South Africa’s Young Democracy, Ten Years On: Guest Editor’s Introduction

Ahmed C. Bawa South Africa's Young Democracy, Ten Years On: Guest Editor’s Introduction POSTAPARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA HELD ITS THIRD GENERAL ELECTION IN April 2004. This time the United Nations decided that it did not need to send any electoral observers to pass judgment on the quality of the process. Soon after the election the public debate about the qualities and characteristics of the next president took root as Thabo Mbeki— having defined the post-Mandela era in his own image as the “intel­ lectual president”—began to navigate his second term as president. Eleven years of press freedom, the separation of the executive, parlia­ ment, and judiciary, and a growing vigor in civil society provide clearly defined positive signposts. South Africa’s transition into a nascent democracy has been cele­ brated in many ways but perhaps the most important and invigorat­ ing is the amount of writing about this first period. This wide variety of analysis spans the spectrum from euphoric to celebratory, through various kinds of sociopolitical critique to outright condemnation of the state for failing the poor and most vulnerable majority—for destroying the vision of the struggle against apartheid or what the Communist party of South Africa referred to as internal colonialism. Has the revolu­ tion been betrayed and according to what benchmarks? Some of this critical writing featured the failure of the program of the government in meeting well-recognized tenets of the Freedom social research Vol 72 : No 3 : Fall 2005 vii Charter, adopted by the Congress of the People in Kliptown, outside Johannesburg, in June 1955. For four decades the Freedom Charter had come to symbolize the minimum revolutionaiy program of the nonracial Congress Alliance led by the African National Congress (ANC). Some of this writing also focuses attention on the failure of the tran­ sition to address the basic elements of the more contemporaneous Reconstruction and Development Program. This program came into being in the run-up to the first election in April 1994 as a minimum program of action that bound together the broad liberation movement led by the ANC. These charters hold an iconic status in the history of the nation and act as a kind of metric. In all of this post-ten-year analy­ sis most focus has been on the state of the economy and the delivery of social services. This special issue of Social Research is another attempt to explore the nature of the transition in the years since April 1994. To accomplish this scholars and activists have been invited to contribute to this issue. Each brings a special perspective. Their papers span a broad range of topics—from the state of the economy, with its deeply structural prob­ lems and an unemployment rate of 20 to 30 percent, to the nature and impact of important symbols of the South African transition, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to the state of South Africa’s foreign policy forays. A theme that runs through several ofthese papers is the way in which the nature of the negotiations process reaches into the transition period, a point we will return to. South Africans remind themselves from time to time that the first election happened at the cusp of a low-scale civil war—in fact two such wars. Just one year before the first election in 1994, Chris Hani, perhaps the most popular leader of the liberation movement after Nelson Mandela, was assassinated by members of the white right-wing. Just a week before the elections, amid rumors of cessation, the Inkatha Freedom Party, representing a substantial part of South Africa’s isiZuluspeaking people, had not yet found its way into the election. And just two days before the election Johannesburg’s streets suffered bomb­ ings carried out by the white right-wing. The negotiations of the previ­ viii social research ous four or five years, both the process and the content, had pushed the preelection transition process far enough to prevent substantial reversals. It is also the case that the precariousness, or the perception of precariousness of the preelection period, forced certain concessions on all sides and left several loops incomplete, to be dealt with when...