President Cyril Ramaphosa has hailed South Africa’s achievements under his party’s leadership as the country celebrated 30 years of democracy since the end of apartheid.
April 27 is the day “when we cast off our shackles. Freedom’s bells rang across our great country,” Ramaphosa, 71, said on Saturday, reminding South Africans about the first democratic election in 1994 that ended white-minority rule.
“South Africa’s democracy is young. What we’ve achieved in these short 30 years is something of which all of us should be proud. This is an infinitely better place than it was 30 years ago,” he said in a speech marking “Freedom Day” at the Union Buildings, the seat of government, in Pretoria.
South African President Cyril Ramphosa delivers a speech as he attends Freedom Day celebrations in Pretoria, South Africa [Themba Hadebe/AP]
The first inclusive election saw the previously banned African National Congress (ANC) party win overwhelmingly and made its leader, Nelson Mandela, the country’s first Black president, four years after being released from prison.
With the ANC winning a landslide victory, a new constitution was drawn up, and it became South Africa’s highest law, guaranteeing equality for everyone, regardless of race, religion, or sexuality.
The ANC has been in government since 1994 and is still recognised for its role in freeing South Africans, but for some, it is no longer celebrated in the same way as poverty and economic inequality remain rife.
ANC struggling in the polls
Ramaphosa used the occasion to list improvements shepherded by the ANC, which is struggling in the polls due on May 29 and risks losing its outright parliamentary majority for the first time.
“We have pursued land reform, distributing millions of hectares of land to those who had been forcibly dispossessed,” he said.
“We have built houses, clinics, hospitals, roads and constructed bridges, dams, and many other facilities. We have brought electricity, water and sanitation to millions of South African homes.”
Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull, reporting from the capital Pretoria, said that while there is freedom of speech, many South Africans will say there is no economic freedom.
“The country has a 32 percent unemployment rate. The World Bank describes this society as the most unequal on earth,” Hull said.
“Corruption is rife. Infrastructure is in a dire state, and in an election due just next month, polls predict that for the first time, the ANC could fall beneath 50 percent of the vote. That, if it happens, would in itself be a pretty significant milestone in this country.”
People listen to South African President Cyril President, right, through a screen, during Freedom Day celebrations in Pretoria, South Africa [Themba Hadebe/AP]
An Ipsos poll released on Friday showed support for the governing party, which won more than 57 percent of the vote at the last national elections in 2019, has fallen to just more than 40 percent.
Were it to win less than 50 percent, the ANC would be forced to find coalition partners to remain in power.
The party’s image has been badly hurt by accusations of graft and its inability to effectively tackle poverty, crime, inequality, and unemployment, which remain staggeringly high.
The governing party is being largely blamed for the lack of progress in improving the lives of so many South Africans.
Thandeka Mvakali, 28, from the Alexandra Township in Johannesburg, said life is no different from the time of her parents during apartheid.
“It’s almost the same. You can see, we are living in a one bedroom, maybe we are 10 inside the house, for my family, we are 10 and then maybe two is employed, like my mother [and] my brother,” Mvakali told Al Jazeera.
“All of us we are not employed, we did go to school but there’s no job in South Africa.”
Mvakali added that she will vote for the first time in the May 29 elections because she is “hoping” her vote will count this time.
Ramaphosa acknowledged the problems, but denounced critics as people who wilfully “shut their eyes”.
“We have made much progress and we are determined to do much more,” he said.
On April 27, South Africa marks the 30th anniversary of the end of apartheid, when we, South Africans, finally won the fight for all to be recognised as equal citizens. We will hold a national election just a month later, on May 29.
Every election in South Africa is a chance for us to remind ourselves that our country belongs to all those who live in it. But this year’s vote has special meaning.
It will be a chance to reflect on what we have learned as a nation through our many successes and failures over the last three decades.
Ironically, perhaps the most important lesson to reflect on is that elections, though important, are just one part of a functioning democracy. Indeed, over the last 30 years, we have learned that in a democratic society, real results depend on people holding their leaders accountable through protest and community organising, not by voting alone.
People power works
South Africa’s first multiracial election began on April 26, 1994. The vote ended white minority rule, swept Nelson Mandela to the presidency, and brought massive positive changes in human rights, housing, education, healthcare, freedom of movement, and more.
Subsequently, April 27 became Freedom Day and was designated a public holiday to celebrate the end of apartheid.
Still multiracial elections did not erase apartheid’s impact. The scars of oppression remain, particularly in the form of massive economic inequality which successive governments have failed to address over the past 30 years. Corruption has also been rampant, while the provision of basic services has been inadequate.
Apartheid’s legacy also resides in the country’s landscape, which had been demarcated through segregation and dispossession. A simple visit to the beach, for instance, conjures memories of people of colour hiding in the bushes to avoid apartheid police who enforced a whites-only seaside. A walk down a certain road reminds us of homes of Black, Coloured, and Indian families demolished by the apartheid regime to make way for white neighbourhoods. To this day, housing inequality still largely falls along racial lines.
These realities have meant that the democratic struggle has continued for the past 30 years, with South Africans winning many of the most significant changes not through the ballot, but through protest.
The Treatment Action Campaign of the late 1990s and early 2000s mobilised people to rally and force the government to acknowledge the reality of HIV spreading and provide antiretroviral drugs as the AIDS epidemic ravaged our nation.
In 2005, a group of shack dwellers in informal settlements formed Abahlali baseMjondolo, a grassroots socialist collective, to demand housing rights for landless people who were forcibly displaced under apartheid rule and barred from owning property. The group’s flagship protest strategy of barricading settlements to prevent local authorities from evicting shack dwellers has been so successful that the collective now has over 100,000 active members and has forced government officials to respect housing rights.
And in 2015, the #FeesMustFall student protesters defied extraordinary police violence on campuses to successfully block planned tuition increases by universities, push the government to increase funding to students, and force student issues onto the national political agenda.
These are just a few examples of protest actions that have made it to front pages and news broadcasts. But there are near daily demonstrations over issues as diverse as labour disputes, gender-based violence, and service delivery that the media does not cover as much but are just as important.
Indeed, South Africa has one of the highest rates of protest in the world, with regular demonstrations being held since the 1970s.
Our protest culture is a legacy of the apartheid years. Apartheid didn’t end because the white supremacists in power developed a conscience. People systematically and collectively undermined it with sustained protest. That tradition continues today.
But the main reason we protest so much is simple: People power works. Or, as community activist Bhayiza Miya said: “Real protest is the only language government understands.”
No illusions
Another lesson from the last 30 years in South Africa is to never take rights and freedoms for granted. In practice, that means being deeply cynical about the powerful.
In South Africa, we can’t assume our politicians, judiciary and law enforcement have our best interests at heart. After all, apartheid was the law, upheld and enforced by the state. Many of us are therefore sceptical of today’s state, too.
That’s one reason why South Africa’s citizen-led initiatives aimed at budget monitoring, transparency, social justice, corruption and equality are some of the most robust in the world. Indeed, our oversight mechanisms – including litigation, civil society demands for transparency, investigative journalism, and public demonstrations – are so strong that they helped uncover rampant corruption and state capture which led to the ousting of Jacob Zuma from the presidency in 2018.
The broad movement to hold Zuma accountable highlights a third lesson we’ve learned since 1994: Everyone must participate for democracy to succeed.
Under apartheid, there was no “civil society sector”. Everyone – from students to trade unions to musicians to flight attendants – joined the struggle.
Today’s movements are most effective when people across society participate regardless of race, class, gender, citizenship and age. Likewise, grassroots mutual aid efforts which provide everything from food to elderly care show how South Africans instinctively band together to form a safety net when the state and private sectors fail.
Still, we have no illusions about the dire conditions many in South Africa live in today.
Horrendous things have happened here under democracy despite our attempts to hold leaders accountable. There is still no justice for the 2012 Marikana massacre, when police shot dead dozens of platinum miners demanding a modest pay increase. There is still no justice for the deaths of more than 140 patients in 2016 after they were moved to substandard psychiatric facilities in Gauteng province where they faced neglect and starvation.
Further, our democracy has effectively produced one-party rule at the national level, with the African National Congress (ANC) winning six straight elections since 1994.
While there are some good reasons for the ANC’s repeated victories, including fears of a return to apartheid and concerns about other parties’ abilities to manage state bureaucracy, there’s no denying South Africa’s young democracy suffers without multiple viable national parties.
But that may be changing, too.
In May, the ANC for the first time will face serious national challengers, with the Democratic Alliance, left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters, and Zuma’s new MK Party emerging as contenders who could force our first-ever coalition government since democracy began.
It’s a sign that South Africa’s electoral democracy is maturing, and it’s fair to say that protests and citizen organising helped us reach this milestone.
So on this 30th anniversary year of apartheid’s end and democracy’s start, South Africans of all backgrounds will have plenty to think about the past, present and future, as the May vote approaches.
But as in April 1994, casting our ballots will just be one step.
After that, we’ll go back to the streets, courtrooms and communities where the hard, daily work of tending to our democracy will continue.
The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
There is nothing remarkable about that. In this year alone nearly 50 percent of the world’s population will head to the polls in at least 64 countries. They may not all meet the bar of being free and fair but that is still some four billion people who will fill in a ballot in some form or another.
But this particular vote was cast 30 years ago on April 27, 1994. It was South Africa’s first democratic election and the man voting for the first time was Nelson Mandela.
He chose to vote in Inanda in KwaZulu-Natal – the polling station close to the grave of John Dube who was the founding president of Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC). Being Mandela, he stopped to pay his respects at the graveside, and then being Mandela he waited his turn to vote rather than go straight to the front.
I’d joined the queue shortly before him to be in place when he voted – and I, along with about 20 million other South Africans, cast a ballot for the first time. The vast majority had been forbidden from voting in the apartheid state because they were not white. In my case, I had chosen not to exercise the right to vote until everyone who wanted to could – a white-only vote was one, I believed, in support of a white-only state.
The polling booth was moved outside into the gentle April sunlight – and I stood a few feet away as Mandela held his ballot aloft. He moved from one side of the ballot box to the other, checking the media was happy with the angle, and then with that incandescent smile he cast his vote. Onlookers erupted in a refrain that I’d heard at so many protest meetings through the dark apartheid years: “Viva Mandela, viva, viva the ANC, viva.”
Then African National Congress leader, Nelson Mandela, casts his vote on April 27, 1994, near Durban, South Africa [John Parkin/AP]
He shuffled forward to where some microphones had been positioned, the smile fading as he acknowledged the import of what had just happened in a simple sentence: “It is the realisation of hopes and dreams that we have cherished over decades.”
Although Mandela voted on April 27, a day that has now become Freedom Day, the process was held over a three-day period throughout the country. Jubilant people of all colours stood in long queues, sometimes for hours, it was a time of celebration, a time in which South Africa truly became the Rainbow Nation. The mood was summed up most succinctly by a self-professed card sharp who’d come to South Africa from neighbouring Lesotho decades before – jumping up and down after casting his vote in Cape Town, Archbishop Desmond Tutu giggled maniacally and repeated time and again: “Free at last, we’re free at last.”
Civil war avoided
Amid the joy though, it was hard not to reflect on how close the country had come to outright civil war in the months preceding this election.
Political violence was ever-present during the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) lengthy negotiations held to secure agreement of all parties on the nature of a new South African democracy.
At one stage I watched as Mandela pulled apartheid President FW de Klerk into an annexe out of earshot – the normally equanimous ANC leader was gesticulating violently, clearly enraged, while de Klerk stood dumbly, looking at the ground for the most part.
Later I learned that Mandela had been briefed that National Party (NP) leader de Klerk was suspected of still deploying armed groups to foment violence in a bid to either disrupt negotiations or gain more leverage in them. “He accused de Klerk of switching violence on and off like a tap, and threatened to walk away if it didn’t stop,” one of Mandela’s senior aides told me.
Mandela, left, shakes hands with Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini as President FW de Klerk and Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, right, look on following a summit ahead of South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994 [John Parkin/AP]
Then there was the issue of Mangosuthu Buthelezi and his Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) – the Zulu-based movement refused to take part in negotiations and continued deploying fighters to attack political opponents in several parts of the country, the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal in particular. Mandela met Buthelezi in Durban at the beginning of March 1994 and attempted to secure both a truce and an agreement to end the violence. He implored the Zulu leader to call off his “impis”, or armies, and join the electoral process.
I stood in the foyer of the Blue Waters hotel and watched as Mandela left the meeting, his face set in a grim mask, clearly having failed. An Inkatha adviser told me Buthelezi was insisting on the autonomy of the Zulu tribe, and of the Zulu monarch Goodwill Zwelithini. Part of the problem, too, was Buthelezi’s belief that as a Xhosa, Mandela was seeking primacy of his own tribe. This despite the core principle of both Mandela and his ANC that tribe and race should play no part in political affairs.
A few days later the ANC sent a new delegation which met with Buthelezi in private. It was led by Mosiuoa Lekota, known as “Terror” because of his youthful skills as a soccer player. Terror was part of a new generation of activists who had been imprisoned on Robben Island alongside Mandela and other leaders. He entered prison as a Black Consciousness follower opposed to the nonracial ANC but was converted to the ANC cause while in prison. On being released he became a powerful force in the United Democratic Front (UDF), a body that was formed to fill the public political vacuum left because of the apartheid government banning the ANC. I’d become friends with Terror, and in fact gave evidence for the defence when he and other UDF members were tried and convicted in the Delmas Treason Trial. Terror was sent back to jail, but released with all other political prisoners when the ANC was unbanned in 1990.
Most importantly, though, with regard to Buthelezi, Terror was from the small Orange Free State town of Kroonstad and was neither Xhosa nor Zulu. While on Robben Island he’d also forged a close relationship with Jacob Zuma, who as a Zulu had the ear of Buthelezi. (It was a relationship that ran into rocky waters in a new century but more on that later).
Terror struck a deal. He told me subsequently that Mandela and other senior ANC leaders had put together a proposal they knew Buthelezi couldn’t resist if it came from what he would see as a messenger untainted by tribe. Buthelezi was promised a seat in the Government of National Unity for the first 10 years of democracy, and the status of Zulu royalty would be guaranteed in the constitution.
People queue to cast their votes In Soweto, South Africa, on April 27, 1994, in the country’s first all-race elections [Denis Farrell/AP]
Buthelezi agreed to take part in the election – a decision that came so late that the name of the IFP had to be pasted at the bottom of the ballot sheet shortly before the polling began on April 26, 1994. There was a marked cessation in violence, and the election went ahead peacefully.
The reason why Mandela voted in the Zulu stronghold of Inanda was to send a powerful message that the killing would be no more. The IFP won 11 percent of the vote, de Klerk’s NP 20 percent, and the ANC emerged victorious with 63 percent.
The nation celebrated, as it did the following year when South Africa won the Rugby World Cup, and in 1996 when it won the Africa Cup of Nations becoming the continent’s football champions. A beaming Mandela handed over the trophy on each occasion.
It would be decades before national unity would be so publicly celebrated again.
‘The ANC is dying’
South Africa won the Rugby World Cup again in England in 2007, and this time it was Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, who appeared with the team. The joy back home was muted though in what had become a political crisis of massive proportions.
It all began to fall apart in 2005, when then-President Thabo Mbeki tried to get rid of his Vice President Jacob Zuma, who was facing charges of corruption and rape. After years of political infighting that began to rupture the ANC, Zuma was elected the organisation’s president at its National Convention in Polokwane in 2008. Despite pleas by Nelson Mandela to end the infighting it was the first time in nearly sixty years that the ANC leadership was contested.
Mandela’s old comrades were rooted out of their positions by the Zuma loyalists – among them was Terror Lekota who’d been serving as the ANC’s secretary-general. I spoke to Terror in Polokwane straight after he’d been voted out of his position.
“It’s over,” he said. “The ANC is dying. Belief in nation has been lost in belief in faction and self-interest. The giants of the past have been replaced by maggots whose concerns are not country, but self.”
African National Congress supporters, one holding a portrait of Nelson Mandela, gather at the Moses Mabhida stadium in Durban, South Africa, in February 24, 2024 [Jerome Delay/AP]
Terror left the ANC and formed his own political party. In 2008, Mbeki stepped down as the country’s president at the request of the ruling ANC – and was replaced by Jacob Zuma.
Zuma ruled over a country in decline – rampant corruption, economic mismanagement and sheer greed saw a giant on the continent shrivel to a skeleton of its former self.
Mandela died in December 2013, and the country came together once again, this time not in celebration but in mourning.
His coffin was taken around the country and long lines formed to pass it and pay their respects – an echo of the queues that formed when so many voted for the first time in 1994. His public memorial service was held on a dismal rainy day at a football stadium in Soweto. I walked down to the VIP drop-off point and spoke to some of the many leaders that Mandela had influenced as they arrived – among them members of the Elders, a group of global leaders Mandela had formed in 2007 to work together for peace, justice, human rights and a sustainable planet.
Former US President Jimmy Carter had spent decades observing elections around the planet. “South Africa 1994 was the most special one,” he told me. Another Elder, Desmond Tutu, was smiling; “he’s going to God,” he said, “and can tell him he got me my vote”.
“What about the ANC now?” I asked. Tutu rolled his eyes and said, “Let’s not make the dead angry.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, left, and Mandela sing songs during a rally in Soweto in May 1994 [David Brauchli/AP]
“I’ll miss him,” said former President de Klerk. “I will too,” said another former president, Mbeki, a few minutes later.
I went back up into the stands in the stadium – there were cheers for both former presidents when they entered; though not as loud as those for the then-US President Barack Obama. Zuma, then president of South Africa, entered to resounding boos.
Another crucial election
Over the years, Zuma faced several corruption charges and finally resigned as president in 2018.
He was subsequently convicted of corruption, sentenced to jail, released on health grounds, resent to jail, and then released because of what was described as overpopulation in prisons.
The real reason, many believe, was an attempt to curb the massive violence being carried out by his followers in protest against his imprisonment.
Zuma’s support base is largely fellow Zulus, an echo of the impis unleashed so many years ago by the IFP’s Buthelezi. On being expelled from the ANC, Zuma formally joined the MK party, or uMkhonto weSizwe (meaning Spear of the Nation), a name taken from the former military wing of the ANC which the governing party has attempted to dispute its claim to. At this stage, though, MK is set to contest the elections in May and could seriously threaten another ANC victory.
Cyril Ramaphosa, left, and Jacob Zuma at Parliament in Cape Town in 2016 [Mike Hutchings/Reuters]
Zuma’s successor as ANC president, Cyril Ramaphosa, came to office with the pledge of rooting out all corruption and restoring the nonracial principles and honesty of Mandela’s ANC. It’s a ship he is struggling to steer. But as a man who earned respect as general secretary of the mineworkers union 40 years ago, as a person who was handpicked by Mandela to be at his side when he was released from prison, and seen by many as imbued with the best of what was the ANC, most South Africans are praying and hoping that he will succeed.
Like so many South Africans around the world, I was watching as my country won another Rugby World Cup in 2019. This was a different team to the ones of the past; it was truly representative of the nation it represented and had developed a culture of inclusiveness and humility.
No one embodies what this team is about more than its captain, Siyamthanda “Siya” Kolisi. For the first time since 1994 the country celebrated as one – and Siya and his teammates became symbols of hope for a battered people.
Celebrations again with yet another World Cup win under Kolisi in 2023, this time in France. And a consistent message from the captain – that the everyday hardship for the people at home is the prime motivating factor for his team.
“So many problems for our country, but to have a team like this … we know we come from different backgrounds, different races, and we came together with one goal and wanted to achieve it. I really hope that we’ve done that for South Africa, to show that we can pull together if we want to work together and achieve something.”
South Africa’s Siya Kolisi lifts the Webb Ellis Cup as they celebrate winning the Rugby World Cup final in October 2023 [Benoit Tessier/Reuters]
Among the celebratory footage I saw were images of people dancing in Kolisi’s hometown of Zwide in the Eastern Cape. It’s an area I know well – throughout the dark and deadly decade of the 1980s, Zwide and its neighbours around the urban centre of Uitenhage were the epicentre of resistance to the apartheid regime. They were, and remain, areas of intense poverty.
For years I reported as countless residents were shot by the police and the army, arrested, tortured, and in some cases simply taken away and executed. But still they fought back. It became a deadly pattern – demonstrations against the regime, people killed by the apartheid forces, then the funerals, more demonstrations, more deaths. There seemed no end to it, no hope, yet the people would not give up.
It became clear to me that what motivated this resistance was more than hope, it was a belief that things would get better. It was a belief that beckoning beyond the ugliness was a nation in which all would be free, a place in which race or tribe or class played no major part, a country in which a vote was a given.
This is where Kolisi comes from, and this hope is what he reminds me of.
The promise made by Nelson Mandela 30 years ago of a better life is still to be fully realised, but Kolisi’s words are a reminder that all is not done, the process may not be over.
“We love you South Africa,” he says, “and we can achieve anything if we work together as one”.
Three decades ago, on April 27, 1994, after centuries of white rule, Black South Africans voted in general elections for the first time. This marked the official end of apartheid rule, cemented days later when Nelson Mandela was sworn in as the country’s first Black president.
Since the arrival of Dutch settlers in the 1600s and British colonists in the 1700s and 1800s, South Africa had been a project that subjected Black people to systematically segregationist laws and practices.
But it was the adoption of apartheid in 1948 that codified and formalised these racist practices into law. It strictly separated people into separate classes based on their skin colour, putting the white minority in the highest class, with all others, including Black, Indigenous, multi-race people, and descendants of indentured Indian workers, below them.
South Africa’s road to freedom was long and bloody – laden with the bodies of thousands of Black activists and students who dared to protest, both loudly and quietly.
The wounds of those times are still painful and visible. Black South Africans make up 81 percent of the 60 million population. But, burdened with the trauma and lingering inequalities of the past, Black communities continue to be disproportionately afflicted with poverty.
Here’s how apartheid unfolded, how it collapsed, and what has since changed in South Africa:
(Al Jazeera)
What was apartheid?
The Afrikaner National Party (NP) government formally codified apartheid as government policy in South Africa in 1948.
Translated from Afrikaans – a language first spoken by Dutch and German settlers – apartheid means “apart-hood” or “separateness”, and its name embodied the ways the ruling white minority sought to separate itself from, and rule over, non-white people socially and spatially.
The policies rigidly and forcefully separated South Africa’s diverse racial groups into strata: White, Coloured (multiracial), Indian, and Black. These groups had to live and develop separately – and grossly unequally – such that although they lived in the same country, it was largely impossible for any one group to mix with another.
The rules were debilitating particularly for the Black majority who were relegated to the bottom rung. Laws limited their movement and squeezed them into small sections of land. The places they were allowed to inhabit were generally impoverished and included designated “Bantustans” (rural homelands) or townships on the outskirts of cities – settlements largely built out of ramshackle corrugated iron homes that were unplanned, overcrowded and had few to no amenities.
Meanwhile, the minority white population reaped the benefits of a gold-and-diamond-powered economy and flagrantly underpaid non-white labour as it kept the lion’s share of land, resources and amenities for themselves.
Apartheid also affected Indians, at first brought into South Africa as indentured labourers and later as traders, and multiracial people, called the Coloured community, who faced segregation and discrimination but to a lesser degree than Black Africans.
(Al Jazeera)
What were the apartheid laws?
Apartheid was enforced through a system of strict laws that kept everything in its place. There were “Grand” laws dictating housing and employment allocations, and “Petty” laws dealing with rules of everyday life, like the racial separations in public amenities.
Some of the most important laws were:
Where people lived: The Group Areas Act – People were legally segregated based on race and allocated separate areas to live and work in. The law relegated nonwhite groups further away from developed urban cities. Black people, in particular, were housed in under-resourced fringe townships far from the centre. From the late 1950s, some 3.5 million Black South Africans were forced to relocate from urban areas, and some 70 percent of the population was squeezed into 13 percent of the country’s most unproductive land. Those who opposed the laws and refused to move had their homes forcibly demolished and were sometimes arrested and imprisoned. Black people, specifically men, who worked in cities as a source of cheap labour were required to carry “pass books” that dictated which white areas they were allowed to be in and for how long. Under the Separate Amenities Laws, public transport, parks, beaches, theatres, restaurants, and other amenities were segregated racially. Signs stating “Whites Only” and “Natives” were commonplace.
What people learned: The Bantu Education Act – Apartheid laws stipulated the segregation of schools, including setting a different standard of education for different races. White schools were the best resourced, Coloured and Indian schools in the middle, while Black Africans were intentionally given an inferior education, specifically meant to ready them for manual labour and more menial jobs. A later law also segregated tertiary education. Some universities allowed non-white students to study but only to a limited degree, as apartheid officials sought to intentionally underskill the population. Government spending on white institutions was far higher than those catering to other groups.
Who people could marry: The Immorality Laws – While intermarriages between white and Black people were already illegal under a 1927 law, a revised version (PDF) criminalised marriage and intimate relationships between white people and all other groups. The penalty was up to five years imprisonment. Thousands of people were arrested for this during apartheid, with nearly 20,000 prosecuted.
In August 1990, Black South African protesters are dispersed by tear gas fired by police [File: John Parkin/AP]
Why did apartheid end?
Apartheid came to an end out of the need for the white minority to sustain itself, not because of a change of heart, noted Thula Simpson, a historian of apartheid at the University of Pretoria.
“There was nothing benevolent or voluntary about the retreat of the white government,” he told Al Jazeera. “It was because there was an internal criticism of apartheid, and people were basically saying, ‘In order to maintain white supremacy, you must maintain white survival.’”
Before apartheid finally yielded, it was placed under tremendous pressure, including by growing resistance among Black South Africans. Political groups like the African National Congress (ANC) led by Nelson Mandela, and the Pan African Congress (PAC), roused the population, instigating protests, peaceful and violent. These movements triggered deadly crackdowns by the apartheid government.
When, on March 21,1960, apartheid police officers opened fire on some 7,000 Black people protesting pass laws, killing 69 people and injuring 180 others in what is now known as the Sharpeville Massacre, the world noticed. International uproar and condemnation from the United Nations followed, even as Mandela was imprisoned and the ANC liberation movement and others like it were banned by the apartheid government.
The 1976 killing of hundreds of Soweto pupils protesting the compulsory use of Afrikaans in Black schools also drew a similar global reaction. June 16 still marks the African Union’s “Day of the African Child,” in remembrance of those killed in the Soweto Uprising.
Increasingly, South Africa became isolated as it was slapped with economic sanctions, starting with a trade ban from Jamaica in 1959. The country was banned from sporting events, as well. By the 1990s, President FW de Klerk was forced to release Mandela and start negotiations for a democratic transition.
(Al Jazeera)
What’s changed since apartheid?
Legally and politically, much has changed in South Africa, with people of all races now free and equal under the law. Anyone is technically able to live, work and study anywhere, and people are free to interact and marry across colour lines. Black South Africans have democratically governed through the ANC for the past 30 years, compared with during apartheid when it was illegal for a Black person to even vote.
However, despite the significant gains, the legacy of apartheid is still present economically and spatially, which has contributed to South Africa being one of the least equal countries in the world.
Economy
Although South Africa’s economy grew with the end of apartheid and international sanctions, Black South Africans households continue to receive only a small share.
In the first decade after apartheid, the ANC-led South Africa’s gross domestic product (GDP) went from $153bn in 1994 to $458bn in 2011, according to the World Bank.
However, a cocktail of corruption and government inefficiency has seen economic growth taper off, with gross debt rising from 23.6 percent of GDP in 2008 to 71.1 percent in 2022, according to researchers at Harvard (PDF).
While infrastructure quality has declined in general – partly due to the crumbling of the coal-powered electricity system that provided cheap power for production – it is exacerbating the historical inequalities Black communities face, experts said.
“The whole network has not been maintained so now the collapse is spreading out [even] to areas where it was not the norm,” Simpson of Pretoria University said, referencing South Africa’s recent, but frequent power and water cuts. “That impacts first and foremost the poor people,” he added.
A shopkeeper serves a customer in the dark during a regular electricity blackout in South Africa [File: Rogan Ward/Reuters]
In 2022, the World Bank classified (PDF) South Africa as the most unequal country in the world, and listed race, the legacy of apartheid, a missing middle class and highly unequal land ownership, as the major drivers. About 10 percent of the population controls 80 percent of the wealth, its report said.
Researchers from Spain’s Universidad de Vigo in 2014 found (PDF) that the average monthly income of Black South African households was 10,554 rand ($552), compared with 117,249 rand ($6,138) in white households.
In 2017, a government survey tracking household expenditure echoed those findings, stating that nearly half of all Black-headed households were spending the least while only 11 percent were in the highest spending category.
Economic woes have added pressure on the ANC, which is predicted to lose a parliamentary majority in the upcoming May elections for the first time since 1994. Simpson said a divide between older voters who witnessed the ANC’s struggle to end apartheid and younger people who do not have an attachment to the party has widened.
Education and skilled employment
After apartheid collapsed, historically white schools with good amenities and qualified teachers were desegregated and drew ambitious parents from Black communities, where government schools were poorly funded and lacked amenities like toilets – conditions that have persisted. According to a 2020 Amnesty International report, out of 23,471 public schools, 20,071 had no laboratory, 18,019 had no library, and 16,897 had no internet.
However, there is persistent trouble with transport to these formerly white-only schools for pupils from low-income and rural communities as these areas remain far apart and are not easily accessible. Pupils have also complained of racism in the formerly segregated white schools.
Meanwhile, general unemployment in South Africa is at more than 33 percent – one of the world’s highest. Nearly 40 percent of Black South Africans were unemployed in the first three months of 2023, while that rate was 7.5 percent among white people, according to government figures (PDF).
Where Black people make up 80 percent of the employable population (PDF) and account for 16.9 percent of top management jobs, white people who comprise about 8 percent of the employable population hold 62.9 percent of top management jobs.
A new law aimed at seeing more Black people employed – the Employment Equity Amendment Bill of 2020 – was signed last year by President Cyril Ramaphosa, but it sparked debate, with South Africa’s main opposition party the Democratic Alliance (DA) saying the law prescribes “race quotas” for companies and would cause other groups to lose jobs.
Housing
Although Black South Africans are no longer confined to rural, fringe townships – and people of colour spread out to urban areas across the country at the end of white minority rule – many still live in settlements with limited amenities.
In the once-majority-white Cape Town, for example, the population of Black South Africans increased from 25 percent in 1996 to 43 percent in 2016, according to the Center for Sustainable Cities (PDF).
“There’s been a massive redistribution of the population and whites have moved to the suburbs or outside the country,” Simpson said. “It has created the opportunity for Black South Africans to move closer to business districts.”
But, the historian added, “the townships remain the areas that have not been de-racialised.”
In some parts, small buffers separate Black townships from high-income neighbourhoods, providing starkly visible differences in satellite images. For example, a quick Google Maps tour will reveal the beautiful Strand, a seaside community in the Western Cape province that boasts of big homes with large, well-tended yards, and clean streets. Just beside it though, the Nomzamo township stands, with tinier homes and streets littered with refuse.
Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township is seen in this picture taken in 2016 [File: Johnny Miller/Reuters]
Raesetje Sefala, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), said her organisation has observed that townships are still expanding. “They continue to resemble their appearance during the apartheid era, indicating that similar small land sizes are still being allocated,” she told Al Jazeera.
Sefala said the South African government now groups townships together with well-serviced suburbs as “formal residential neighbourhoods”, which makes it difficult for researchers to track the actual improvements in quality of life since the end of apartheid.
However, as someone who comes from a township, “I can attest to the extent of the poor service delivery,” she added.
Government reforms have sought to provide subsidised homes for low-income earners, with some four million homes (PDF) delivered since 1994 according to the South Africa Human Rights Commission. But some of those policies have meant houses are located far from economic centres, inadvertently recreating the same apartheid dynamic, some researchers have said.
Besides, there is a national backlog of some 2.3 million households and individuals still waiting for a home since 1994.
Meanwhile, rural homelands, where Black people were once forced to reside, continue to be at a disadvantage. For one, they experience extremely low employment rates: Although some 29 percent of South Africa’s population lives there, employment rates are roughly half of what they are in all other parts of the country according to Harvard researchers. Experts have blamed the government’s failures to expand connecting infrastructure like transport, technology, and know-how to these historically excluded places.
More than 120,000 people have been displaced, Kenyan government says, with 22 others injured and eight reported missing.
Flooding and heavy rains in Kenya have killed at least 70 people since mid-March, according to a government spokesperson, twice as many as were reported earlier this week.
Kenya and other countries in East Africa — a region highly vulnerable to climate change — have been lashed by severe downpours in recent weeks.
“The official tally of fellow Kenyans who regrettably have lost their lives due to the flooding situation now stands at 70 lives,” government spokesperson Isaac Mwaura said on X on Friday, after torrential rains killed 32 people in the capital Nairobi this week.
Fifteen people were killed in the Rift Valley region, the government also said in a report on Friday, following a meeting of the country’s disaster response committee.
More than 120,000 people have been displaced by the floods, the report said, with 22 others injured and eight reported missing.
The government has proposed 3.3 billion Kenyan shillings ($24.5m) for an “initial emergency response”, which includes repairing infrastructure, emergency housing and food assistance.
People carry belongings retrieved from their homes following the floods in Nairobi [Luis Tati/AFP]
Sixty-four public schools in Nairobi – nearly a third of the total number in the capital – have been “substantially affected” by the flooding, said Belio Kipsang, the principal secretary for education.
However, Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua said that “the schools will reopen as scheduled” following the mid-term holidays this month.
Kenyans have been warned to stay on alert, with more heavy rains forecast across the country in coming days as the monsoon batters East Africa.
A naturally occurring climate pattern typically associated with increased heat worldwide, El Nino can lead to drought in some parts of the world and heavy rains elsewhere.
Regional destruction
Meanwhile, at least 155 people have been killed in flooding and landslides in neighbouring Tanzania.
Tanzanian Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa said on Thursday that more than 200,000 people had been affected by the disaster.
He said homes, property, crops, as well as infrastructure including roads, bridges, railways and schools, had been damaged or destroyed.
In Burundi, about 96,000 people have been displaced by months of relentless rains, the United Nations and the government said this month.
The UN’s humanitarian agency (OCHA) said in an update this week that in Somalia, the seasonal Gu rains from April to June are intensifying, with flash floods reported since April 19.
It said four people had been reportedly killed and more than 800 people were affected or displaced nationwide.
Uganda has also suffered heavy storms that have caused riverbanks to burst, with two fatalities confirmed and several hundred villagers displaced.
Late last year, more than 300 people died in torrential rains and floods in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, just as the region was trying to recover from its worst drought in four decades that left millions of people hungry.
Photographer Jurgen Schadeberg (1931-2020) spent most of his life documenting the struggle against apartheid. Years before his death in 2020, Schadeberg shared some of his iconic images – and the stories behind them – with Al Jazeera.
On April 27, 1994, South Africa held its first multiracial democratic election, voting out apartheid and voting in its first Black president, Nelson Mandela.
Forty-six years prior, in 1948, apartheid – a system built on white supremacy, segregation and inequality – was signed into law.
It fomented the boundaries between races, cutting people off from one another with increasingly restrictive rules.
In the vibrant multiracial enclaves of Johannesburg in the 1950s, apartheid police clamped down while many non-white people resisted.
Among those documenting life and resistance under apartheid for the famed Drum magazine, was young German-born photographer Jurgen Schadeberg.
On the streets of Johannesburg, he captured vibrant, diverse communities at a time when the apartheid government was trying its hardest to remove every trace of multiracialism from its streets. Through his lens, he also immortalised leading struggle and cultural icons, among them Oliver Tambo, Miriam Makeba and Nelson Mandela himself.
This story was first published in the Al Jazeera Digital Magazine.
More than 200,000 people and 51,000 households have been affected by the rains, Tanzania’s prime minister said.
Flooding and landslides in Tanzania caused by weeks of heavy rain have killed 155 people and injured 236 others, the country’s prime minister has said, as intense downpours continue across East Africa.
Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa told Parliament that the El Nino climate pattern has worsened the ongoing rainy season, causing the flooding and destroying roads, bridges and railways.
“The heavy El Nino rains, accompanied by strong winds, floods and landslides in various parts of the country, have caused significant damage,” Majaliwa told Parliament on Thursday.
El Nino is a naturally occurring climate pattern typically associated with increased heat worldwide, as well as drought and heavy rains.
The devastating effects of the rains were “primarily due to environmental degradation”, Majaliwa added, blaming deforestation, unsustainable farming practices such as “slash and burn” agriculture and unregulated livestock grazing.
More than 200,000 people and 51,000 households were affected by the rains, the prime minister noted. Flooded schools were closed and emergency services were rescuing people marooned by the floodwaters.
Schoolchildren are stranded due to a damaged River Zingiziwa bridge in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania [AP]
Majaliwa warned those living in low-lying areas to move to higher ground and urged district officials to ensure that provisions meant for those whose homes were washed away go to those in need of the supplies.
On April 14, the government said a total of 58 people, including children, had been killed in rains and floods since the beginning of the month.
The East African region has been pounded by heavier-than-usual rainfall during the current rainy season, with flooding also reported in neighbouring Burundi and Kenya.
In Kenya, 35 people were reported dead as of Monday, and the number was expected to increase as flooding continues across the country.
Some parts of the capital, Nairobi, remained underwater on Thursday, and Kenyans were warned to stay alert, with the forecast for more heavy rains across the country in coming days.
In the Mathare neighbourhood in the capital, at least four bodies were retrieved from flooded houses on Wednesday. Local media reported that more bodies were retrieved from the Mathare River.
The number of casualties is expected to increase as flooding continues across Kenya [Tony Karumba/AFP]
Kenyan President William Ruto chaired a multi-agency flood response meeting on Thursday and directed the National Youth Service to provide land for people in flood-affected areas.
Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua told a press briefing that people affected by the floods would be given food and other goods, while those living in the most vulnerable areas would be relocated.
In Burundi, around 96,000 people were displaced by months of relentless rains, the United Nations and the government said earlier this month.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in an update this week that in Somalia, the “Gu” rains (from April to June) were intensifying, with flash floods reported since April 19.
Uganda has also suffered heavy storms that have caused riverbanks to burst, with two fatalities confirmed and several hundred villagers displaced.
A manhunt is under way after a downpour destroyed the perimeter fence of the medium-security prison in the town of Suleja.
More than 100 inmates have escaped from a prison in Nigeria near the capital city of Abuja after overnight heavy rains destroyed parts of the facility, prison officials have said.
The downpour, which lasted for several hours on Wednesday night, destroyed the perimeter fence of the medium-security prison in the town of Suleja, in Niger state, “giving way to the escape of a total of 118 inmates from the facility”, according to prisons spokesman Adamu Duza.
The prison service and other agencies managed to recapture 10 of the escaped inmates. “We are in hot chase to recapture the rest,” Duza said.
“The public is further enjoined to look out for the fleeing inmates and report any suspicious movement to the nearest security agency,” he added.
Duza gave no details on the identities or affiliation of the escaped prisoners, but in the past members of the Boko Haram armed group have been locked up in Suleja prison.
There are fears that they could find their way into the vast forests that connect Suleja town and neighbouring states, some of which are known hideouts for criminal gangs.
In addition to being overcrowded with 70 percent of the inmates still awaiting trial, most prisons in Nigeria are old, having been built during the colonial era before the West African nation’s independence from Britain in 1960.
The structures are rarely renovated, which has made it easier for inmates to escape during past jailbreaks. Thousands of inmates have thus escaped from prisons, including in Abuja, where nearly 900 inmates broke free in 2022.
Duza said the prison service was making “frantic efforts” to modernise its prisons, including the construction of six 3,000-capacity facilities and the revamping of existing ones.
Thousands of inmates have escaped in recent years due to weak infrastructure and militant attacks, notably a July 2022 ISIS (ISIL) attack on a high-security prison in the capital Abuja where around 440 inmates were freed.
At least 28 others are missing after a boat carrying 77 asylum seekers sinks, according to the UN’s migration agency.
At least 16 people are dead and 28 others are missing after a boat carrying asylum seekers capsized off the coast of the Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti, according to the UN’s migration agency.
The accident occurred on Monday night, about two weeks after another boat carrying mainly Ethiopian asylum seekers sank off the Djibouti coast, killing several dozen people, on the perilous so-called “eastern migration route” from Africa to the Middle East.
“Tragedy as boat capsizes off Djibouti coast with 77 migrants on board including children,” the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Tuesday in a post on X.
“At least 28 missing. 16 dead,” it said, adding that the local IOM branch was “supporting local authorities with search and rescue effort”.
Yvonne Ndege, a spokeswoman for the agency, told the AFP news agency that the 16 deaths included children and an infant, without offering further details.
❗️ Tragedy as boat capsizes off #Djibouti coast with 77 migrants on board including children. At least 28 missing. 16 dead. @DjiboutiIOM supporting local authorities with search and rescue effort. pic.twitter.com/s4L7ASNW4o
— IOM – UN Migration News (@UNMigrationNews) April 23, 2024
Ethiopia’s ambassador to Djibouti, Berhanu Tsegaye, said on X that the boat was carrying Ethiopians from Yemen and that the accident occurred off Godoria in northeastern Djibouti.
He said 33 people, including one woman, survived.
Another boat carrying more than 60 people sank off the coast of Godoria on April 8, according to the IOM and the Ethiopian embassy in Djibouti.
The IOM said at the time that the bodies of 38 people, including children, were recovered, while another six people were missing.
The Ethiopian embassy had said the boat was carrying Ethiopians from Djibouti to war-torn Yemen.
‘Eastern Route’
Each year, many tens of thousands of African asylum seekers brave the “eastern route” across the Red Sea and through Yemen to try to reach Saudi Arabia, escaping conflict or natural disaster, or seeking better economic opportunities.
“On their journeys, many face life-threatening dangers including starvation, health risks and exploitation – at the hands of human traffickers and other criminals,” the IOM said in a statement in February.
Ndege said the IOM’s data from 2023 showed that “the number of people trying to cross is on the rise”.
According to the IOM, Ethiopians make up 79 percent of about 100,000 people who arrived in Yemen last year from Djibouti or Somalia, the remainder being Somalis.
Africa’s second-most populous country, Ethiopia is blighted by various conflicts and several regions have suffered from severe drought in recent years.
More than 15 percent of its 120 million inhabitants depend on food aid.
In February, the IOM said that according to its Missing Migrants Project at least 698 people, including women and children, had died crossing the Gulf of Aden from Djibouti to Yemen last year.
The controversial law is expected to come into force within days with the first deportation flights in weeks.
A controversial United Kingdom government bill to send asylum seekers to Rwanda has finally secured the approval of the upper house of parliament, which had demanded numerous amendments, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promised to start the first flights to Kigali within weeks.
Sunak hopes the legislation will boost the dismal fortunes of his Conservative Party in an election widely expected to take place later this year.
The House of Lords, an unelected chamber, had long refused to back the divisive plan without additional safeguards, but relented after Sunak said the government would force parliament to sit as late into Monday night as necessary to get the bill passed.
“No ifs, no buts. These flights are going to Rwanda,” Sunak told a news conference earlier in the day.
The Rwanda scheme, criticised by United Nations human rights experts and groups supporting asylum seekers, has been beset by legal challenges ever since it was first proposed as a way to curb the number of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats.
In June 2022, the first deportees were taken off a flight at the last minute after an injunction from the European Court of Human Rights. The following year, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that sending asylum seekers on a one-way ticket to Kigali was illegal and would put them at risk.
The National Audit Office, a public spending watchdog, has estimated it will cost the UK some 540 million pounds ($665m) to deport the first 300 asylum seekers.
The House of Lords criticised the latest bill as inadequate and demanded amendments, including a requirement that Rwanda could not be treated as safe until an independent monitoring body found it to be true.
They also wanted an exemption for agents, allies and employees of the UK overseas, including Afghans who fought alongside the British Armed Forces, from being removed.
In the end, the Lords gave way and let the bill pass without any formal changes. The legislation is expected to receive Royal Assent from King Charles later this week and will then become law.
#UK: Airlines should not facilitate unlawful removals of asylum-seekers to Rwanda 🇷🇼, UN experts say. Such actions might make these companies complicit in violating internationally protected #HumanRights and court orders.https://t.co/EZfERVb1kzpic.twitter.com/1JVhs49Ywt
More than 120,000 people – many fleeing wars and poverty in Africa, the Middle East and Asia – have reached the UK since 2018 by crossing the English Channel in small boats, usually inflatable dinghies, on journeys organised by people-smuggling gangs.
Last year, 29,437 asylum seekers made the crossing with one in five of them from Afghanistan, according to the Refugee Council.
Critics say the plan to deport people to Rwanda rather than handle asylum seekers at home is inhumane, citing concerns about the East African country’s own human rights record and the risk that asylum seekers may be sent back to countries where they would be in danger.
The so-called “Safety of Rwanda” bill states some existing UK human rights statutes will not apply to the scheme and Rwanda must be treated by UK judges as a safe destination, despite the Supreme Court declaring the scheme unlawful. It also limits individuals’ options for an appeal to only exceptional cases.
Sunak’s plans could still be held up by legal challenges, and UN rights experts have suggested that airlines and aviation regulators could fall foul of internationally protected human rights laws if they participate in the deportations.
About 150 people have already been identified for the first two flights.
Polls suggest the Conservatives, who claimed that the UK’s departure from the European Union would give the country “control” over its borders and the ability to reduce immigration, will be badly beaten in the coming election by the opposition Labour Party.
Labour has said it will scrap the scheme if it wins power and work on a deal with the EU to return some arrivals to mainland Europe.
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