Dear Professors and Doctors Jo Beall, Elleke Boehmer, Sara Rich Dorman, Alan Lester, Shula Marks, Deborah Potts, Lyn Schumaker and Dennis Walder,
My attention was drawn to your letter published in The Guardian on 25 April 2007 under the heading De Klerk’s delusions of grandeur in which you object to the choice of ex-president De Klerk in prefacing a speech by Nelson Mandela that was evidently reprinted in that newspaper.
De Klerk enjoys no standing in South Africa and is rather despised by his own people, the Afrikaners, for having betrayed them. He and especially his chief negotiator, Roelf Meyer, who had switched sides halfway through the negotiations in the early nineties, completely failed to secure any form of meaningful settlement in the conflict then opposing the African National Congress and its allies to the South African state. The result has been South Africa’s predictable slide into ethnic conflict and extreme violence which have been downplayed by the international media but can be ignored no longer.
