FW de Klerk: South Africa’s last white president

His actions were strongly condemned by Calvinist Afrikaners, one of the more conservative sections of white South African society.

Three years later, Marike was murdered during the course of a robbery. A 21-year-old security guard was later convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing.

De Klerk did not abandon politics. He founded the FW de Klerk Foundation to promote peaceful activities in multi-community countries and travelled the world as an advocate for democracy.

In 2004 he quit the New National Party because of a planned merger with the ANC. He professed himself broadly satisfied with the changes in South Africa but admitted there were “a number of imperfections”.

When Nelson Mandela died in 2013, De Klerk paid tribute to the country’s first black president. “He was a great unifier and a very, very special man in this regard, beyond everything else he did. This emphasis on reconciliation was his biggest legacy.”

In 2015 he waded into the row at Oxford University, criticising the demand of activists that a statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College should be removed. “Students,” he said, “have always been full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

FW de Klerk remained loyal to his Afrikaner heritage. Some former colleagues complained he’d been opportunistic, simply seizing a moment because he saw the inevitability of change.

But, whatever his motives, his role in the relatively peaceful transition to majority rule in South Africa assures his place in the history books of the 20th Century.