Thanks for your comment. That thought actually occurred to me recently. Had Governor Wallace taken a similar stance to de Klerk, things might have played out similarly in Alabama to how they did in South Africa. Ironically, Wallace appeared to be relatively non-racist — and was even endorsed by the NAACP — until losing the election to a KKK-endorsed candidate in 1958. After that, he decided that he wouldn’t be, in his words, “out-ni****ered again” and became a hardline segregationist.

de Klerk’s views on the separation of races appear to have undergone a change at least a decade before he became president. Professor Stuart J. Kaufman states that conservative officials like de Klerk learned to moderate their racial views during their encounters with non-white members of the tricameral parliament established to give the “Colored” (not black) and Indian populations a limited voice in the legislature. In his posthumous video apology, he describes himself as having undergone a “conversion” beginning in the early 80’s. Before that video, he did apologize for and acknowledge the harm of Apartheid a number of times in public, notably at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission chaired by Mandela’s colleague Archbishop Tutu.

It was after he replaced P. W. Botha as South Africa’s president that the end of Apartheid was announced, and he also set out to free Nelson Mandela and lift the ban on his party, the African National Congress. In the 1992 referendum which asked white South Africans if they supported the reforms ending Apartheid, de Klerk successfully campaigned for a “Yes” vote against Botha, whom he had served under in the government.

Some will point to actions by government forces under his watch against the black population which he denied sanctioning. One has to keep in mind that both de Klerk and Mandela were playing a balancing act and trying to keep peace among their respective sides. There was certainly a large number of white South Africans even in the government at the time who did not want white rule to end, so it’s very possible that some elements acted on their own initiative. Some will also mention the times that he said that Apartheid was not a crime against humanity. That statement is, of course, deeply problematic. In context, however, de Klerk wasn’t trying to say that Apartheid wasn’t a tragedy, but that it wasn’t on the same scale as, say, Hitler’s Holocaust or the millions killed by Stalin and Mao.

Nelson Mandela did naturally have his own flaws, holding rather barbaric ideas about violence before he was released and supporting violent world leaders — which the US is plenty guilty of itself. Regardless he too deserves praise for his part in peacefully transitioning South Africa to a democratic, non-Apartheid state. His willingness to make peace with the white South Africans who imprisoned him for 27 years is certainly noteworthy, and he didn’t even want to leave prison as early as de Klerk meant him to.

So I would argue that yes, unlike Wallace, de Klerk did do more good than harm. Wallace himself did renounce his racism, but when they were in power, de Klerk was the one who took action alongside Mandela against oppression, whereas Wallace enforced it. Interestingly, de Klerk has been compared to Mikhail Gorbachev who himself helped to end an oppressive system as the last head of the Soviet Union, even though he didn’t set out to wipe away communism.