South Africa remembers historic election every April 27, Freedom Day: NPR

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — South Africans celebrate their “Freedom Day” every April 27, when they remember their country’s first democratic elections in 1994, which heralded the official end of racial segregation and the oppression of apartheid.

Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of that momentous vote, when millions of black South Africans, young and old, decided for the first time about their own future, a fundamental right they had been denied by a white minority government.

In the first multiracial elections, the previously banned African National Congress party won overwhelmingly, making its leader, Nelson Mandela, the country’s first black president four years after his release from prison.

Here’s what you need to know about that iconic moment and a South Africa that’s changing again 30 years later:

Inflection point

The 1994 elections were the culmination of a process that began four years earlier, when FW de Klerk, the last apartheid-era president, shocked the world and his country by announcing that the ANC and other anti-apartheid parties would be banned.

Mandela, the face of the anti-apartheid movement, was released from prison nine days later, putting him on track to become South Africa’s first black leader.

South Africa took years to prepare and was still on a knife’s edge in the months and weeks leading up to the election due to ongoing political violence, but the vote, held over four days between April 26 and 29 to accommodate to the large number of attendees — continued successfully.

A country that had been closed and sanctioned by the international community for decades due to apartheid emerged as a full-fledged democracy.

Heroes

Nearly 20 million South Africans of all races voted, compared to just 3 million whites in the last general election under apartheid in 1989.

Associated Press photographer Denis Farrell’s iconic aerial photograph of people waiting patiently for hours in long, snaking lines in fields next to a school in Johannesburg’s famed Soweto township captured the determination of millions of black South Africans to finally be counted. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

“South Africa’s heroes are legends across generations,” Mandela said as he declared victory. “But it is you, the people, who are the true heroes.”

apartheid yes

The ANC’s electoral victory ensured that apartheid was finally dismantled and a new constitution was drafted which became South Africa’s highest law, guaranteeing equality for all regardless of race, religion or sexuality.

Apartheid, which began in 1948 and lasted almost half a century, had oppressed blacks and other non-white people through a series of race-based laws. The laws not only denied them the vote, but controlled where black people lived, where they were allowed to go on any given day, what jobs they were allowed to do, and who they were allowed to marry.

30 years later

Current South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, a protégé of Mandela, will lead celebrations for the 30th anniversary of Freedom Day on Saturday at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the seat of government.

The ANC has been in government since 1994 and, while it is still recognized for its central role in the liberation of South Africans, it is no longer celebrated in the same way as it was in the hope-filled period after that election.

South Africa in 2024 has profound socioeconomic problems, none more jarring than the widespread and severe poverty that still overwhelmingly affects the black majority. The official unemployment rate is 32%, the highest in the world, while for young people between 15 and 24 years old it exceeds 60%.

Millions of black South Africans still live in impoverished and abandoned townships and informal settlements on the outskirts of cities, in what many see as a betrayal of the heroes Mandela referred to. South Africa is still considered 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 was not easy to reverse.

Another crucial election?

The 30th anniversary of 1994 falls against the backdrop of another potentially crucial election. South Africa will hold its seventh national vote since the end of apartheid on May 29, and all opinion polls and analysts predict that the ANC will lose its parliamentary majority in a new milestone.

The ANC is still expected to be the largest party and will likely have to form complicated coalitions with smaller parties to remain part of the government, but the general picture expected is that more South Africans will vote for other parties in a national election. for the first time in its democracy.

South Africans still cherish the memory of Mandela and the elusive freedom and prosperity he spoke of in 1994, but most of them now seem willing to look beyond the ANC to achieve it.