For his 30 million fellow Africans, it was the first, exuberant taste of full citizenship after a lifetime in which even second-class status was denied to them. They stood in long lines, stretching across the open African landscape. They marveled at themselves as they waited, patiently and peacefully, sometimes standing amicably right next to whites. They cast their ballots with reverence and glee. “I am about two inches taller than before I arrived,” Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu joked as he left a polling station. “It’s an incredible experience, like falling in love.” Julius Molawa, a 48-year-old bricklayer, packed a dozen farm women into his Ford pickup and drove them to the polls. “My heart tells me it’s the best day of my life,” he said. “I don’t have to carry a pass. I can work anywhere in the country I want. I am free.”
For whites, too, it was a new day-and a more complicated one. “It’s all happening too fast,” complained a burly Afrikaner in the farming town of Bothaville. “Most of the blacks aren’t ready to vote. The whole place is going to fall apart.” But most whites seemed to accept the new reality, grudgingly or otherwise. “I think the blacks are aware that they need us, and we need them,” said Gottfried Groebbelaar, a retired psychology lecturer. The generally hard-line Afrikaners, a blend of Dutch, French and German stock, had nowhere else to go-no European homeland to retreat to, no other white colony to take them in. Liberal whites were happy to shed their burden of guilt. “White South Africans should consider themselves one of the luckiest groups of people on the face of the earth,” said playwright Athol Fugard. “In spite of our terrible history, we weren’t torn apart by the violence disemboweling countries like Yugoslavia.”
The voting was slow and the count even slower. But all signs were that Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) would win a strong majority, and that the new Parliament would elect him president this week. The National Party, the inventor of apartheid, was expected to finish second. Its leader, President F. W. de Klerk, who negotiated the end of apartheid with Mandela, would become one of two deputy presidents. The new government is merely a five-year coalition, full of checks and balances. It will almost certainly lack the means to satisfy the soaring expectations of the blacks who swept the ANC into power. And it may never win the confidence of most foreign investors, whose capital is crucial to the economy.
But even before the votes were counted, Mandela was saying all the right things, preaching reconciliation and promising to govern by consensus. “My full-time occupation is going to be to unite the country,” he said in an interview with NEWSWEEK (page 36). And senior ANC officials told NEWSWEEK they were strongly inclined to retain several key officials from de Klerk’s white government, including Chris Stals, the head of the central bank; Derek Keys, the finance minister; Kobie Coetsee, the defense minister, and the commander of the armed forces, Gen. George Meiring.
Mandela will never win over the lunatic fringe. Before the voting began, bombs apparently set off by white extremists killed 21 people in Johannesburg and Pretoria. “We don’t want to fight and maim, but we are preparing,” warned Eugene Terre’Blanche, leader of the white-supremacist Afrikaner Resistance Movement. Yet, considering that 12,000 people were killed by political violence in the past four years, the polling stations were almost eerily peaceful. “They’re the safest places in the country,” said de Klerk. There were enormous bureaucratic foul-ups, especially in KwaZulu/Natal, the stronghold of Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi. The late entry into the race by his Inkatha Freedom Party meant that paper ballots, already crowded by 18 parties, had to be expanded for a 19th. In six rural areas, balloting was extended for a day to accommodate the crowds.
It was the unlikely pairing of Mandela and de Klerk that enabled South Africa to avoid all-out civil war over apartheid, winning the Nobel Peace Prize for the two men. The abandonment of apartheid was forced, in part, by the rest of the world’s disapproval, expressed most effectively through economic sanctions. The end of the cold war meant that white hard-liners could no longer hide behind the strategic skirts of the West, denouncing equality as a communist plot. But in the end, peaceful change occurred mainly because de Klerk was willing to negotiate himself out of power-and the cautious, moderate Mandela was determined to win his war of national liberation without soaking the country in blood.
Racial discrimination may be as old as human history, but the system of apartheid-the word is Afrikaans for “apartness”-was created only in the late 1940s, after the National Party was voted into office by disgruntled Afrikaners. The apartheid era began with the passage in 1949 of the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, which laid the foundation for an elaborate system of discriminatory legislation. Thus, while most other countries were condemning colonialism, white South Africa established a frankly racist regime. Racism alone was not what made apartheid uniquely evil; prejudice and discrimination existed elsewhere, even in some black countries. But by the 1980s, racism was deplored almost everywhere; when other nations succumbed to it, they did so in violation of their own laws and stated principles. Only in South Africa was racism the law of the land.
For years, Frederik Willem de Klerk was an earnest acolyte of apartheid. As a National Party cabinet minister in 1985, he opposed abolition of the Immorality Act, which outlawed interracial sex. “He is too strongly convinced that racial grouping is the only truth,” his older brother Willem (Wimpie) de Klerk wrote in a magazine article. But by the mid-1980s, even some of the most fervent defenders of apartheid were beginning to realize that white supremacy was untenable. South Africa had become a pariah nation. The world turned against it after a series of ugly events, including the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, in which 67 blacks were killed by police, and the 1962 arrest of Nelson Mandela.
In 1968, South Africa’s team was barred from the Olympics, beginning an athletic boycott that galled sports-loving white South Africans. In 1977, a year after a bloody uprising began in the black township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg, the United Nations imposed an arms embargo on South Africa. In 1986, the U.S. Congress voted for economic sanctions, overriding President Reagan’s veto. American companies and other foreign investors backed away from South Africa, and soon the economy slipped into a long recession.
By then, white officials were holding secret talks with their most famous political prisoner. According to South African journalist Allister Sparks, they also took Mandela for drives in Cape Town and its suburbs to prepare him for freedom. In 1989, de Klerk became president. He had come to realize, he told his brother Wimpie, that apartheid “had landed us in a dead-end street.” In an epochal speech on Feb.2, 1990, de Klerk announced his intention to legalize the ANC and release Mandela.
Mandela initially hailed de Klerk as a “man of integrity,” but the relationship turned sour under the pressure of black-on-black violence, notably the vicious fighting in Natal between supporters of Inkatha and the ANC. Mandela accused de Klerk of fanning the violence; he called the president a “political criminal.” An investigation by a white judge, Richard Goldstone, found that senior police officials had armed Inkatha and organized some of the violence. But despite the ill will between them, Mandela and de Klerk persevered, agreeing last November on an interim constitution and nonracial elections.
Now Mandela must make good on the hopes he has aroused, especially among his black followers. A few blacks talk excitedly about taking over the master’s house and swimming pool. Most just want a home of their own, and a job. That task is daunting enough. Caristus Mngwengwe, a 29-year-old shop clerk, lives in the same tiny house he was born in, sharing it now with his wife and three children, his parents and his three brothers. And he is lucky, because he has a job. “Seventy-five percent of my friends don’t work,” he says. He thinks the ANC will change things. “It won’t happen overnight,” he says, “but we have to be optimistic.”
Mandela has a loosely drawn plan, called the Reconstruction and Development Program, which is the closest thing to an economic blueprint the ANC has yet produced. During his five years in office, the program would build 1 million new homes, electrify 2.5 million dwellings, furnish at least 10 years of free and mandatory education to all children, create 2.5 million jobs through public works and redistribute 30 percent of all arable land. The ANC’s opponents deride the program as a populist wish list; one of de Klerk’s ministers estimated the cost at $165 billion over five years-roughly equal to the current national budget. ANC officials have estimated the five-year cost of the program at $11 billion.
Although South Africa’s economy is beginning to recover, the country faces mountainous problems. Unemployment stands at 46 percent nationally, and, as in other countries, the current economic revival is not producing large numbers of good jobs. Black illiteracy is about 50 percent. A generation of radicalized black schoolchildren has lost critical classroom time to violence and political upheavals. And the time they did manage to spend in shamefully underfunded black schools wasn’t necessarily productive.
In his early years as an ANC activist, Mandela pushed an idealistic socialist agenda. His organization’s 1955 Freedom Charter called for widespread nationalization. Now, in the post-communist world, Mandela scrupulously avoids the N word. Although he says he is neither a socialist nor a capitalist, at times he sounds almost Reaganite, with talk about keeping taxes low, promoting free markets and encouraging investment. But even some of his admirers wonder whether Mandela is tough enough to control his own followers, including trade unionists clamoring for higher wages and gun-toting “comrades” from the black townships.
“We may still find ourselves with a government trying to pre-empt black demands for bread and circuses by allowing the whites to be delivered as scapegoats,” warned author and antiapartheid activist Breyten Breytenbach. Still, if any country on the despoiled African continent can overcome postcolonial problems, it ought to be the South Africa of Mandela and de Klerk. It is a rich country, the world’s leading producer of gold and other valuable metals. It has a modern infrastructure and a professional and managerial cadre of First World standards. And for now, at least, it has Nelson Mandela, whose patience, forbearance and largeness of spirit set an example for all South Africans, in captivity and in triumph.
After decades of official discrimination, South Africa’s blacks are far behind whites economically They have high expectations that will be hard to fulfill.
Monthly Income / 1993 Population / Infant Mortality
White / 1,300 / 13.6% / 8.6
Asian / 470 / 2.6 / 10.6
Colored / 270 / 8.6 / 39.4
Black / 160 / 75.2 / 52.8
Education Funding / Illiteracy/ Number of Homes Needed
White / 4,372 / 1% / 181,000
Asian / 3,702 / 16% / 87,000
Colored / 2,902 / 34% / 176,000
Black / 1,659 / 46% / 3 mil.
