By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Sunday, April 3, 1994
The scenes are stunning: blacks lustily cheering apartheid scion Frederik Willem de Klerk as he campaigns for re-election to the presidency of South Africa.
The happy candidate obliges by donning Zulu tribal hats, carrying spears and cowhide shields.
“I’m white,” he told one black audience, “but my heart pumps the same red blood as the red blood in the heart of every South African.”
De Klerk, 58, was born into a staunchly political Afrikaner family in the Transvaal. As his great-grandfather and his father, he represented the province in parliament. So, the deeply religious father of three caught most people by surprise when he began dismantling apartheid.