F.W. de Klerk, Last President of Apartheid South Africa, Dies at 85

F.W. de Klerk, who as president of South Africa dismantled the apartheid system that he and his ancestors had helped put in place, died at his home near Cape Town on Thursday. He was 85.

The former president’s death was confirmed by the F.W. de Klerk Foundation, which said in a statement that he had been receiving treatment for cancer.

A member of a prominent Afrikaner family, Mr. de Klerk had vehemently defended the separation of the races during his long climb up the political ladder. But once he took over as president in 1989, he stunned his deeply divided nation, and the wider world, by reconsidering South Africa’s racist ways, a step that led to him and Nelson Mandela, whom he released from prison, being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

South Africa had become such a pariah in the eyes of the world by the 1980s, its internal strife and tainted reputation so disruptive to the economy, that Mr. de Klerk argued that the country’s future depended on a new course.

“He didn’t say apartheid was bad or immoral but that he had decided it wasn’t going to work,” said Herman J. Cohen, who held talks with Mr. de Klerk during that tumultuous time as the State Department’s top Africa adviser in the administration of President George H.W. Bush.

With its web of insidious laws doling out rights, privileges and even meal sizes in prisons based on skin color, apartheid was not easy to undo, requiring years of legislative action and significant national angst. But when Mr. de Klerk in 1990 announced the lifting of the 30-year ban on the African National Congress and the release from prison of its most prominent leader, Mr. Mandela, he set in motion a transformation so powerful that it quickly pushed him to the margins.

Mr. Mandela would trample Mr. de Klerk in presidential elections just four years after winning his freedom. Even as Mr. Mandela invited Mr. de Klerk into his transitional government as second deputy president, Mr. de Klerk struggled with his diminished role and eventually quit.

Mr. de Klerk’s efforts to remake the National Party that his grandfather helped create from a white-dominated organization into a multiracial one with the clout of the A.N.C. fizzled. Frustrated by internal party tensions and criticism from the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated the country’s past, Mr. de Klerk announced his retirement from politics in 1997.

Mr. de Klerk and Mr. Mandela shared the peace prize in 1993 for their joint efforts at remaking the country, although their relationship was less harmonious than it seemed. Mr. de Klerk complained in his autobiography, “The Last Trek — A New Beginning,” that he felt underappreciated and at times openly attacked by Mr. Mandela during celebrations surrounding the award.

“I was seething,” he wrote of a frank speech Mr. Mandela made in Sweden after the prize ceremony. “It was only with the greatest self-control that I once again managed to bite my tongue and not shatter once and for all the illusion that there was a cordial relationship between me and Mandela.”

He added: “It was ironic that we had both traveled so far to be granted the world’s highest…