In his message de Klerk also cautioned that the country was facing many serious challenges, saying: “I’m deeply concerned about the undermining of many aspects of the constitution, which we perceive almost day to day.”

“I, without qualification, apologise for the pain and the hurt and the indignity and the damage that apartheid has done to Black, Brown and Indians in South Africa,” de Klerk said.

It was not immediately clear when the recording was made.

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De Klerk’s death drew mixed reactions, with some hailing his role in ending apartheid while others criticised a failure to atone for the horrors endured by majority blacks for decades.

“The former president occupied an historic but difficult space in South Africa,” said Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s office.

Tutu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his resistance to apartheid, led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) charged with uncovering the horrors of the white-minority regime.

After de Klerk’s appearance at the TRC, Tutu “addressed the media to express disappointment that the former president had not made a more wholesome apology on behalf of the National Party to the nation for the evils of apartheid,” the archbishop’s office said.

But it added that de Klerk “played an important role in South Africa’s history. At a time when not all of his colleagues saw the future trajectory of the country unfolding in the same way, he recognised the moment for change and demonstrated the will to act on it”.

Julius Malema, leader of South Africa’s leftist Economic Freedom Fighters, tweeted: “Thank you God”, followed by five dancing emojis.

But former opposition Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon tweeted: “Like Mikhail Gorbachev, he reformed the system he inherited in 1990. And if he had not relinquished power in 1994, likely SA would be Syria or Venezuela today.”

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said de Klerk would be remembered for his “steely courage and realism in doing what was manifestly right and leaving South Africa a better country”.

Many right-wing white Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch and French settlers who had long ruled the country under de Klerk’s National Party, viewed de Klerk as a traitor to their causes of nationalism and white supremacy.

Frederik Willem de Klerk ‘s metamorphosis from servant of apartheid into its wrecking ball mirrored that of the former Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev. Both men rose to the pinnacle of power before moving to reform or dismantle the systems that had nourished them for decades.

The collapse of the Soviet Union helped pave the way for de Klerk to launch his own bold initiatives.

“The first few months of my presidency coincided with the disintegration of communism in Eastern Europe,” de Klerk wrote in his autobiography. “Within the scope of a few months, one of our main strategic concerns for decades was gone.”

Less than three months after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, de Klerk opened the way for an end to more than four decades of apartheid with a bombshell speech to parliament on February 2, 1990, that “unbanned” the African National Congress (ANC) and announced the release of its leader after 27 years behind bars.

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Fearing a backlash from right-wing whites, de Klerk had kept the momentous decision secret from all but a handful of cabinet ministers. Even his wife was in the dark until the couple were heading to parliament.

At de Klerk’s 70th birthday celebrations in 2006, Mandela heaped praise on his predecessor. “You have shown courage that few have done in similar circumstances,” he said.

Radical turn

A lawyer from a prominent Afrikaner political dynasty, de Klerk was a member of a secret Afrikaner society dedicated to white supremacy.

He launched his parliamentary career in 1972 as member for a right-wing mining town and was for several years minister in charge of a schooling system that spent 10 times more on white children than on black children.

He challenged then-finance minister Barend du Plessis in the 1989 party election and sat in the white-minority government of ailing apartheid hardliner PW Botha, soon ousting him from the presidency in a cabinet coup.

De Klerk’s rise was viewed as a consolidation of white rule and threatened to escalate the vicious racial conflict that had already killed more than 20,000 black citizens.

“Nothing in his past seemed to hint at a spirit of reform,” Mandela wrote in his autobiography.

The negotiations on a peaceful transition to non-racial democracy that followed Mandela’s release were held against the backdrop of mounting political violence and often looked as though they would be derailed into a bloody race war. But peace prevailed.

Nobel Peace Prize

In 1993 de Klerk shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela, who won the presidency the following year in the first multiracial elections in Africa’s biggest economy.

After the vote, the National Party shared power in a “Government of National Unity” in which de Klerk served as a deputy president.

But the relationship between de Klerk and Mandela was often strained and de Klerk pulled out of the government in 1996, saying the ANC no longer prized his advice. He retired from active politics in 1997.

In 2013 he seemed moved by Mandela’s death. As he walked away from his body, lying in state at Pretoria’s Union Buildings where two decades earlier he handed over power, de Klerk wiped a tear from his eye.