Word: apartheid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...late-blooming reformer. "All of us were very much committed to separate development," says Education Minister Stoffel van der Merwe, a friend and colleague. "Each of us at some time or other had to change his mind. Somewhere along the line De Klerk changed his." The futility of apartheid probably came to him in the same gradual way it dawned on many whites: as hundreds of thousands of blacks flooded the cities, separation was no longer practical...
...Klerk has one enormous advantage over his predecessors: he is an inheritor, not a creator, of the system. His is the first generation of Afrikaner leaders who did not fight to impose apartheid in 1948. He also has had more intellectual contact with the outside world than his insular elders. "De Klerk," says a Western diplomat, "is younger-minded, more in the pragmatic mold than the ideological generation of Afrikaner politicians." Still, it was only after his surprise selection to succeed P.W. Botha -- De Klerk was the choice of the conservative Old Guard -- that he began to exhibit much willingness...
...expectations have been raised. For many, the release of Mandela is meant to signal the beginning of the end of apartheid. Now anything less than an agreement between white and black about the shape of the future will be a bitter disappointment. De Klerk knows this, and he must find some middle path that will satisfy both sides. Yet it must be more than apartheid with a human face. "His mandate is somehow to maintain white supremacy without alienating the black majority," says Alan Morris, an anti-apartheid activist and sociology lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand...