Former South African President F.W. de Klerk lectures on campus March 10

F.W. de Klerk, South Africa's last president under the system of apartheid and recipient of a 1993 Nobel Prize, will give a public lecture in Newman Arena in the Field House at Cornell University, March 10 at 7:30 p.m. His appearance is sponsored by the student-operated Cornell University Program Board.

Tickets for de Klerk's untitled lecture go on sale March 1 at the Willard Straight Hall Ticket Office on the Cornell campus and at the Clinton House box office, 116 N. Cayuga St. Tickets are general admission and are $6 for Cornell students and $10 for the general public. A question-and-answer period and book signing will follow the lecture.

De Klerk, along with Nelson Mandela, played a major role in initiating the reforms that marked the end of apartheid and white minority rule in South Africa. Soon after becoming president in 1989, de Klerk lifted a 30-year ban on the African National Congress (ANC), released ANC leader Mandela from prison, abolished the principal laws of apartheid, instituted constitutional reform and laid the groundwork for South Africa's first-ever multiracial elections in April 1994. A year earlier, he and Mandela were co-recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Born Frederik Willem de Klerk in Johannesburg in 1936 to a prominent Afrikaner political family, de Klerk's great-grandfather had been a senator, his father, Jan de Klerk, was a leading politician who became minister of the South African government, and his brother, Willem, is a liberal newspaperman and one of the founders of the country's Democratic Party.

After graduating from law school, de Klerk worked as an attorney before winning his first parliamentary seat in 1972. In 1978, he was appointed to the South African cabinet, and from 1982 to 1989, he served as the leader of the National Party in Transvaal, the most populous of South Africa's original four provinces. He was elected national leader of the party in February 1989 and became president seven months later after P.W. Botha was forced to resign because of illness and allegations of erratic behavior.

De Klerk and the National Party lost the 1994 elections to Nelson Mandela and the ANC. However, de Klerk was sworn in as a deputy president under Mandela in a coalition government that was created to ensure a smooth transition to democracy. In May 1996, de Klerk resigned from his post as deputy president, and he retired from active politics a year later.

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