wiseMusings

F.W de Klerk’s death was not limited to celebratory memes on Twitter by “the Woke Mob.”

F.W de Klerk’s death brings the constant trauma and helplessness enacted against the majority group in this country by the apartheid regime back into the fore (as if it had ever truly rested).

Regardless of what people may think about him, de Klerk literally presided over the apartheid regime, and was partially responsible for mass atrocities committed in the name of ethnicity in KwaZulu-Natal among other evil orchestrations.

Some people want to whitewash (what a fitting term, by the way) de Klerk’s legacy by pointing to the negotiated settlement as the defining moment in his legacy. Other people – like myself – are far less generous in their outlook, choosing instead to examine de Klerk at the TRC, de Klerk and his comments regarding the crime of apartheid, de Klerk clinging onto the final vestiges of the shallow and vapid idea of the “Rainbow Nation” in order to gain the tiniest shred of credibility.

There are historical figures whose death will instantly spark a conversation about the gruesome horrors of apartheid, and the complicity of some individuals in the continuation of those horrors. One of them has now passed. The other one (who was born on the 27th of August 1928) will also have his day of reckoning when the time is ripe.

The lesson to be gleaned from de Klerk’s death, and “complex” legacy, is, ironically enough, the one thing that the man could not bring himself to admit – that apartheid was a crime against humanity; not only in that it oppressed human beings but that it brought the feral, the beastly and the inhumane out of otherwise decent human beings.