End of apartheid

Between 1990 and 1993 South Africa's white minority government and the liberation movements negotiated an end to apartheid, the system of racial segregation and discrimination formalised in 1948. The talks, led chiefly by the National Party government of F. W. de Klerk and the African National Congress (ANC) of Nelson Mandela, produced an interim constitution in November 1993. On 27 April 1994 South Africa held its first elections in which all adults could vote, and Mandela became president.

Under apartheid, political power rested with the white population while the black majority was denied basic political rights. In 1960, the year of the Sharpeville massacre, the ANC and other mainly black opposition groups were banned, and many of their leaders were imprisoned, exiled or killed. By the 1980s, pressure at home and abroad, and a sense on both sides that neither could win outright, pushed them towards dialogue. From the mid-1980s government ministers and intelligence officials held secret meetings with the imprisoned Mandela, and prominent Afrikaners met ANC exiles abroad.

De Klerk became president in 1989. In February 1990 he told Parliament that the ban on the ANC and other organisations would be lifted, and on 11 February Mandela walked free after 27 years in prison. In May 1990 the two sides met at Groote Schuur in Cape Town and agreed to curb violence and to address exiles and political prisoners; in the Pretoria Minute of August 1990 the ANC suspended its armed struggle. Political violence nevertheless continued, especially between ANC supporters and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), and in 1991 it emerged that the government had been secretly funding the IFP. Twenty-six organisations signed a National Peace Accord in September 1991.

Multi-party talks opened in December 1991 as the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), at which 19 groups agreed in principle on a united, non-racial democracy with a bill of rights. In March 1992 white voters backed continued reform in a referendum. Yet the second session in May 1992 deadlocked: the ANC wanted a strong central government and majority rule, while the National Party and IFP sought federal arrangements and guarantees for minorities. In June 1992, 45 people were killed at Boipatong; the ANC accused the state of complicity, amid wider allegations of a "third force" fomenting violence, and broke off talks. In September troops of the Ciskei homeland killed 28 ANC supporters at Bisho.

Quiet talks between the government's Roelf Meyer and the ANC's Cyril Ramaphosa led to the Record of Understanding of 26 September 1992. The government accepted that an elected body would write the constitution, and the ANC, persuaded in part by the Communist leader Joe Slovo's proposal of a "sunset clause", agreed to a transitional period of power-sharing in a Government of National Unity. A new Multi-Party Negotiating Forum of 26 groups began work in April 1993. Days later, on 10 April, a white extremist assassinated the popular ANC and Communist leader Chris Hani; Mandela's televised appeal for calm raised the ANC's standing at home and abroad, and in June an election date was set. Later that month right-wing militants rammed an armoured car into the venue.

The forum adopted the interim constitution on 18 November 1993, and Mandela and de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize that year. The IFP and several homeland and white right-wing groups boycotted the final stage, but most were drawn in before the vote: the Bophuthatswana homeland government was paralysed by a crisis in March 1994, and the IFP joined the ballot at the last minute. The ANC won a large majority on 27 April 1994, now celebrated as Freedom Day, and governed in coalition with the National Party and IFP, with de Klerk as a deputy president.

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission, created by law in 1995, examined human rights violations committed under apartheid. A final constitution was adopted in 1996 and took effect in February 1997; the National Party had left the coalition the day after its provisional adoption. Further elections under the new constitution followed in June 1999.

Our 1985 map shows South Africa under apartheid, and our 1994 map the country in the year of its first democratic elections.