The Last Trek: A New Beginning by F.W. de Klerk Macmillan 412pp, £20 in UK
ALL autobiographies are suspect, and so the question arises: is this one more suspect than most? The self-justificatory tone and ambience of The Last Trek is, if anything, rather more obvious than is the norm, but the relative absence of craft and guile, which at one level almost invites a demolition job, also tends to reveal, in a way undoubtedly unintended by the author, a mind-set and an approach to the business of politics which has a relevance outside the confines of South Africa itself.
De Klerk seems to have been around for so long that it is surprising to learn that he is still only sixty-three. Perhaps it is just that - especially in the general perception of the many who have opposed apartheid over the past three or four decades - South Africa seems to have been ruled indefinitely by a succession of craggy-faced white intransigents whose features have blended into an indistinguishable composite.
De Klerk is at pains to deconstruct this impression. Verwoerd and P.W. Botha are portrayed here as essentially men of the past. There is a telling portrait of the occasion when de Klerk visited Botha after Botha's retirement, and found him convinced that de Klerk was now part of a sinister international conspiracy, the so-called New World Order. He makes a strenuous attempt to rehabilitate Vorster, at least in part, for his implicit acknowledgement that the new South Africa would have to develop structures in which equal citizenship would be explicit. To do this de Klerk has to engage in micro-analysis of, and put the best construction on, a Vorster speech which was in large part a defence of the status quo.
His description of Botha would have gained from a sense of the absurd. But de Klerk lacks this, as he also lacks, in the final analysis, the breadth of mind to understand precisely why the scars are taking, and will take, so long to heal. His contrition about the past is genuine - no doubt about it - and has a strong religious basis. But it is interwoven with a kind of wistfulness for what might have been, and an inability to appreciate the moral and political consequences of the failure to raise questions about the role of the police death squads in the 1980s.
The wistfulness is often unconscious. How else to explain the following passage, from his description of his inauguration as President in 1989: "Members of the security forces saluted as we drove by and the public of all races looked on inquisitively, waved and gave us a friendly reception. Fortunately, we could wind down the windows of our armoured Mercedes a little way and Marike and I could wave back." The laager of the voortrekkers had shrunk to the confines of a limousine encased in steel, but its occupants were, as yet, unaware of what had happened.
The role of the death squads continues to raise serious questions. De Klerk does his best to put daylight between himself and these operations, but in the end the question is not so much whether he was aware of them, as whether he could have become more aware had he chosen a different course of action. Here, buried in the sometimes turgid prose, is one of the classic dilemmas about political power: when do you compromise, and how much - not with your enemies, but with your allies?
His belief that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is, at the end of the day, one-sided and even vindictive, is also deficient in its understanding of the processes involved. The party line, to which he still more or less adheres, is that although the illegal killings and torture by the security forces were immoral, reprehensible in the extreme, and "bordered on treason", those killed were a tiny proportion of the 23,000 who died, often in bitter intra-African violence, during the struggle against apartheid. The issue here, however, is not one of quantity but of quality. Torture, murder and other forms of illegality perpetrated by people who are invested with authority, and weaponry, by the State, differ inescapably from murder and mayhem carried out without such official sanction.
They are different not in a moral but in a political sense, and that is why some murders, rather than others, have to be prioritised by the TRC if the new South Africa is to develop a shared trust in political institutions. The outrage at the perversion of public institutions under apartheid has, as part of its foundation, the paradoxical fact that at some level even black South Africans expected them to be less lethal.
For all that, de Klerk (whose ancestors, he discloses, include an Indian slave woman) is already assured of his place in history. His book doesn't really add to it, but it does offer valuable insights into the Akfrikaaner mind and into the political processes which led to the birth of a still deeply troubled, but hopeful country.