Frederik W De Klerk

South African President Frederik W. de Klerk will visit Maputo on Friday for talks with President Joaquim Chissano, the Mozambican AIM news agency announced Wednesday. De Klerk met Chissano in Maputo last July before he became South Africa's state president.

Since his retirement as opposition leader in 1997, former South African President Frederik W. de Klerk's love life has attracted more attention in South Africa than his substantial political legacy. Last year, De Klerk, the country's last white head of state, divorced his wife of 39 years and married the glamorous ex-wife of a Greek shipping magnate.

South African President Pieter W. Botha returned to Parliament for the first time since his January stroke, determined to repel a leadership challenge by National Party chief Frederik W. de Klerk, whose bid was backed this week by the ruling party. Botha returned to his office, chaired a Cabinet meeting and heard a budget speech in Parliament. Botha, looking tanned and fit, though slimmer, kept his left hand, temporarily paralyzed by the stroke, at his side.

Frederik W. de Klerk, South Africa's last white president and the man who led the dismantling of apartheid, resigned as leader of the opposition National Party on Tuesday and stepped out of the political limelight. In a surprise announcement, De Klerk, 61, told a packed news conference in Cape Town that he is retiring because "it is in the best interest of the party and the country."

Thousands of pro-apartheid South African whites marched on government buildings in Pretoria demanding an election to test the popularity of President Frederik W. de Klerk's apartheid reform program. Conservative Party leader Andries Treurnicht told a crowd of 3,000 people that De Klerk has no mandate to scrap formal racial segregation. "De Klerk wants to be something for everyone and ends up giving nothing to anyone," Treurnicht said.

South African President Frederik W. de Klerk ended a milestone visit to Nigeria that was seen as a significant step toward ending Pretoria's political isolation. Nigeria is black Africa's most influential country and has been one of the firmest opponents of apartheid. De Klerk conferred with Nigerian President Ibrahim Babangida and won praise for his efforts.

South African President Frederik W. de Klerk will be on the hot seat today when he makes a statement on a political scandal threatening to undermine crucial all-party talks on the troubled country's future and possibly to unseat De Klerk himself. The government now admits that it secretly funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Zulu-based conservative black union and the allied Inkatha Freedom Party--a rival of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress.

President Frederik W. de Klerk, reacting to accusations of an army "dirty tricks" campaign, said he has replaced the command of South African military intelligence and ordered some of its files seized. De Klerk said in a statement after a 10-hour Cabinet meeting that Gen. Pierre Steyn, chief of the Defense Force Staff, had been placed in immediate command of all intelligence organizations of the armed forces.

President Frederik W. de Klerk, leading his country out of diplomatic quarantine, will visit the United States in June, sources close to the South African government said Thursday. It would be the first visit to Washington by a South African head of government since the Afrikaner-based National Party assumed power in 1948 and introduced apartheid, its legislated system of racial segregation.

For almost 15 months now, the horrors have gushed forth in hundreds of hearings before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the panel created to record the agony and ordeal of the victims of apartheid--and to provide legal immunity or pardons to those who confess to its crimes. Weeping survivors, including children, have told nightmarish tales of pain and persecution. Police have admitted to murder. Politicians have confessed to terrorist bombings.

In the four months since this nation's Truth and Reconciliation Commission began investigating the apartheid era, hundreds of victims and survivors have described in agonizing detail how successive white, racist governments used murder, torture and other atrocities to oppress the black majority and keep a tight grip on power. Many pleaded, often in tears, simply for an explanation as to who had ordered such gruesome abuses, and why. On Wednesday, the white former president, Frederik W.

After the real or imagined lives of Richard Nixon, Josef Stalin and other world leaders became grist for Hollywood's mill, it was just a matter of time before Nelson Mandela got the treatment. So now comes Mandela the movie. Two movies, in fact. The first, tentatively titled "One Man, One Vote," stars Sidney Poitier as Mandela, the political prisoner who became South Africa's first black president and a global icon of freedom. Michael Caine co-stars as Frederik W.

Less than 24 hours after the adoption of a historic constitution, apartheid's white former rulers said they will withdraw from President Nelson Mandela's coalition government and enter a new era as the country's main opposition. National Party leader and Deputy President Frederik W. de Klerk and six Cabinet members will depart June 30 after two years of power-sharing, but the party will retain its 82 seats in the 490-member Parliament.

Although they shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize for jointly steering South Africa from apartheid to democracy, Nelson Mandela and Frederik W. de Klerk have always been adversaries, not friends. But rarely before has their bickering been so public, or so serious.

From the beginning, many blacks and whites doubted Frederik W. de Klerk's promises. How, they asked, could this white man, this scion of an Afrikaner family who helped maintain apartheid, put an end to the system of racial separation? But no doubters were left in South Africa on Monday, when De Klerk, misty-eyed, his voice choking slightly, conceded to Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader whom he released from prison four years ago.

Despite widespread fears of polling violence, this nation's first all-race elections for a post-apartheid government drew to a close Friday amid an atmosphere of calm and initial assessments by political leaders that the long-awaited balloting was substantially free and fair.

It was supposed to be a speech about sacrifice and struggle, about ending a long journey and starting another. Instead, Nelson Mandela was furious. At a campaign rally in South Africa's largest black township Saturday, the gray-haired president of the African National Congress and all-but-certain next president of South Africa was greeted with the rattle and roar of guns being fired into the bright blue sky.