The End of Apartheid
South Africa held its first election with a universal franchise on 27 April 1994, and people queued for a day and a night to vote in it. Apartheid had been law since 1948: the population classified by race, marriage and sex between groups criminalised, residence and jobs allocated by classification, some 3.5 million people forcibly removed to make areas white, and the African majority assigned citizenship of nominally independent homelands covering thirteen per cent of the country. The system was ended by a combination of things rather than any one: internal ungovernability from the mid-1980s, sanctions and disinvestment, the cost of the war in Angola and Namibia, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, which removed the argument that the ANC was a communist front to be resisted at any price. F. W. de Klerk unbanned the ANC and the Communist Party in February 1990 and released Nelson Mandela nine days later, after twenty-seven years. The four years of negotiation that followed were nearly wrecked several times — by the Boipatong and Bisho massacres, by the assassination of Chris Hani in 1993, and by a level of township and hostel violence in which some 14,000 people died with clear evidence of a third force in the security establishment. Mandela became president on 10 May 1994 in a government of national unity that included de Klerk. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission traded amnesty for full disclosure and heard 21,000 statements. Land and income remain distributed roughly as apartheid left them.
- Year: 1994 CE
- Category: Reform
