(GIN) – In April of every year, South Africans mark the anniversary of a momentous vote: when millions of Black South Africans, young and old, brought apartheid to a close.
The first all-race election took place on April 27, 1994, and the previously banned African National Congress (ANC) won overwhelmingly. Its leader, Nelson Mandela, became the country’s first Black president, four years after he was released from prison.
Preparations for the 1994 election began four years earlier, when F.W. de Klerk, the last apartheid-era president, succumbing to international pressure, announced that the ANC and other anti-apartheid parties would be unbanned.
South Africa was still on a knife-edge in the months and weeks before the election because of ongoing political violence, but the vote—held over four days between April 26 and 29 to accommodate the large numbers who turned out—went ahead successfully.
A country that had been shunned and sanctioned by the international community for decades because of apartheid emerged as a fully fledged democracy.
Nearly 20 million South Africans of all races voted, compared with just 3 million white people in 1989—the last general election under apartheid.
The ANC has been in government ever since 1994 and, while it is still respected for its central role in freeing South Africans, is no longer celebrated in the same way as in the hope-filled aftermath of that election.
South Africa in 2024 has deep socio-economic problems, none more jarring than the widespread and severe poverty that still overwhelmingly affects the Black majority. The official unemployment rate is 32 percent overall, the highest in the world, and more than 60 percent for young people aged 15–24.
Millions of Black South Africans still live in neglected, impoverished townships and informal settlements on the fringes of cities in what many see as a betrayal of the heroes Mandela referred to. South Africa is still rated as one of the most unequal countries in the world.
The ANC is now largely blamed for the lack of progress in improving the lives of so many South Africans, even if the damage of decades of apartheid wasn’t going to be easy to undo.
The ANC is still expected to be the largest party and probably will have to enter into complicated coalitions with smaller parties to remain part of the government, but the expected overriding picture is that more South Africans will vote for other parties in a national election for the first time in their democracy.
South Africans still cherish the memory of Mandela and the elusive freedom and prosperity he spoke about in 1994, but the majority now appear ready to look beyond the ANC to attain it.