ON THIS DAY ·
Inauguration of Nelson Mandela
10 May 1994 — At the Union Buildings, Nelson Mandela is sworn in as South Africa’s first democratically elected president. Jets of the old regime dip their wings overhead. The map of a free Africa is complete.
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The moment in context
Neither the apartheid government nor the ANC could obtain the future it wanted by force alone. The ANC could mobilize mass resistance and make the country ungovernable, but it could not seize the state. The government controlled the security forces and bureaucracy, yet could neither govern the excluded majority indefinitely nor restore the economy. Each could obstruct the other. That made negotiation worth attempting, although it gave neither side reason to trust the other with unchecked power.
From End of apartheid, chapter 11 of The Decolonization of Africa, 1945–1994 (APR 1994).
The place: Inauguration of Nelson Mandela — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Two sides that could obstruct but not win. The ANC could make apartheid ungovernable through mass resistance, but could not simply take a state guarded by powerful security forces. The…
- The turn — The election, 27 April 1994. On 27 April 1994 about twenty million people voted, most for the first time. Many queued for hours to exercise a right denied to the Black majority…
- What it changed — The map completes. The vote brings the atlas’s tide of independent, majority-ruled states to 100 percent. From Libya in 1951, nearly fifty years of political change…
Then ask the room: The South African transition nearly collapsed in violence more than once. What helped it hold, and what can its experience teach us about ending entrenched conflicts? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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