Nelson Mandela Elected President of South Africa
Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president of South Africa on 10 May 1994, four years after leaving prison. He had served twenty-seven years, eighteen of them on Robben Island breaking limestone in a quarry that damaged his eyes, after being convicted at the Rivonia trial in 1964 of sabotage and conspiracy — a trial at which he made a four-hour statement from the dock saying that a democratic and free society was an ideal for which he was prepared to die. He had begun negotiating from prison in the late 1980s without a mandate from his own organisation, on the judgement that someone had to start. The election in April 1994 gave the ANC 62 per cent, and the government of national unity that followed included F. W. de Klerk as a deputy president and Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Inkatha Freedom Party, whose participation was secured a week before the vote after violence that had killed thousands. The presidency lasted one term by his own choice. Its characteristic acts were symbolic and deliberate: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission trading amnesty for testimony, lunch with the prosecutor who had asked for his death, tea with Betsie Verwoerd, and wearing the Springbok jersey at the 1995 World Cup final in a stadium of white South Africans chanting his name. The economic settlement was more cautious than his party's programme, and inequality has not moved much since. He stood down in 1999 and died in 2013. His own assessment of the presidency was modest and largely accurate. He held the country together through the transition, which was the job that could not be delegated, and left the economic and administrative work to Thabo Mbeki and his successors, who have not finished it.
- Year: 1994 CE
- Category: Political
