Africa since 1940 The Past of the Present

On April 27, 1994, black South Africans, for the first times in their lives, voted in an election to decide who would govern their country. The lines at polling stations snaked around many blocks. It had been more than thirty years since African political movements had been banned, and the leader of the strongest of them, Nelson Mandela, had spent twenty-seven of those years in prison. Most activists and observers inside and outside South Africa had thought that the apartheid regime, with its explicit policy of promoting white supremacy, had become so deeply entrenched, and its supporters so attached to their privileges, that only a violent revolution would dislodge it. In a world that, some thirty to forty years earlier, had begun to tear down colonial empires and denounce governments that practiced racial segregation, South Africa had become a pariah, subject to boycotts of investment, sports events, travel, and trade. Now it was being redeemed, taking its place among nations that respected civil rights and democratic processes. This was indeed a revolution – whose final act was peaceful.