South Africa Votes: The Election That Ended Apartheid

On April 27, 1994, Nelson Mandela cast his vote in South Africa's first democratic election — the first time in his life he had ever been allowed to vote. Four years earlier he had walked out of prison; now he was taking part in the election that would make him the country's first Black president.

For most of the 20th century, South Africa had been ruled by a white-minority government under a system called apartheid — laws that segregated every part of daily life and denied Black South Africans, the vast majority of the population, the right to vote. The country had been shunned and sanctioned by much of the world for decades because of it.

The road to this vote began in 1990, when President F.W. de Klerk stunned the world by unbanning the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid parties. Mandela, the face of the anti-apartheid movement, was released from prison nine days later. What followed were years of difficult negotiations — and, in the months before the vote, ongoing political violence that left the country on a knife-edge, with the whole process at risk of collapsing.

It had taken years of preparation to get here. Election officials had to register millions of voters and set up polling stations across a country where most adults had never cast a ballot in their lives. When the days of voting finally arrived, the lines outside polling places stretched long, and the atmosphere — after all the fear — was closer to celebration than anyone had dared hope.

The election itself was held over four days, from April 26 to 29, to make room for the enormous turnout. Across the country, millions of Black South Africans — young and old — queued for hours to do something they had never been permitted to do: choose their own leaders. Despite the fears, the voting went ahead successfully and peacefully.

When the results came in, the previously banned ANC had won overwhelmingly, and its leader Mandela became the country's first Black president. South Africa — isolated for decades because of apartheid — emerged as a fully fledged democracy.

Every April 27, South Africans celebrate Freedom Day in memory of that vote. It marked the official end of apartheid and one of the most remarkable peaceful transfers of power in modern history — proof that even the deepest divisions can be settled at the ballot box, and that a single day of voting can close the book on decades of injustice.

Photo: John Mathew Smith (Kingkongphoto / www.celebrity-photos.com), CC BY-SA 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).