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BBC MUNDO RADIO
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: October 29, 2011
Howard E. Wolpe, a former congressman who played a crucial role in passing legislation that imposed economic sanctions on South Africa in the 1980s, helping to bring an end to apartheid while overcoming two vetoes by President Ronald Reagan, died Tuesday at his home in Saugatuck, Mich. He was 71.
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His cousin Bruce Wolpe said the cause had not been determined.
Mr. Wolpe, a Democrat, represented the Third Congressional District in southwestern Michigan for 14 years, starting in 1978. He was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Africa from 1982 to 1992. That placed him at the forefront of America’s policy response to the growing domestic movement pressuring South Africa’s government to end more than half a century of white supremacist rule.
He was a primary sponsor of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, which imposed sanctions against American companies doing business in South Africa. Among its provisions, it called for government pension plans to withdraw their investments from corporations doing billions of dollars of business there.
That was too blunt for the White House. “President Reagan saw South Africa as an important ally against expansion of Soviet influence, and he was a very pro-business president,” Steve McDonald, director of the Africa program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said on Friday. “He wanted to use what he called ‘constructive engagement’ with the government to bring an end to apartheid.”
Mr. Reagan twice vetoed versions of the law. Though the second draft was weaker, in Mr. Wolpe’s opinion, he led the effort to marshal the bipartisan support needed in both the House and Senate to overturn the second veto.
From the House floor on Aug. 1, 1985, he declared: “The white minority regime will abandon apartheid, and will agree to enter into negotiations with the credible black leadership of the majority of the population, only at that point when it concludes that it has more to lose than to gain by attempting to hold on to apartheid.”
Mr. Wolpe retained his concern for Africa well after he retired from Congress in 1992. In a statement on Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that “as special envoy to Africa’s Great Lakes Region under President Clinton, he supported peace talks that helped bring an end to longstanding civil wars in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
Howard Eliot Wolpe was born in Los Angeles on Nov. 3, 1939, the only child of Arthur and Zelda Wolpe. He graduated from Reed College in Oregon and went on the earn a doctorate in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Soon after, he began teaching at Western Michigan University. He was later a professor at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University.
Before entering Congress, Mr. Wolpe served in the Michigan House of Representatives. He ran for governor in 1994 but lost to the incumbent, John Engler.
Mr. Wolpe’s first marriage, to Celia Jeanene Taylor, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Julianne Fletcher, and a son from his first marriage, Michael.
Apartheid ended in 1994. Among the conditions for lifting sanctions in the legislation championed by Mr. Wolpe was that the South African government release Nelson Mandela from prison.
“One of the first calls that Mandela made when he was finally released in 1990,” Mr. McDonald said, “was to Howard Volpe to thank him for playing the role he did in passing the law.”
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