LETTER: De Klerk’s speech of February 2 1990 deserves recognition
On February 2 1990, then president FW de Klerk delivered a singularly important political speech in the House of Assembly in Parliament in Cape Town. It is submitted that it ranks as one of the great political speeches of the 20th Century, comparable to the Winds of Change address given by the British prime minister in January 1960, also in Parliament in Cape Town. George Bizos, in his interesting and fascinating book, 65 Years of Friendship, states in the epilogue that "[t]here are a small group of ill-informed South Africans who accuse Mandela of having ‘sold out’ the rights of black people in the country because he was ‘trounced’ by the De Klerk government during the Codesa negotiations". Nothing could be further from the truth, and as Bizos explains, they "are obviously ignorant of our history and Nelson Mandela’s attitude to all our people". Both De Klerk, Mandela and their teams and other political parties and their leaders were seasoned and hard-nosed politicians who, for app...
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