President Jacob Zuma said the late apartheid-era opposition leader Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert would be remembered as a principled patriot who served his country diligently.
“Dr Van Zyl Slabbert played a prominent role in the struggle against apartheid. His conventional Afrikaner upbringing did not prevent him from recognising the folly of the apartheid system,” said a statement from Zuma’s office, on Van Zyl Slabbert’s death on Friday morning.
He had been an outspoken critic of minority rule and would be remembered for his courage and foresight in leading a group of white South Africans to Dakar, Senegal in 1987 for talks with the then banned African National Congress.
“A mobile political library”, “a living embodiment of active citizenship” and a “person who left South Africa better than what it was” — these were some of the tributes to former politician, businessman and academic Frederik van Zyl Slabbert who died in Johannesburg on Friday.
After being treated at Johannesburg’s Milpark Hospital for an illness, the former Progressive Federal Party opposition leader during apartheid, died with his family at his side at the age of 70.
“He died peacefully, with his family”
“He died peacefully, with his family,” his daughter Tania told Sapa.
In a moving tribute to his “dear friend”, Inkatha Freedom Party chief whip Koos van der Merwe described him as a parliamentarian par excellence while the opposition DA, a descendant of the PFP said he had presented a non-racial alternative “with determination and principle”.
“He devoted his life to the development of a just South Africa, and he left our country a far better place than before,” said DA leader Helen Zille.
PFP co-founder Colin Eglin said Van Zyl Slabbert would be remembered with “great respect for his integrity, his keen intellect, his warm personality, and his deep concern for the people, the society and the country of which he was so much a part”.
A true patriot
The ANC, with which he arranged pre-democracy talks with the ruling National Party, said he had made an indelible mark in shaping opposition politics against apartheid.
“As leader of the Progressive Federal Party, not only did he make an indelible mark in shaping opposition politics against apartheid in South Africa, but he fought for constitutional democracy to be realised,” said ANC spokesperson Brian Sokutu.
The office of the ANC chief whip in Parliament said he would be remembered for the role he played in the historic meeting between Afrikaner South Africans and the ANC representatives in exile, which helped open up channels of communications between the party and the white community, which had been bombarded with the apartheid government’s anti-ANC propaganda.
The ANC had regarded him as a voice of reason in “an ocean of ruthlessness repression” and felt that he had resisted apartheid when it was not fashionable or personally rewarding to do so.
The Independent Democrats called him a true patriot and said all South Africans owed him a debt of gratitude for the principled stance he took in all the positions he occupied throughout his life, while United Democratic Movement leader Bantu Holomisa said the country had been deprived of an intellectual
and moral leader.
The African Christian Democratic Party called him a “remarkable man”.
The Institute for Democracy in South Africa, which he co-founded in 1986 with Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner Alex Boraine as the Institute for a Democratic Alernative for South Africa, said he was a visionary and represented a “living embodiment of active citizenship as a South African and an African public intellectual”.
A memorial service, at a venue to be announced, will be held next Saturday. –Sapa