Answer:
The correct answer is B. This excerpt relates to Mandela's relationship with FW de Klerk in the 1990s as it argues for the cooperation between politicians of all races that Mandela would fulfill in his negotiations with De Klerk to end apartheid.
Explanation:
Before De Klerk came to power, negotiations were blocked for several reasons: De Klerk's predecessor, Pieter Willem Botha, did not want to pass the Rubicon accepting a fully democratic state.
All disagreements revolved, after all, around the recognition of the right to total equality between whites and blacks. Botha raised the possibility of a state of "minorities", in which whites were recognized as "group", which would have earned them specific rights vis-à-vis the rest of the population.
Mandela explained that this vision, in reality, resumed the logic of the Bantustans and that it could cause much more damage to whites than to blacks in a democratic state. It was the best way to perpetuate a sort of reverse apartheid and make whites the scapegoat of the State. On the contrary, the new power should not be of the blacks, but of the majority of the citizens. Botha did not accept.
Negotiations stalled until the arrival of his successor, jurist Frederik de Klerk. Mandela had put on the table several points that he considered imperative to end the apartheid system: a voice equal to one vote; independent and common justice for all; legitimate monopoly of violence for and only for the State (cessation of armed militias); political pluralism based on citizenship and not ethnic groups or confessions; etc. Upon becoming president in 1989, De Klerk accepted all these conditions and released Mandela, because he trusted his word.
His greatness went further: to continue negotiating with the latter, while several military groups, both black and white, had rushed into violent attacks and murders at the most critical moments of the negotiation process. Both leaders insisted on agreeing in the midst of hostility: they knew that peace was more important than their enemies.
