FROM THE ARCHIVES: Although leaders of the reconciliation era accept South Africa's last white president, younger politicians are not as forgiving.
e freed Nelson Mandela, shared the Nobel peace prize and, in the once-popular narrative, was the apartheid oppressor who handed power to his former enemies in a moment when hope and history rhymed.
“The City of Cape Town’s renaming of the road to FW de Klerk is like a naming a German street after a Nazi,” said a statement issued last week by the ANC’s powerful ally, trade union federation Cosatu. Despite such claims, many of the leading lights from that era have been willing to embrace the former head of state. Mandela’s friend and fellow former Robben Island inmate Ahmed Kathrada said he has no objection to the Cape Town street naming, which also drew support from Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, former president Kgalema Motlanthe and Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
Even the Mandela-De Klerk creed of reconciliation appears to be fraying at the edges, with surveys suggesting racial groups are growing apart and a recent series of ugly incidents coming to media attention. In one, a former tennis coach allegedly attacked a woman with a Taser in a row over a parking space in Cape Town, shouting: “You fucking k***r, you don’t belong here. You should go back to where you belong.
“The origins of the concept of apartheid, which we preferred to call separate development, was to bring justice to all South Africans,” he says.
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