The ANC Perspective: Meeting Expectations?

Abstract

On 2 May 1994 President EW. de Klerk, subsequently the second deputy-president in the Government of National Unity (GNU), rose to his feet in Pretoria and addressed the activists of the once-dominant National Party (NP). In a gracious and conciliatory speech, delivered four days before the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) released the final tally of votes, de Klerk accepted that his party had been defeated at the ballot box by the African National Congress (ANC) and that Nelson Mandela would become the new State President.1 Although much ceremonial was to follow, this was the moment at which South Africa could be said to have, in that most familiar of phrases, ‘crossed the Rubicon’ and to have truly entered the post-apartheid era. It was also a defining moment for the ANC, the culmination of an 82-year long struggle, which had seen it pass through several phases from moderate petitioning to non-violent resistance, from defiance campaigns to armed struggle, and from insurrectionary tactics to the politics of negotiation. Each period had asked different questions of, and had set new challenges for, the movement, but the various ANC campaigns had always been sustained by a determination to remove white minority rule and to establish a democratic system, an aspiration neatly encapsulated in the 1955 Freedom Charter which had declared that no government could ‘justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people’.2 In May 1994, South Africans finally acquired such a government and one in which the ANC would be the strongest political force.