Professor Willie Esterhuyse, often described as coming from humble beginnings in Laingsburg, a sheep-farming area in South Africa, became a prominent Afrikaner writer, intellectual, and philosophy professor. After earning his Doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Stellenbosch, he taught philosophy at the then Rand Afrikaans University, and later returned to the University of Stellenbosch as a philosophy professor between 1974 and 1998. He also taught business ethics in the Stellenbosch University Business School until 2006, with a part time appointment at the University of Cape Town at the end of his academic career.
The South African History Online website describes Willie Esterhuyse succinctly for what he more importantly became known for: “Professor Esterhuyse is a leading figure in the Afrikaner community who through foresight and profound love of his country realized the futility of trying to sustain Apartheid [racial segregation in South Africa]. In an attempt to forestall a bloodbath and at great risk to his own standing and credibility, he doggedly persevered with the task of convincing other significant leaders within his community of the need to open negotiations with the African National Congress (ANC).”
Professor Esterhuyse was always known as a Verligte (enlightened) Afrikaner, in contrast to the political leaders of his time, such as Hendrik Verwoerd, J.B. Vorster or P.W. Botha, who were strong Apartheid proponents. His second academic book was a major critique of Apartheid, entitled Apartheid Must Die (1979), in which he argued that the system, apart from being morally wrong, would turn out to be a self-defeating means of trying to protect the Afrikaner identity over the long term.
In 1987, Willie Esterhuyse, at the behest of the South African National Intelligence Service, became involved in an informal and confidential Track Two process of direct talks with ANC representatives in London. South Africa's second President after the end of Apartheid, Thabo Mbeki, led the ANC delegation. The series of meetings about the possible future of a multi–racial South Africa lasted from 1987 until 1991, and clearly contributed to the unbanning of the ANC, the release of Nelson Mandela and the other ANC leaders, and the beginning of discussions about how to replace Apartheid with a political system based on Mandela's idea of “a rainbow nation.”
The whole process, from the initial involvement of Willie Esterhuyse and his colleagues, the ANC and the Nationalist Government to the opening of official talks in 1991, is laid out in detail in Esterhuyse’s book, Endgame (Tafelberg; Cape Town, 2012). The book is an excellent account of a successful Track Two process that made a real and undoubted contribution to the resolution of an ostensibly intractable conflict that everyone expected to end in massive violence. The book contains Professor Esterhuyse’s reflections on the “ConsGold Process” in the light of conflict resolution theory, which are well worth reflecting on in turn by other scholar-practitioners. This history is also portrayed in the 2009 movie Endgame, in which William Hurt plays Willie Esterhuyse.
This process created a close friendship between Thabo Mbeki and Willie Esterhuyse, and Esterhuyse serves on the Thabo Mbeki Foundation, for which he still does some teaching. Esterhuyse is the winner of about ten national awards in South Africa, starting with the Sunday Times Prestige Prize for Political Literature in 1981, and in 2014, he became the first recipient of the Order of the Baobab, the Business Ethics Network of Africa.
