30 Years of South African Democracy
On 27 April, 2024, South Africa will mark thirty years of democracy.
That 30-year period has been "a paradox," journalist and AFRE Board Member Redi Tlhabi observes. "There have been moments of great achievement and elation but, at the same time, we have demonstrated the global tendencies toward practices or patterns of power that leave the poor out," she adds.
Among those early moments of elation were the first elections that brought the ANC into government, Nelson Mandela’s swearing-in as president, and the adoption of a new constitution that is widely regarded as the world’s most progressive.
South Africans in Soweto, Johannesburg formed long queues to cast votes in the country’s first democratic elections held on 27 April, 1994. (AP Photo/Denis Farrell)
Nevertheless, the intervening years have proved more complicated, having brought too little change for South Africa's most vulnerable Black people.
"Ten years after [the first elections], we were still in those shacks that we had been in on 27th April 1994," says AFRE Board Member and long-time community organiser Mandisa Dyantyi, reflecting on the disappointment—most sharply felt by poor and working-class Black people who have yet to see the promise of post-apartheid South Africa—that has settled over time.
Throughout the country basic services, like electricity and water-supply, are failing. Unemployment, too, is at a distressing 32 percent, and a staggering 59 percent among young people in particular. Rates of gender-based violence also remain distressingly high, and access to quality education too rare.
These are, of course, the legacies of apartheid, and the ANC’s inabilities and failures to meet the challenge of overcoming its painful history. The party’s leaders once held the confidence of the vast majority of Black South Africa. But their governance has come to be marked by corruption and state capture, both of which have contributed to the breakdown of public infrastructure and the continued marginalisation of poor Black people.
Workers carry out clean up operations at a shopping centre in Vosloorus, near Johannesburg following widespread unrest in July 2021— by many accounts, the greatest unrest South Africa has seen since apartheid. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)
As we look back at these last 30 years in South Africa, AFRE has been in conversation with Redi, Mandisa and three other members of our community— 2022 Fellow Lwando Xaso, 2020 Fellow Axolile Notywala, and Verne Harris, acting CEO of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, AFRE's South African host partner— to make sense of how the country has come to be where it is, and to imagine into its future.
Though the conversations were held separately, consistent themes quickly emerge: that a reckoning with the prevailing harms of apartheid remains urgent, and that the cultivation of a values-driven political culture where people are activated to build toward a just future—regardless of their links to traditional political institutions—are both vital to South Africa’s future.
Read more below.
Reckoning with the Harms of Apartheid
"That last decade of apartheid, from '84 to '94, I call it 'the deadly decade',” Verne Harris says drawing on his perspective as an anti-apartheid activist and later, archivist for the papers of Nelson Mandela. “So many people died, so many people were violated. The social fabric was ripped to shreds."
That period of remarkable violence, and the much longer history of the apartheid state system that operated on brutality and exclusion, still demands a reckoning today, Verne argues. "Our society carries a very deep wounded-ness from that [last decade of apartheid] that underlies so many of the challenges we face," he adds.
“Our society carries a very deep wounded-ness from that [last decade of apartheid] that underlies so many of the challenges we face.”
Mandisa Dyantyi agrees. A deeply experienced community organiser who grew up in a township in Cape Town, she recalls the impacts of the violence in her community.
"We should have sat and dealt with the extent of the pain, the extent of the violence that apartheid visited on the bodies of Black people," she says.
She also identifies a new kind of healing process rooted in communities as crucial. "We had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but that was a state-directed process. We need to think through what a community-led healing process would look like.”
returning to Daily Practice of Politics
The ideas that make South Africa's Constitution the world's most progressive were established via an extensive public engagement process, a notable achievement in a context of an apartheid history defined by exclusion, notes Lwando Xaso, a constitutional lawyer and founder of Including Society. "Parliamentarians left Parliament and went into communities to engage people on their visions for the country," she says.
Lwando adds that these processes of articulating shared visions had much longer roots in South Africa's political culture. "I think every person who ever held up a protest sign in apartheid resistance, saying that they want freedom, they want quality education, they had a role in shaping the text of the Constitution, as did earlier processes of crafting people's documents or the people's laws," she says, calling up memories of documents like the 1958 Freedom Charter.
"It is clear that we cannot outsource our freedom to people in power."
Acclaimed journalist Redi Tlhabi also recalls this everyday quality of anti-apartheid political organising. "Communities rose up to dismantle apartheid, from our teachers to our priests, there was a way in which Black communities in particular were organising in different ways, and you didn't need to have any political affiliation to be involved." she says.
Redi argues that returning to these kinds of politics is crucial for South Africa's future, as does Mandisa. "It is clear that we cannot outsource our freedom to people in power," Mandisa says.
New Leadership in Electoral Politics
For 2020 Fellow Axolile Notywala—a Cape Town-based community organiser currently running for Premier of the Western Cape via the Rise Mzansi party—taking ownership of one's freedom means a foray into electoral politics. "In the last 30 years, one of the big failures we’ve had has been in relation to the people we’ve put in power," he says.
Indeed, many agree that the instruments for South Africa’s transformation are already present in the Constitution and in many policies and laws, but a leadership vacuum in electoral politics stands in the way of progress.
"I do believe that we have a maturing multiparty democracy where it is possible to get leaders who care, are ethical and capable, and can take South Africa on a different road within the next 30 years," Axolile says. "And we are starting to see some of those leaders—from civil society, from academia, for the corporate sector—who had for too long kept away from party politics."
“I'm encouraged by a defiance of some sort, a message that goes to the political class to say, ‘this is not your country, but it is ours too.’”
Redi similarly observes that "there are young people who are leaving their professions and saying, ‘I want to be a part of the solution.’"
In these leaders, Redi finds hope. "I'm encouraged by a defiance of some sort, a message that goes to the political class to say, 'this is not your country, but it is ours too,'" she says.
Politics Driven By Values
Despite the immense challenges left in apartheid's wake, a profound optimism marked the first post-apartheid years. Redi provides context: "The Madiba years were not devoid of the challenges of poverty, crime, and unemployment. Those things were real. But there was a sense of hope. There was an aspirational tone. There was a sense that we're building something."
That hope, she believes, was rooted in part in a set of values that provided a sense of identity to South Africa's people. Some of these values have since been eroded amid the failures and missed opportunities of the last thirty years. A recommitment to values, then, is vital.
“I want politicians to be forced to say
[words like love and care] to ponder those words and to be haunted by those words as a political commitment.”
Redi, Axolile, and Mandisa all say that the country needs a politics of care. Love, too, Lwando adds. "I want politicians to be forced to say [words like love and care]," she says, "to ponder those words and to be haunted by those words as a political commitment."