Willemse met her future husband, F. W. de Klerk, at Potchefstroom University (where she was studying for a degree in commerce).

[citation needed] In 1983, de Klerk made comments about the Coloured community: "You know, they are a negative group ... a non-person.

"[1] In 1991, she became embroiled in a personal drama when the South African press revealed that her son, Willem was in an 18-month-long relationship with a coloured woman, Erica Adams.

[5] FW de Klerk later said: "She was deeply distressed by all the chopping and changing which she interpreted as a calculated attempt by Mandela himself to humiliate us...

Melanie Verwoerd would later recount that de Klerk was the only person sitting in the packed public gallery as Mandela entered the room and those around her rose and clapped.

In 1994, de Klerk and her entourage travelled to the United States for a tour of new educational projects in Los Angeles designed to interest African-Americans in science.

The book later earned some notoriety after it emerged that FW had censored a chapter that deals with her heartbreak after discovering her husband's affair with Elita Georgiades.

[12][13] Later de Klerk published A Place Where the Sun Shines Again where she offered guidance to women facing divorce later in life.

On 3 December 2001, de Klerk was murdered at her Dolphin Beach flat in Blouberg, Cape Town.

Mboniswa violently gripped de Klerk's neck, breaking several bones in her throat and causing a blood vessel to burst in her eye.

[15] Her ex-husband had, at the time of the discovery of her body, been in Stockholm for a celebration on the centennial of the Nobel Peace Prize, and quickly returned to South Africa to issue a statement saying "I have learned with great shock and sorrow of the circumstances of the tragic death of my former wife Marike."

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela made a speech at the former First Lady's funeral in Pretoria, saying; "As a woman, I identify with the exhaustion of her emotional resources in helping to shape her husband's career.