Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa.

F. W. de Klerk's retirement from politics, announced on August 26, was a long-overdue acknowledgement of his irrelevance in post-apartheid South Africa. For the former president and one-time Nobel Peace Prize recipient, the drift from center stage to the political margins has been unsentimentally swift since Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first democratically elected president in May 1994. De Klerk, 60, seemed unable to grasp the fact that his moment in history had passed. By the time he resigned as head of the National Party last month, he was reduced to the role of a second-string pol carping from the sidelines. It was a humiliating final chapter to a volatile career.

De Klerk will forever be saddled with a dual reputation. He will be best remembered as the apartheid leader who broke with the past and freed his erstwhile enemy and eventual successor, African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela. But he also bears ultimate responsibility for the deaths of some 20,000 black South Africans during his reign, many of whom died as a result of actions by a "third force" of government security operatives that wreaked havoc in black communities. De Klerk, incredulously, continues to deny knowledge of or responsibility for these abuses.

The seeds of de Klerk's downfall were evident even as he negotiated South Africa's transition to majority rule. In her controversial new book, Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa, author Patti Waldmeir explores the personalities and politics behind the South African transition. The book provides historical insight into de Klerk's current misfortunes. And in a curious sideshow, Waldmeir's conclusions were cited by de Klerk's adversaries earlier this year in their campaign to topple him.

Reality Check

De Klerk's macabre side and his stunning fall from grace are at odds with the fairy tale version of the South African revolution that emerged in the popular media. This mythology began to take shape the moment Mandela strolled into his new office in the Union Buildings in Pretoria in 1994. The made-for-TV rendition features characters right out of central casting: a black saint, a white knight, and the heavily armed forces of evil drawn from both races. The storybook ending has the saint and the knight realizing that they need each other, vanquishing the demons together, then placidly riding their steeds off into the multiracial sunset. The saint also forgives everyone of their sins, from police torturers to complicit Western politicians. It's a wonderful, heart-warming tale about how two men rose above their narrow self-interests to serve the greater good of humankind.

There's just one small problem: It didn't happen that way.

Patti Waldmeir, a Detroit native who served as Johannesburg bureau chief for the Financial Times from 1989 to 1995, offers a much-needed antidote to the fairy tale. Waidmeir's version of South African history includes real people: Mandela is a complex political animal, "a schemer, a conjurer, a manipulator of men" who spent his 27 years in prison studying his Afrikaner enemy in order to defeat him. F.W. de Klerk "was inclined to serious delusions of grandeur" and was intent on dinging to power, not giving it up. The author even confesses "a guilty sympathy" for the plight of Afrikaners, who "were fighting for ethnic survival." Waldmeir's willingness to challenge cherished stereotypes about the main players in the South African drama is a refreshing strength of this book.

Waldmeir's break with convention is confirmed by the astonishing reception the book has received in South Africa. While reporting there during the past year, I watched in amazement as this book was converted into a weapon to lynch F.W. de Klerk. The key coup plotters in this drama were not fringe malcontents: They were former members of de Klerk's brain trust. This was a place coup, and Anatomy arrived just as the mutineers were ransacking the arsenal in search of ammunition. The conflagration finally became so intense that the author felt obliged to write an angry letter to the editor of a newspaper to denounce the way in which her work was being misused for political ends.

The first salvo was fired in February by University of Cape Town political philosopher Hermann Giliomee. He used Anatomy to revisit the negotiations that led to South Africa's first democratic elections in April 1994. Writing in the Afrikaans press, he pronounced the outcome of the negotiations "an overwhelming defeat" for the National Party. He cited Waidmeir's account of de Klerk's capitulation at the bargaining table as proof that the ex-president was too "weak" to extract concessions from the African National Congress that would have protected the language and culture of the Afrikaners.

Following Giliomee into battle was the Afrikaans newspaper (and former National Party mouthpiece) Die Burger. Under the headline "Surrender," de Klerk was bitterly accused of abandoning promises to protect Afrikaner culture. The editorial concluded, "Such politicians will really find it difficult to make a meaningful contribution to the reconstruction process which now lies before Afrikaans-speakers."

The Afrikaans daily Beeld jumped in next and cut right to the point: "... every NP leader can achieve only one big thing in his time. F.W. de Klerk has achieved his and more. A new leader must now take over."

All this sniping represents a touching bit of nostalgic bluster that one would have thought the Afrikaner opinionmakers had been disabused of by now: namely, that they "coulda been contendahs" if only their Great White Hope had the cajones to do what was needed. Alas, the passage of time has caused some Afrikaners to forget a painful truth: The Boers did not give up power because they wanted to. They capitulated because they had to.

Make no mistake, the apartheid regime could have held on much longer than it did. By the late 1980s, the South African military was still the mightiest in Africa, and the ANC's armed wing was so ineffective that its guerrilla units frequently ended up as suicide squads. But by the time de Klerk came to power in mid-1989, the cost of maintaining apartheid had grown unacceptably high. The South African economy had been ravaged by international sanctions and by the refusal of foreign banks to extend credit to Pretoria. Inside South Africa, the black townships had become ungovernable. The black homelands had become hopelessly corrupt aid junkies that were entirely sustained by Pretoria; rent and utility boycotts in the urban townships were further bleeding central government funds. Politically and economically, a younger generation of Afrikaners was simply running out of the willpower, if not the firepower, needed to sustain the ailing apartheid machinery.

Besides, apartheid had largely succeeded in achieving its goals by the end of the 1980s. Apartheid was first and foremost an economic ideology; concerns for racial purity were decidedly secondary. The National Party carne to power in 1948 with an urgent mandate to resolve "the poor white problem" Their solution was to implement the world's most ambitious affirmative action program -- an aberrant policy that they dubbed "apartheid." The intent of the system was to uplift a largely poor and illiterate Afrikaner nation and change its socioeconomic status from lower class to ruling class. And -- aided by generous doses of police repression of the black majority -- that's just what happened. "In the end, apartheid succeeded too well to survive," Waldmeir perceptively observes. "By promoting the economic advancement of the Afrikaner, it rendered itself obsolete."

But the elite don't forego their status, wealth, and power easily. Waldmeir does a fine job of explicating F.W. de Klerk's real motives for entering into negotiations with the ANC. De Klerk "was not -- as many outsiders assumed -- recognizing the historical inevitability of black majority rule; he does not recognize that to this day. His plan was to share power with blacks, subject to an effective white veto, not to hand it over."

De Klerk may have fleetingly been a visionary, but his vision was clouded by decades of white domination. He was deluded into assuming that he would easily outfox his black opponents in negotiations. Only in hindsight did he and his advisers appreciate the political savvy of ANC leaders like Cyril Ramaphosa, a dynamic former trade union leader who was lead bargainer for the ANC. "These guys had an advantage over us," laments Ramaphossa's NP counterpart Roelf Meyer. "They'd been through negotiations par excellence in the mining industry while we had to learn through experience on a daily basis -- you can't read these things in books."

(Of course, the ANC also miscalculated. When Mandela pronounced de Klerk "a man of integrity" upon his release from prison in 1990, he assumed the NP leader was intending to end white power. It took four years and the death of thousands of people in factional fighting before Mandela's dream was realized)

Waldmeir insists that de Klerk was not only "outmaneuvered" by the ANC, he fell victim to his own hubris. "De Klerk was desperate not to fail in the eyes of the world. And [he had] the arrogance of power: the personal arrogance of believing that he could influence debate by sheer force of personality." In a 1992 white referendum on his strategy that overwhelmingly endorsed reform, de Klerk had the audacity to campaign on the slogan, "Vote yes, if you're scared of majority rule." It was, writes Waldmeir, "a monumental deception." Eighteen months later, de Klerk signed a "Record of Understanding" with the ANC that virtually guaranteed majority rule. Even members of de Klerk's own cabinet viewed this about-face as the ultimate sellout of the Afrikaner.

Nonetheless, where de Klerk's former Afrikaner allies prepared to lynch him for his political heresies, Waldmeir ultimately views de Klerk's capitulation as a heroic act. She opines of the former president -- much too charitably in my view, given the death toll of de Klerk's reign -- that "the true test of his greatness [was] that he repeatedly took such risks, without hesitation, from the moment he released Mandela to the day he accepted majority rule. That he constantly redefined the conditions necessary for Afrikaner survival, in the light of prevailing reality.... De Klerk accepted the democratic revolution, in the end, not because he was 'converted' to democracy but because he had no choice." In the end, de Klerk and the Afrikaners had simply been "on the wrong side of history."

Not So Happily Ever After 

So why did Afrikaner thinkers reopen this debate now, three years after a universally lauded peaceful transition to democracy? For the simple reason that de Klerk still ruled the Afrikaner roost. He was a relic of a disgraced era: It was time for him to quit.

Having reached his political zenith between 1990 and 1993, de Klerk's star has been falling precipitously in the post-apartheid South Africa. In June, he took the low road in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), bleating "I was surprised as you were" about the human rights abuses committed by security forces during his presidency. When all-forgiving TRC Chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu expressed astonishment and disbelief at de Klerk's denials, the former president responded by suing the TRC, calling for Tutu to apologize and for his deputy to be axed. De Klerk assumed the ignoble posture of a schoolyard bully who'd been caught lying, and whose only defense was to punch his way out of the corner.

De Klerk missed a pivotal opportunity. He could have used the TRC as a pedestal from which to morally cleanse his party of its despicable past, taking responsibility and apologizing for crimes. Instead, he retreated into the legendary Afrikaner laager, trying to whip up a last gasp of white nationalism, playing the political race card, and peering out paranoically on the crowds that were massing to lynch him.

As goes de Klerk, so goes his party. A recent South African poll indicated that support for the National Party has dropped by a third, from 20 percent to 14 percent. The dwindling verligte, or enlightened wing, of the Nats has watched in dismay as de Klerk retreated into old-style racial politics. These reformers are voting with their feet: June saw the defection of Roelf Meyer, de Klerk's one-time heir apparent and top lieutenant during the pre-election negotiations. Meyer has now given up on the Nats and opted to form his own moderate multiracial party. It now appears that NP hardliners will inherit the party, ensuring its continued marginalization and perhaps its death as a viable political group.

De Klerk's final act has been an exhibition of his monumental hubris. That is what makes Anatomy of a Miracle all the more compelling. It offers a rare chance to read an incisive analysis of a historic leader's past failings, and then watch as those flaws become the seeds of his present undoing.

Anatomy is one of the best of the journalistic accounts of the negotiations that led to South Africa's first democratic elections. Waidmeir provides readers with the rare opportunity to follow the thinking of key players both before and after the pivotal battles, since she covered South Africa for the duration of the negotiations and the election. She is a punchy and engaging writer, with the result being a book that at times reads like a political thriller.

Where this book falls short is in the way it panders to the "Big Man" view of history, in which great transformations are credited to the backroom dealings of a few men. (Women's voices are strikingly absent in this all-male "anatomy.") This was clearly not the way change came about in South Africa, which spawned one of the most organized and sustained political mass movements of the last quarter-century. Indeed, Mandela often found himself leading from behind, responding to grass-roots initiatives from diverse sectors of the anti-apartheid movement -- for better or worse. This book offers little insight into the social history of the era that it covers, nor does it provide a coherent picture of the larger social and political forces that played a key role outside the negotiating rooms.

The importance of these social and political factors continues to be paramount. As I traveled the "New South Africa" over the past year, it was apparent that the Boers have been quite successful at not "giving it all away." The disturbing hallmark of South African society -- the juxtaposition of wrenching poverty alongside lavish wealth -- is more striking than ever. Hopeful villagers flock to the cities in search of jobs, further swamping already overextended resources. Residents of the ubiquitous squatter camps voiced frustration and anger at not having received what they were promised during the 1994 elections: housing and jobs foremost among them.

"The book of apartheid is still open. We must close it and bury it forever," Adelaide Buso told me, standing in her neatly kept metal shanty outside of Cape Town. Buso is a domestic worker and a squatter, and nothing has changed in her living conditions since the day she voted for Nelson Mandela. She expresses bitterness at the fact that the ANC has "forgotten the poorest of the poor." She would consider voting for someone else if her life doesn't improve soon.

"South Africa finds itself in the middle of a revolution, not at the end of one," Waldmeir rightly observes. "The inauguration of Nelson Mandela brought about political liberation. But in the economic sphere, it was largely a revolution without change."

Indeed most Afrikaners whom I met were generous in their praise of Mandela the man, if not his government. As well they should be: Mandela's single-minded embrace of racial reconciliation -- "the new civil religion," Waldmeir dubs it -- has gone a long way to ensure that white wealth remains just that. White civil servants were promised that they could keep their jobs, and big business remains overwhelmingly in white hands. Life for whites in South Africa is still very, very good, thank you.

It seems cruel that the afterglow of a stunning peaceful transition to democracy should fade so quickly, eclipsed by urgent development needs. It is also unfair that people expect that a system of racial and economic exploitation that took 350 years to craft could be undone in a few years. But revolutions must yield quickly to the mundane tasks of providing basic services to those who have been neglected, and offering economic opportunities where there have been none.

As Waldmeir aptly concludes, "When South Africa stepped through the looking glass, it did not emerge in Wonderland. It emerged in the real world, where poverty is the biggest challenge to all democratic governments, and where there are tougher problems to solve than apartheid."