Frederik Willem de Klerk, the former South African president who negotiated the end of apartheid with Nelson Mandela after spending years upholding the system of white minority rule, has died. He was 85.

De Klerk died at his home in Cape Town on Thursday after having been diagnosed with lung cancer in March 2021.

After taking power in 1989, De Klerk removed a ban on the pro-democracy African National Congress, released Mandela from jail and managed the nation’s first all-race elections in 1994. He and Mandela were awarded the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize for securing a smooth transition to democracy. De Klerk “had the courage to admit that a terrible wrong had been done to our country and people through the imposition of the system of apartheid,” Mandela said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “He had the foresight to understand and accept that all the people of South Africa must, through negotiations and as equal participants in the process, together determine what they want to make of their future.”

In his 1999 autobiography “The Last Trek, a New Beginning,” De Klerk wrote: “Like any other people in the world at any time in history, we were the products of our time and circumstances.”