leading the armed wing of the ANC – he did not look much like one now. A fit, good-humoured, serene and kingly figure aged 71, he committed himself to finding a negotiated solution to a conflict that had been threatening during the violent Eighties to spill over into civil war.