Читать книгу Elita and her life with F.W. de Klerk - M Meiring - Страница 4

On 29 January 1998, the news flashed around the world: the former president of South Africa was going to leave his wife – for the wife of a friend. Everywhere, the report was greeted with shock and mystification. How was it possible that two people from such different worlds could meet – or have anything in common?

The lives of FW de Klerk and Elita Georgiadis could not have been more divergent. He was the former president of South Africa, she the Greek-born wife of a multi-millionaire. His world was politics, hers the international playgrounds of high society.

The nature of their relationship and its beginnings were as widely debated as its unacceptability. There was endless speculation, in society as well as in the media. And not only in South Africa. In Europe, the United States and especially in Greece, everyone who knew Elita, or knew about her, asked the same question. How could she, so well regarded in international circles and known to be a compassionate and fair-minded person, fall in love with a man who had for so many years been a proponent of the abhorred policy of apartheid?

It was inexplicable. “Who is she?” asked South Africans, who knew nothing of this woman in the life of one of their best-known political leaders. “Who is he?” asked Greek communities and British friends, who were aware that he had been president of an African state and a player in world events but knew nothing of him as a person.

Their secret relationship became public against the backdrop of a political upheaval that had gripped attention worldwide. This was a love affair between a president, a Nobel prize-winner who had won world fame through the dramatic changes that he had brought about in his country, and a woman without any involvement whatsoever in the political issues that had occupied his life. As the wife of a committed businessman, her life was one of wealth and privilege; she travelled all over the world, was one of a close family and chatelaine of a number of luxurious houses.

This was no simple or straightforward love. They were both still married to other people. For years they both tried to avoid divorce. Repeatedly they said to each other: “It cannot happen. We must set our feelings aside.” They would experience the anger of both enemies and friends when their relationship finally made headlines. In the process they would lose some of those friends; there would be accusations of betrayal, even that they had abandoned their religious principles.

He would eventually declare that he had had to make a choice against pretence, against a semblance of conventional propriety. “I fell in love with an honourable woman of foreign nationality.”

She would say: “I met a wonderful person whom I grew to love with my whole heart.”

They met for the first time at a theatre. Later, society, gossipmongers and the media would refer to their affair as a Greek drama – a drama which would play out before the avid scrutiny of both local and international media.

He was accustomed to the public gaze, she shied away from it. Immediately after the news of their affair became public, when she flew from South Africa to Greece, a reporter from the Sunday Times booked a seat on the same flight. For the first time in her life she was interviewed by a newspaper.

Her brother in law, Totis Vernicos, teased her about it: “You, Elita, interviewed by the press!” The shock of speaking to the media was as great as the photographs and reports in the Greek newspapers. “Is that woman really me?” she asked herself, appalled.

She had by then known FW for ten years. She could never have dreamed that her life would become so involved with South Africa, a country which she hardly knew and understood even less.