The 30th anniversary of South Africa's 1994 election offers a lesson in mythmaking

The popular narration of South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy contains narratives that are foundational to the country's post-1994 history

An ANC rally in Soweto. Credit: Graeme Williams

30 Years of Democracy in South Africa

South Africans celebrate “Freedom Day” every April 27 to commemorate their country’s first democratic election in 1994 which marked the culmination of the four-year process to formally end apartheid. On that day 30 years ago, millions of South Africans cast a ballot for the first time in their lives, exercising a fundamental right that had been denied to them by repressive, white-supremacist regimes.

The African National Congress, a political party with origins in South Africa’s anti-apartheid liberation struggle, was proclaimed the winner of the national election with approximately 63 percent of the vote. Its leader, Nelson Mandela, went on to become South Africa’s first Black president a little more than four years after he was released from 27 years of incarceration.

I vividly recall observing the 1994 South African election as a young child with a keen interest in international affairs, global politics and Pan-Africanism. Growing up I learned so much about South Africa’s long, painful walk to freedom from documentaries, books and stories told to me by my parents and other older relatives who recalled their own memory of key events during South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle like the Sharpeville Massacre, the Rivonia Trial, the assassination of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the 1976 Soweto Uprising and the townships revolts of the 1980s. Mandela’s release from incarceration in 1990 is seared in my memory as though it happened yesterday, as is his joint 1993 Nobel Peace Prize win with F.W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last apartheid president.

The 1994 election appeared to be in keeping with the winds of change blowing across a continent where civilians elected in multiparty contests were replacing dictators in military regimes and single-party systems. Observing all the way from West Africa where many autocracies remained intact including in Nigeria, where the most free and fair presidential election in the country’s history was annulled by the military in 1993, many including me lived vicariously through South Africans and the hope and optimism they were filled with in April 1994. Someday, we hoped, we too would get to taste the fruit of freedom.

Last Saturday was the 30^th anniversary of that landmark election, the first in South Africa’s history in which eligible citizens of all races were allowed to participate. Freedom Day was an opportunity for South Africans to reflect on their country’s history including the struggle against apartheid, the negotiations that dissolved it, the 1994 election and life since that milestone vote.

This year’s commemoration takes place against the backdrop of the upcoming general election, one that could also turn out to be historically significant. Many are predicting that the ANC, which has held power since the dawn of democracy 30 years ago, will lose its parliamentary majority for the first time since 1994 and will need to form a coalition with smaller parties if it is to remain in the government.

Reconstructing the story of South Africa’s transition from apartheid

In the three decades since South Africa’s 1994 election, an expedient narrative about the country’s transition to non-racial democracy emerged from the storytelling of apartheid’s demise. Its rough outline depicts de Klerk as “the man who ended apartheid,” a principled emancipator — a South African combination of William Wilberforce, Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson, if you will — who courageously consigned white-minority rule to the ash heap of history.

In this telling, de Klerk was a moderate reformer who magnanimously freed Mandela and extended an olive branch to the chastened revolutionary who accepted it and partnered with South Africa’s great white hope on a mission to save their country. As the two men set aside their differences to transform their country, they negotiated a pathway to democracy that brought racial unity to South Africa and culminated in Mandela’s rise to the presidency. When they passed on — Mandela in 2013, de Klerk in 2021 — these popular chronicles of their respective roles in the demise of apartheid took center stage in the ovations that accompanied their valediction.

By emphasizing themes of forgiveness and reconciliation instead of retribution and vengeance in office, the story goes, President Mandela created conditions for the emergence of a Rainbow Nation in which South Africans of all races could live together happily ever after. That vision, according to this narrative, has since been besmirched by the post-Mandela ANC which has dramatically embraced racial divisiveness, run the country into the ground and destroyed what was once a livable, prosperous and developed South Africa.

The problem with such neat narratives lies in what they include, omit, downplay and overstate. In other words, it is precisely because the issues involved are not black and white but contain several shades of grey that a kumbaya-style recollection of South Africa’s transition to democracy emerged and gained popularity.

It goes without saying that this sanitized version of events is mostly the domain of international (read: Western) discourse, as South African society has usually acknowledged the bloody interregnum between Mandela’s release from incarceration and his inauguration as the first president of a post-apartheid South Africa. But the enduring mythology of South Africa’s democracy has had consequence for its nation-building efforts.

The story of South Africa’s democratic transition overstates the role played by individuals like Mandela and especially de Klerk. It is technically true that the formal end of apartheid took place under de Klerk’s watch but his decision was triggered by domestic, regional and global conditions that developed during the regime of his predecessor, P.W. Botha. Some have even argued that the beginning of the end of apartheid gestated during the era of B.J. Vorster, South Africa’s prime minister from 1966 to 1978.

By the late 1980s, larger segments of Afrikaner intelligentsia as well as business, media and religious elites viewed apartheid as impractical and unsustainable — if not necessarily morally wrong — and came around to opinions that were previously held by a minority of whites in South Africa. The winding down of the Cold War diminished the importance of the West’s strategic partnership with South Africa’s apartheid regime.

International sanctions, costly military incursions into neighboring countries, popular uprisings against apartheid and capital flight from South Africa all contributed to a domestic crisis. International pressure from Pretoria’s Western backers, primarily the U.K. and U.S., to negotiate a settlement that would end apartheid was converging with the mood among a significant portion of the domestic Afrikaner community. Put simply, de Klerk was not so much a convert to the cause of egalitarianism as he was a pragmatist who read the writing on the wall.

De Klerk, who became South Africa’s president after Botha’s resignation in August 1989 and won the presidency outright in a whites-only election held the following month, had campaigned on a five-year plan to “reform” apartheid. This proposal retained the fundamental features of the system including separate schools, residential segregation and the clustering of native Africans into so-called bantustans, the “homelands” where South Africa's Black majority was forcefully moved to during apartheid.

The ANC viewed de Klerk’s plan as a stalling tactic intended to preserve white-minority rule and fend off international pressure to end apartheid, and its leaders dismissed it as disingenuous. Instead, the ANC reiterated its demand for an end to apartheid and restated its preconditions for entering into talks with the government, like the lifting of South Africa’s years-long state of emergency, an unconditional release of political prisoners and detainees, reversing the ban on political organizations and permitting the return of exiles.

The persistence of domestic and international pressure forced de Klerk’s hand, and in a dramatic speech delivered on Feb. 2, 1990, he announced a series of measures that marked the first major step toward the dismantling of apartheid. The ban on the ANC and other political organizations was repealed, and Mandela was released from prison after 27 years behind bars.

Shortly after, a four-year process of bilateral negotiations that became multilateral in scope began but it ran into several roadblocks that threatened to collapse the transition to democracy. De Klerk’s role in events during that period was secondary at best as forces well beyond his control quickly overshadowed him.

The long, bloody journey to Freedom Day

South Africa’s “transitional” period was plagued by disappearances, murders, assassinations and large-scale violence. Beginning in the mid-1980s, a civil war broke out among a range of Black anti-apartheid groups, primarily between the United Democratic Front, a popular coalition loosely affiliated with the ANC, and supporters of Inkatha, a Zulu cultural organization which later morphed into a political party. That conflict was largely confined to the KwaZulu bantustan and Natal province, but by the early 1990s had spread more broadly especially to the Transvaal province that included Pretoria and Johannesburg.

According to South Africa’s Apartheid Museum, an estimated 14,000 people died from political violence between 1990 and 1994, several times larger than the official number which died from political violence during the years of formalized apartheid. Violent battles among the range of groups that included the ANC and Inkatha are said to have claimed the lives of as many as 20,000 people in the decade between 1984 and 1994.

The ANC and its supporters asserted that a shadowy “third force,” thought to consist of South Africa's security forces acting in concert with right-wing elements like paramilitary groups as well as Inkatha, was fomenting and orchestrating violence aimed at derailing the negotiations to dissolve apartheid. Their allegations were boosted by the “Inkathagate” scandal, which publicly revealed details of the apartheid regime’s clandestine funding of Inkatha.

In the run-up to the 1994 election, a report on the role of the apartheid state in fomenting violence was released. The Commission of Inquiry Regarding the Prevention of Public Violence and Intimidation, which was established in 1991 and led by Justice Richard Goldstone, revealed that the South African Police had indeed armed Inkatha, and pointed to attempts by senior police officers to subvert his enquiry.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission would uncover more evidence of the involvement of the apartheid-era security services in the violent conflicts of the 1980s and 1990s, and it is now known that clandestine squads like South African Military Intelligence, the Civil Cooperation Bureau, 5th Reconnaissance Regiment of the Special Forces and the infamous Vlakplaas counterinsurgency unit of the South African Police were deeply involved in the violence of that period.

Several major violent incidents during the “transitional” period stood out, like the so-called Seven Day War in the Pietermaritzburg area in March 1990, the 1991 Sebokeng massacre, the Boipatong and Bisho massacres of 1992, the April 1993 assassination of Chris Hani and the Shell House massacre of 1994.

A coalition of black and white reactionaries — led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Inkatha’s leader and retired Gen. Constand Viljoen, a former military chief and leader of the Afrikaner People's Front — attempted to disrupt the negotiations and plans for democratic elections unless their demands for federalism and self-determination were met, and threatened to use force to get their way.

The March 1994 Bophutatswana crisis, which took place merely weeks before the 1994 election and is remembered mainly for the televised shooting of three members of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, exemplified the determination of far-right elements to preserve apartheid with bloodshed and underscored the fear that South Africa would descend into a nationwide civil war.

A broad range of domestic and international actors, from South African unions and religious leaders to the U.K. and U.S. governments as well as the United Nations played a key role in ensuring that the election went ahead as planned. The transition from apartheid to non-racial democracy, punctuated by the April 1994 election, was far from “peaceful” or guaranteed. The “Mandela miracle” was, in fact, a bloody one that claimed countless lives along the way.

South Africa’s “Born Free" generation has questions about the transition from apartheid

On the 30^th anniversary of South Africa’s liberation, to say that many citzens are deeply disillusioned with their situation would be nothing short of an understatement. A large chunk of the so called born free generation, that is those born after the formal demise of apartheid, is openly challenging the received wisdom about the transition to democratic rule.

In particular, the political and economic settlements reached during the negotiations to end apartheid have come under harsh scrutiny due to persistent racialized inequities in employment, wealth, housing, education, health and infrastructure that are a legacy of apartheid and which continue to hinder the prosperity of Black South Africas.

In recent weeks and months, several international media outlets have run articles highlighting many of these debates. Last December, the BBC reported on the young South Africans “re-evaluating” Mandela’s legacy. An op-ed in the Washington Post last week examined some possible reasons why some South Africans are “rethinking” Madiba’s legacy. The New York Times asked if South Africa truly defeated apartheid and FT wrote about the young people who are “rethinking” Mandela’s legacy.

Although Mandela did not play a major role in the negotiations and mostly delegated that responsibility to his deputies in the ANC, as the party's leader and South Africa’s first democratically elected president, he is closely associated with the period for better or worse.

To be clear, these debates are not new or even restricted to young, disaffected South Africans. Indeed, the political and economic settlements that formally dismantled apartheid were debated and critiqued at the time, within the ANC as well as among other anti-apartheid groups like the Pan Africanist Congress and the Azanian People’s Organization.

Many veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle argued that the negotiations contained too many concessions to white interests that were entrenched over centuries of racist oppression that included settler colonialism, British imperial rule and apartheid.

Suspicions that the ANC struck a bargain with Afrikaner political and security elites to shield them from accountability for crimes committed during apartheid have lingered for decades, and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s trading of justice for forgiveness bolstered many of those misgivings.

Many others, including some ANC negotiators who participated in the transitional talks, reject those criticisms and argue that South Africa's post-apartheid constitution made provisions to reflect the goals of the 1955 Freedom Charter, a statement of core principle drafted by the ANC and its allies in the Congress Alliance.

In truth, the negotiations were heavily lopsided in favor of the status quo and did not contain enough of the radical transformation South Africa needed. That was largely because of structural forces like the global capitalist system that balked at the suggestion of economic redistribution to uplift the country’s non-white majority.

Faced with a balance of payment crisis stemming from years of economic malaise, the de Klerk administration sought and received a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in December 1993 that imposed drastic spending cuts, lowered import tariffs, demanded large cuts in public sector wages and the privatization of state-owned entities. Michel Camdessus, the Fund’s managing director at the time, reportedly “suggested” the reappointment of Derek Keys and Chris Stals — South Africa’s then-finance minister and governor of the Reserve Bank respectively — in a Mandela administration.

The IMF, World Bank and South Africa’s major oligarchs all warned against the redistribution of land and nationalization of mines, banks and other strategic industries that many on the ANC’s left argued was consistent with the demands of the Freedom Charter. The Reconstruction and Development Programme, the Mandela administration’s flagship socioeconomic initiative that was developed by the ANC and its allies like the Congress of South African Trade Unions, was watered down, stripped of its more far-reaching elements and ultimately abandoned in favor of a more avowedly neoliberal macroeconomic strategy.

Freedom has not necessarily brought liberation for many South Africans

Many South Africans objected to the idea of repaying loans taken out by tyrannical, racist regimes that provided few if any tangible social services to Black people and at one point stripped them of their South African citizenship. But given the domestic and international conditions at the time, the ANC had little choice but to give in to demands to temper its transformative ambition.

In real terms, from 1994 until about 2002 South Africa pursued a program of austerity and rebuilding a bankrupt, hollowed out state that was stripped down to the bone by de Klerk’s apartheid regime before it handed over power. The country didn’t shift to an expansionary fiscal policy until the early 2000s, when a global commodities boom led to strong growth rates. This was roughly the same time when Black Economic Empowerment, or BEE, was codified into law as a means of redressing historical economic inequities.

From the era of Thabo Mbeki, who succeeded Mandela as president, a Black middle class emerged, access to education improved and black entrepreneurship spiked. Equally, unemployment has worsened, wealth and income gaps have widened as economic power remains concentrated in white hands, the capacity of the South African state has further weakened and many Black citizens remained trapped in multidimensional poverty. The gains of BEE and other government initiatives accrued to a select few with close links to the ruling ANC.

Cronyism, graft and waste became more widespread under Mbeki, and even more pronounced under Jacob Zuma, Mbeki’s successor who became widely associated with the concept of “state capture.” Zuma’s presidency saw a reversal of many gains made since 1994, and the widespread corruption he and his allies were regularly accused of played a role in his eventual fall from power. Cyril Ramaphosa, Zuma’s successor and South Africa’s incumbent president, finds himself having to do much of the same rebuilding today that Mandela had to embark on 30 years ago, amid a different set of circumstances admittedly.

The purpose of this post is less to rationalize or defend the ANC’s shortcomings in office and more to contextualize the debate that political freedom for Black South Africans did not come with economic prosperity. The argument gives acknowledgment to the weak hand the party was dealt on the eve of South Africa’s democratic transition that must be reckoned with.

South Africa’s next 30 years are unlikely to be like the previous three decades, but that is likely all anyone can say with certainty. The promise of a fair, just and equitable country is still a long way but useful lessons have emerged from life since 1994 that could make up the foundation of the next three decades. One such example just might be a consideration of the power of myths and storytelling in nation building, and the effects they have on fostering societal cohesion.