MARIANNE MERTEN, Cape Town | Friday
AMID condolences and warm tributes to murdered former first lady Marike de Klerk – initially thought to have committed suicide after years of depression following her divorce and singledom – her dark side has been largely forgotten.
Apparently a reluctant politician’s wife, she had tried to persuade her former husband FW de Klerk not to enter politics. Yet when he did she accepted her place by his side.
From a very conservative Afrikaaner background she struggled with the political changes initiated and co-piloted by her husband from the early nineties.
Relations with South Africa’s first black president Nelson Mandela soured over discussions where the De Klerks should take up official residence. “She was deeply distressed by all the chopping and changing which she interpreted as a calculated attempt by Mandela himself to humiliate us,” FW de Klerk wrote in his autobiography.
Few now seem to remember her crucial role in ending the engagement of her son Willem to a coloured woman, Erica Adams, in 1990. Indeed, in 1983 she reportedly described coloured South Africans as non-persons: “You know, they are a negative group. They are people that were left after the nations were sorted out. They are the rest.”
Instead African National Congress representative Smuts Ngonyama this week spoke warmly of her deep love for South Africa. “As a former first lady she was never hesitant to respect and support the leadership of a democratically elected government under a black leader.”
Clearly old animosities which years earlier led the ANC to describe De Klerk as a “bitter person unable to come to terms with the fact that she is an ex-first lady” are forgotten.
As politicians and the diplomatic corps expressed their shock and sympathies, President Thabo Mbeki described her as “a charming and dignified woman”. Another divorced ex-first lady, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, expressed her sympathy: “As a woman, I can identify with the exhaustion of her emotional resources in shaping her former husband’s career. He attained his dream and she became expendable. She died a lonely death while he jetted around the world.”
Always the supportive wife, FW de Klerk’s decision to divorce came as a shock and humiliation, particularly after she almost begged him to save their marriage.
“I told him: ‘If you change your mind, I’ll forgive everything – up to 70 times seven.’ He whispered: ‘I’m certain about my decision. Stop hoping,'” she wrote in her autobiography.
Whereas her ex-husband was finally forgiven, it seems De Klerk struggled to let go over her grudge against the woman he had an affair with and later married. Elita Georgiades, the glamorous ex-wife of a Greek shipping magnate, made Marike de Klerk look like an unsophisticated boeremeisie.
Hopes for a second love were shattered when her fianc Johan Koekoemoer was publicly described as a conman after the 1999 engagement became known.
She retreated to the beachfront flat at Dolphin Beach Club in Cape Town’s northern suburb of Table View she received under the divorce settlement. It was there she was found murdered on Tuesday afternoon after her hairdresser went to check why she failed to arrive for an appointment.
Her body was discovered still dressed in a nightdress, slumped backwards on the floor of her bedroom. An autopsy revealed she had been throttled to death with such force several bones in her throat were broken. The blade of a little serrated steak knife was discovered in her back, but the wound was not fatal.