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Today's Birthday March 18: Former South African president FW de Klerk (1936-).
FW de Klerk, South Africa's last white president, is one of the men credited with bringing about democracy to the apartheid-ravaged nation of South Africa.
Born in Johannesburg on March 18, 1936 to a Afrikaner political family, Frederik Willem de Klerk went on to study law at Potchefstroom University, graduating in 1958.
De Klerk worked as a lawyer before becoming an MP in 1972.
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He later held portfolios including Social Welfare and Pensions and Home Affairs and National Education. In 1986 he became leader of South Africa's House of Assembly.
De Klerk was elected leader of the National Party, responsible for apartheid, in 1989 after the then president, PW Botha, suffered a stroke.
After a short stint as acting state president, he became president of South Africa in September the same year.
In 1990, he announced an end to apartheid and the release of political prisoner Nelson Mandela after 27 years in jail.
Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize.
In South Africa's first democratic elections in April 1994, de Klerk was defeated by the African National Congress (ANC) and Mandela became the nation's first black president.
Mandela appointed him deputy president in the new Government of National Unity, a role in which de Klerk served until May 1996. He retired from politics the following year.
The former president was married to Marike de Klerk, but the couple divorced in 1998 after the discovery of a mistress, Elita Georgiadis, whom he has since married.
Three years after the divorce Marike was strangled in her Cape Town home in what was South Africa's most high profile killing since apartheid.
When Mandela died in late 2013, de Klerk said he was "grief-stricken" and added: "Keeping our constitution alive is the best way to honour Nelson Mandela's legacy."
