Cautious Architect of a Cloudy Future

Faced with the challenge of bringing racial harmony to his country, State President F.W. de Klerk seeks a middle path that will satisfy blacks without alienating whites

For the Afrikaner, one of the great comforts of apartheid was that it left no room for doubt. Everything was accounted for in an elaborate system that measured a man's race by the kink of his hair and plotted the future as a cluster of indentured black homelands surrounding a wealthy white state. But those certainties are beginning to feel like relics of an embarrassing past. The future is now clouded, and Afrikaners are uneasy. For them, the architect of what lies ahead is not the revolutionary Nelson Mandela but a quiet, cautious lawyer who seems to demonstrate more loyalty to...

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