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Since then, April 27 is celebrated as a [[public holidays in South Africa|public holiday in South Africa]] known as [[Freedom Day (South Africa)|Freedom Day]].
Since then, April 27 is celebrated as a [[public holidays in South Africa|public holiday in South Africa]] known as [[Freedom Day (South Africa)|Freedom Day]].

== Allegations of apartheid and institutionalized racism in other nations ==

Controversially, arguments are often made that the actions of other nations are analogous to apartheid in South Africa, or constitute apartheid under the definition adopted in [[international law]]. In particular, [[racial segregation]] was the law in the American South until the mid-1960s.

Some Basques have argued that the [[Navarre]]se laws (in Spain) that do not grant official status to the [[Basque language]] are a form of apartheid.
Supporters of [[Batasuna]] also call its illegalisation "apartheid".

The State of [[Jordan]]'s Constitution denies [[Jew]]s citizenship. [[Saudi Arabia]] denies citizenship not only to Jews, but to [[Christian]]s as well, and non-Muslims are not permitted to reside permanently in the country. [http://www.saudiinstitute.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=227&Itemid=39]

The [[Israeli West Bank barrier]] is often referred to by critics as the ''Apartheid wall'', and some critics of Israel refer to it as a "racist" and/or "Apartheid" state.

[[Saudi Arabia]]'s discriminatory practices against women and non-Muslim minorities can also be described as forms of apartheid (see also [http://hrw.org/backgrounder/mena/saudi/] for Human Rights Watch report).

Global apartheid is the view that rich democratic Western nations are acting in much the same way as white South Africa, by exploiting or ignoring the plight of people in developing countries. White South Africans justified their actions by citing black South Africans as nominally removed from them in terms of geography and therefore citizens of another territory.


==See also==
==See also==

Revision as of 18:19, 10 July 2005

File:Apartheid-beach.jpg
A segregated beach, in apartheid South Africa, 1982. Blacks were only allowed on the left side of the boundary.

The history of South Africa in the apartheid era covers the period of South African history from 1948, when the formal legal framework for apartheid was created, to 1990-1994, when the apartheid legal code was dismantled and the first free elections were held. Apartheid (International Phonetic Alphabet [əˈpɑː(r)teɪt] or [-taɪt] in English and [aˈpartheid] in Afrikaans) was a policy and the system of laws implemented and continued by "White" minority governments in South Africa from 1948 to 1990. The first recorded use of the word, which means "separateness" in Afrikaans and Dutch, was in 1917 during a speech by Jan Smuts, who became Prime Minister of South Africa in 1919. Apartheid was not just the legally enforced "separateness" of the races but a pervasive system in which people were classified into racial categories, and political rights, personal freedom, and economic privileges were allowed or denied according to those categories. Although many important events occurred during this period, apartheid was the central fact around which most of the historical issues of 1948-1990 revolved.

Creation of apartheid

Background

In some ways apartheid was an extension of the segregationist laws implemented by previous white minority governments. Examples include the 1913 Land Act and the various workplace "colour bars". These laws were required to comply with the peace treaty signed between the Boer republics and the British Empire at the end of the second Anglo-Boer war. However, by the end of the Second World War, the enforcement of these laws had been lessened by the United Party government of Jan Smuts. This culminated in the 1948 report of the Fagan Commission, which was set up by the government to investigate changes to the system. The report recommended that segregation in the cities be ended, thus also ending the migrant labour system whereby the permanent home of Black South Africans was in distant rural "reserves". Prime Minister Smuts was in favour of the findings of the Commission, stating that: "The idea that natives must all be removed and confined in their kraals is in my opinion, the greatest nonsense I have ever heard."

In response to the Fagan Commission, the National Party convened its own commission known as the Sauer Commission. The findings of this commission were almost the exact opposite of those of the Fagan Commission, as it recommended that not only should segregation continue, but it should be made even stricter, and implemented in all spheres of social and economic life. It recommended the concept of "apartheid", in which the races were to be completely separated as much as possible.

File:Architects of apartheid.jpg
The original architects of apartheid gathered around a map of a planned township.

Legal system created

In the run-up to the 1948 elections, the NP campaigned on its policy of apartheid. It was voted in, in coalition with the Afrikaner Party (AP), under Malan's leadership. The National Party won the national election of 1948, narrowly defeating Smuts' United Party (though losing the popular vote). It immediately began implementing stricter racial segregation policies, creating the system of apartheid.

Apartheid, long a reality of life, became institutionalised under Malan. Within short order, legislation was passed prohibiting mixed marriages, making interracial sex illegal, classifying every individual by race, and establishing a classification board to rule in questionable cases. The notorious Group Areas Act of 1950 set aside desirable city properties for whites, while banishing non-whites into the townships. The Separate Amenities Act created, among other things, separate beaches, buses, hospitals, schools, and even park benches. The existing pass laws were further strengthened; Blacks and Coloureds were compelled to carry identity documents at all times and were prohibited from remaining in towns, or even visiting them, without specific permission. Couples were not allowed to live together, or even visit each other, in the town were only one of them worked, and children had to remain in rural areas.

Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd, whose firm belief in racial segregation earned him the unofficial title of "architect of apartheid", moved to strip coloureds and blacks of what little remaining voting rights they had. However, he needed a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Parliament in order to change the entrenched clauses of the Constitution. As the Nationalists did not have a majority in the upper house, the Senate, Verwoerd nominated a large number of his supporters as Senators, who then voted for the change.

The principal apartheid laws were as follows:

The apartheid system

Apartheid in South Africa from day to day

File:Apartheid sign.JPG
A sign from the District Six museum illustrating racial segregation policies

Apartheid was implemented by the law. The following restrictions were not only social but were strictly enforced by law:

  • Non-whites were excluded from national government and were unable to vote except in elections for segregated bodies.
  • Non-whites were not allowed to run businesses or professional practices in any areas designated as being for whites only. Whites were not allowed to run businesses or professional practices in any areas designated as being for blacks only. Every significant metropolis, and practically every shopping and business district was in a white area.
  • Blacks (except for a few who had "Section 10" rights), being in excess of 60% of the population, were excluded from the two Boer republics and two colonies, unless they had a pass. Whites required passes in black areas.
  • Blacks must use separate equipment and transportation facilities from whites.
    • A pass was only issued to someone who had approved work; spouses and children had to be left behind.
    • A pass was issued for one magisterial district confining the holder to that area only.
    • Being without a valid pass made a person subject to immediate arrest, summary trial and "deportation" to the "homeland". Police vans containing sjambok-wielding officers roamed the "white area" to round up the "illegal" blacks.
File:Apartheid Passbook.jpg
The interior of a black man's pass book.

Black areas rarely had plumbing or electricity. Hospitals were segregated, the white hospitals being the match of any in the western world. Black hospitals were seriously understaffed and underfunded and far too few in number to match the white hospitals. Ambulances were segregated, forcing the race of the person to be correctly identified when the ambulance was called. A "white" ambulance would not take a black to a hospital. Black ambulances typically contained little or no medical equipment.

In the 1970s each black child's education cost the state only a tenth of each white child's. Higher education was practically impossible for most blacks.

Trains and buses were segregated. White trains also had no third class carriages, while black trains were overcrowded and had only third class carriages. Black buses stopped at black bus stops and white buses at white ones.

Beaches were racially segregated, with the majority (including all of the best ones) reserved for whites. Public swimming pools and libraries were racially segregated but there were practically no black pools or black libraries.

Sex and marriage between the races was prohibited.

Cinemas in white areas were not allowed to admit blacks. Restaurants and hotels were not allowed to admit blacks, except as staff.

Membership in trade unions was not allowed for blacks until the 1980s, and any "political" trade union was banned. Strikes were banned and severely repressed. The minimum yearly taxable income for blacks was 360 rand (30 rand a month), while the white threshold was much higher, at 750 rand (62.5 rand per month).

Apartheid pervaded South African culture, as well as the law. A white entering a shop would be served first, ahead of blacks already in the queue, regardless of age, dress, or any other factors. Until the 1980s, blacks were always expected to step off the pavement to make way for white pedestrians. A white boy would be referred to as "Klein Baas" (little boss) by a black; a grown black man would be addressed as "Boy" by whites.

The "homeland" system

File:Ciskei-landscape.jpg
A rural area in Ciskei, one of the apartheid-era "homelands."

One explanation used by apologists to excuse white South Africans is that once apartheid had been implemented to the point where its victims were no longer citizens of South Africa, but instead citizens of the nominally independent "homelands" who worked in South Africa as holders of temporary work permits, they no longer regarded themselves as responsible for their welfare.

The South African government attempted to divide the internationally recognized state of South Africa into a number of statelets. Some eighty-seven percent of the land was reserved for whites and coloureds, and Indians. About thirteen percent of the land was divided into ten fragmented "homelands" for Blacks (60% of the population) which were given "independence". The South African government attempted to draw an equivalence between their view of black "citizens" of the "homelands" and the European Union and the United States view of illegal immigrants from Eastern Europe and Latin America, respectively.

Where South Africa differed from other countries is that while other countries were dismantling discriminatory legislation and were becoming more open on issues of race, South Africa was constructing a labyrinth of discriminatory racial legislation. That white South Africans considered the implementation of apartheid necessary may have been motivated by demographics; as a minority that was shrinking as a percentage of the total population, there was widespread unease at the thought of being swamped by the black majority, and of losing their identity through intermarriage if that were permitted.

Apartheid in international law

South African apartheid was condemned internationally as unjust and racist. In 1973 the General Assembly of the United Nations agreed the text of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. The immediate intention of the Convention was to provide a formal legal framework within which member states could apply sanctions to press the South African government to change its policies. However, the Convention was phrased in general terms, with the express intention of prohibiting any other state from adopting analogous policies. The Convention came into force in 1976.

Article II of the Convention defines apartheid as follows:

For the purpose of the present Convention, the term "the crime of apartheid", which shall include similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practised in southern Africa, shall apply to the following inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them:

(a) Denial to a member or members of a racial group or groups of the right to life and liberty of person
(i) By murder of members of a racial group or groups;
(ii) By the infliction upon the members of a racial group or groups of serious bodily or mental harm, by the infringement of their freedom or dignity, or by subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment;
(iii) By arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups;
(b) Deliberate imposition on a racial group or groups of living conditions calculated to cause its or their physical destruction in whole or in part;
(c) Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognised trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association;
(d) Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof;
(e) Exploitation of the labour of the members of a racial group or groups, in particular by submitting them to forced labour;
(f) Persecution of organisations and persons, by depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms, because they oppose apartheid.

The crime was also defined in the formation of the International Criminal Court:

"The crime of apartheid" means inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime [1]

Resistance

The ANC and the Pan African Congress

These developments pushed the hitherto relatively conservative ANC into action. In 1949, they developed an agenda that for the first time advocated open resistance in the form of strikes, acts of public disobedience, and protest marches. These continued throughout the 1950s and resulted in occasional violent clashes. In June 1955, at a congress held near Kliptown, near Johannesburg, a number of organisations, including the Indian Congress and the ANC, adopted a Freedom Charter. This articulated a vision of a non-racial democratic state and is still central to the ANC's vision of a new South Africa.

The Sharpeville Massacre

File:Sharpeville Massacre.jpg
South African police officers standing over people killed in the Sharpeville Massacre.

In 1959, a group of disenchanted ANC members, seeking to sever all ties with white government, broke away to form the more militant Pan African Congress. First on the PAC's agenda was a series of nationwide demonstrations against the hated pass laws. On 21 March 1960, 20,000 black people congregated in Sharpeville, a township near Vereeniging, to demonstrate against the requirement for blacks to carry identity cards (under the Pass Law). Police opened fire on the demonstrators, killing 69 and injuring 186. All the victims were black. Most of them had been shot in the back. Colonel J. Pienaar, the senior police officer in charge on the day, was quoted as saying

"Hordes of natives surrounded the police station. My car was struck with a stone. If they do these things they must learn their lesson the hard way."

The event became known as the Sharpeville Massacre. In its aftermath the government banned the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC).

The event led to a great change in the ANC tactics, switching from nonviolent means to violent means. Although their units detonated bombs in government buildings over the next years, the ANC and PAC were not a military threat to the state, which had a monopoly of modern weapons.

Resistance goes underground

File:Rivonia accused.gif
The accused in the Rivonia Trial.

To many domestic and international onlookers, the struggle had crossed a crucial line at Sharpeville, and there could no longer be any doubt about the nature of the white regime. In the wake of the shooting, a massive stay-away from work was organised and demonstrations continued.

Verwoered declared a state of emergency, giving security forces the right to detain people without trial. Over 18,000 demonstrators were arrested, including much of the ANC and PAC leadership, and both organisations were banned. Ten ANC leaders, including Nelson Mandela were arrested in Rivonia, and tried for alleged violent and subversive activities, and were sentenced to life in prison. The trial was condemned by the United Nations Security Council, and led to their trying to get international sanctions imposed against the South African government.

As black activists continued to be arrested, the ANC and PAC began a campaign of sabotage through the armed wings of their organisations, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation, MK) and Poqo ("Pure" or "Alone"), respectively. In July 1963, 17 members of the ANC underground movement were arrested. Together with ANC leader Nelson Mandela, who had already been arrested on other charges, they were tried for treason at the widely publicised Rivonia Trial. In June 1964, Mandela and seven others were sentenced to life imprisonment. Oliver Tambo, another member of the ANC leadership, managed to escape South Africa and lead the ANC in exile.

"I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for an to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." — Nelson Mandela, 20 April 1964, Rivonia Trial.

With the ANC banned, and Mandela and most of the rest of its leadership in jail or exile, South Africa entered some of its most troubled times. Apartheid legislation was increasingly enforced, and the walls between the races were built even higher, culminating in the creation of separate Homelands for blacks. In 1966, Verwoerd was stabbed to death, but his policies continued under B.J. Vorster and later P.W. Botha.

File:Soweto Riots.jpg
Famous photograph of the Soweto Riots.

The Black Consciousness Movement, and the Soweto riots

During the 1970s, resistance again gained force, first channelled through trade unions and strikes, and then spearheaded by the South African Students' Organisation under the charismatic leadership of Steve Biko. Biko, a medical student, was the main force behind the growth of South Africa's Black Consciousness Movement, which stressed the need for psychological liberation, black pride, and non-violent opposition to apartheid.

In 1974 the government issued the Afrikaans Medium Decree which forced all schools to use the Afrikaans language when teaching blacks mathematics, social sciences, geography and history at the secondary school level. Punt Janson, the Deputy Minister of Bantu Education was quoted as saying: "I have not consulted the African people on the language issue and I'm not going to. An African might find that 'the big boss' only spoke Afrikaans or only spoke English. It would be to his advantage to know both languages."

The policy was deeply unpopular, since Afrikaans was regarded as the language of the oppressor. On 30 April 1976, children at Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their rebellion spread to other schools in Soweto. The students organised a mass rally for 16 June 1976, which turned violent — police responded with bullets to stones thrown by children. Hector Pieterson, aged 12, was one of the first of 566 children who died at the hands of the police. The incident triggered widespread violence throughout South Africa, which claimed further lives.

In September 1977, Steve Biko was killed. Unidentified security police bashed him until he lapsed into a coma; he went without medical treatment for three days and finally died in Pretoria. At the subsequent inquest, the magistrate ruled that no one was to blame, although the South African Medical Association eventually took action against the doctors who had failed to treat Biko. South Africa was never to be the same again. A generation of young blacks committed themselves to a revolutionary struggle against apartheid under the catch-phrase of "liberation before education", and the black communities were politicised.

International relations

South Africa also officially took possession of South-West Africa after it was conquered from the Germans during World War I. Following the war, the Treaty of Versailles declared the territory to be a League of Nations Mandate under South African administration. South Africa formally excluded Walvis Bay from the mandate and annexed it as an enclave. The Mandate was supposed to become a United Nations Trust Territory when League of Nations Mandates were transferred to the United Nations following World War II, but the Union of South Africa refused to agree to allow the territory to begin the transition to independence. Instead it was treated as a de facto 'fifth province' of the Union. The South African government turned this mandate arrangement into a military occupation, and extended apartheid to South-West Africa. The South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO) was founded, along with a number of other groups, to resist the occupation. There was a protracted struggle between South Africa and guerillas fighting for independence. Namibia did not become independent until 1990.

In 1960, tensions came to a head in the Sharpeville Massacre. Soon thereafter, Verwoerd announced a referendum on whether the country should sever links with the British monarchy and become a republic instead. In order to secure a majority in favour, Verwoerd lowered the voting age for whites to 18 and included whites in South West Africa on the voter's roll. The referendum on 5 October that year asked whites "Do you support a republic for the Union?" — 52 per cent voted 'Yes'.

As a consequence of this change of status, South Africa needed to reapply for continued membership of the Commonwealth, with which it had privileged trade links, but when it became clear that African and Asian member states would oppose it due to the apartheid policies being enforced, South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth on 31 May 1961, the day that the Republic came into existence.

File:South African Miners.jpg
Miners reading the newspaper after a riot in a mine on the Witwatersrand was brutally suppressed.

In the period after the Soweto riots, South Africa became increasingly isolated internationally. Numerous conferences were held and the United Nations passed resolutions condemning South Africa, including the World Conference Against Racism in 1978 and 1983. An immense divestment movement started, pressuring investors to refuse to invest in South African companies or companies that did business with South Africa. South African sports teams were barred from participation in international events, and South African culture and tourism were boycotted.

By 1980, South Africa was the only country in Africa with a white government and a constitution discriminating against the majority of its citizens. As international opinion turned decisively against the white regime, the government and most of the white population increasingly saw the country as a bastion besieged by communism, atheism, and black anarchy. Considerable effort was put into circumventing sanctions, and the government even developed nuclear weapons, which have since been destroyed.

Negotiating majority rule with the ANC was not considered an option, at least publicly, which left the government to defend the country against external and internal threats through sheer military might. A siege mentality developed among whites, and although many realised that a civil war against the black majority could not be won, they preferred this to "giving in" to political reform. Brutal police and military actions seemed entirely justifiable. Paradoxically, the international sanctions that cut whites off from the rest of the world enabled black leaders to develop sophisticated political skills, as those in exile forged ties with regional and world leaders.

From 1978 to 1988 the South African Defence Force (SADF; now the South African National Defence Force; SANDF) made a number of major attacks inside Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Lesotho. All white males were liable for national service and thousands fled into exile to avoid conscription. Many more were scarred mentally and physically by their participation in vicious struggles in the region, or in the townships.

HIV/AIDS epidemic

Amidst this turmoil, an even darker shadow began to move across South Africa. In 1982, the first recorded death from HIV occurred in the country. Within a decade, the number of recorded AIDS cases had risen to over 1,000, and by the mid-1990s, it had reached 10,000. Yet, these officially recorded cases were only the tip of the iceberg, with some estimates placing the actual number of HIV-positive cases at close to one million in 1995. Fuelled by the entrenched migrant labour system at South Africa's mines, AIDS is estimated to have been spreading at the explosive rate of over 500 new cases per day.

In the late 1980s, the South African Chamber of Mines began an education campaign to try and stem the rise of cases. But without a change in the underlying conditions of mine workers, a major factor contributing to the epidemic, success could hardly be expected. Long periods away from home under bleak conditions and a few days leave a month were the apartheid-induced realities of the life thousands of miners and other labourers worked. Compounding the problem was the fact that as of the mid-1990s, many health officials were still focused more on the incidence of tuberculosis than HIV.

As South Africa began to take its first tenuous steps to dismantle the walls of apartheid, HIV lay waiting to explode like a ticking time bomb.

Winds of change

File:Alexandra-police.jpg
Police in Alexandra Township, 1985.

The most violent time of the 1980s were 1985-1988, when the P.W. Botha government embarked on a savage campaign to eliminate opposition. For three years police and soldiers patrolled South African towns in armed vehicles, destroying black squatter camps and detaining, abusing and killing thousands of blacks and coloureds. Rigid censorship laws tried to conceal the events by banning media and newspaper coverage.

In the early 1980s, the white government began to admit the need for change, due to a combination internal violence, international condemnation, and changing demographics — whites constituted only 16% of the total population and dropping, in comparison to 20% fifty years earlier. Recognising the inevitability of change, P.W. Botha told white South Africans to "adapt or die". In 1984 some reforms were introduced. Many of the apartheid laws were repealed, including the pass laws. A new constitution was introduced, which gave limited representation to certain non-whites, although not to the black majority. But Botha stopped short of full reform, and many blacks as well as the international community felt that the changes were only cosmetic. Protests and resistance continued full force, as South Africa became increasingly polarised and fragmented and unrest was widespread. A white backlash also arose, giving rise to a number of neo-Nazi paramilitary groups, notably the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), lead by Eugène Terre'Blanche. The opposition United Democratic Front (UDF) was also formed at this time. With a broad coalition of members, led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Reverend Allan Boesak, it called for the government to abandon its proposed reforms, and instead to abolish apartheid and eliminate the homelands.

International pressures also increased, as economic sanctions began to dig in harder, and the value of the rand collapsed. In 1985, the government declared a state of emergency, which was to stay in effect for the next five years. The media was censored, and by 1988, 30,000 people had been detained without trial and thousands tortured.

File:Political Rally in 1985 in South Africa.jpg
A funeral ceremony for those killed by the police on 1985's International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Uitenhage.

In 1986, President Botha announced to parliament that South Africa had "outgrown" apartheid. The government began a series of minor reforms in the direction of racial equality, while maintaining an iron grip on the media and all anti-apartheid demonstrations. The police entered the townships and Homelands in this time to violently suppress any protests, killing many protesters in the process which caused even larger protests. As the security situation in South Africa continued to deteriorate, many white South Africans fled the country as refugees. In August 1989, a physically ailing Botha resigned and was succeeded by FW de Klerk. At his opening address to parliament in February 1990, de Klerk announced that he would repeal discriminatory laws and lift the ban on the ANC, the PAC, and the Communist Party. Media restrictions were lifted, and de Klerk released political prisoners not guilty of common-law crimes. On 11 February 1990, 27 years after he had first been incarcerated, Nelson Mandela walked out of the grounds of Victor Verster Prison a free man.

File:Crossroads-township.jpg
Crossroads township, 1990.

Having negotiated to end its long-standing military conflict with SWAPO in Namibia, South Africa agreed to relinquish control of the disputed territory, which officially became an independent state on 21 March 1990.

From 1990 to 1991, the legal apparatus of apartheid was abolished. A referendum in March 1992, the last whites-only vote held in South Africa, overwhelmingly gave the government authority to negotiate a new constitution with the ANC and other groups.

In December 1991, the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) began negotiations on the formation of a multiracial transitional government and a new constitution extending political rights to all groups. Months of wrangling finally produced a compromise and an election date, although at considerable human cost. Political violence exploded across the country during this time, particularly in the wake of the assassination of Chris Hani, the popular leader of South Africa's Communist Party. It is now known that elements within the police and army contributed to this violence. There have also been claims that high-ranking government officials and politicians ordered, or at least condoned, massacres.

File:Nelson Mandela Being Sworn In.jpg
Newly elected President Nelson Mandela addressing the crowd from a balcony of the Town Hall in Pretoria on 10 May 1994 during his inauguration.

In 1993, a draft constitution was published, guaranteeing freedom of speech and religion, access to adequate housing and numerous other benefits, and explicitly prohibiting discrimination on almost any ground. Finally, at midnight on 2627 April 1994, the old flag was lowered, and the old (now co-official) national anthem Die Stem ("The Call") was sung, followed by the raising of the new rainbow flag and singing of the other co-official anthem, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika ("God Bless Africa"). The election went off peacefully amidst a palpable feeling of goodwill throughout the country.

The ANC won 62.7% of the vote, less than the 66.7% that would have allowed it to rewrite the constitution. As well as deciding the national government, the election decided the provincial governments, and the ANC won in all but two provinces. The NP captured most of the white and Coloured vote and became the official opposition party.

Since then, April 27 is celebrated as a public holiday in South Africa known as Freedom Day.

See also

External links