The transition from the apartheid to democracy in
South Africa: political and social changes.
When one
analyses a country like South Africa can see the many social differences that
it still has between the social classes, and the question is: is it improving?
In 1994 were held the first democratic elections of this country, making
official the end of the apartheid, which was informally ended in 1992. This not
only meant a change in politics, it was necessary to change the whole social
structure of the country, and more important, the mindset of its people. South
Africa needed to go from a country in which “a 10% of the population had it all
and the 90% had nothing. (Ruiz-Jiménez, 2013)”, to a democratic country
following the human rights that could stand next to the all the European
countries. And this needed to be done without making all the investors and
citizens with better coalification leave, because in this case the said group
was formed mostly by white people, who were afraid to see their rights and
resources taken away.
What this
essay attempts to do is explain this change, the way the government affronted all
this transformations and how effected they have been.
To begging
with, it is important to explain what the apartheid is in a general way and
what social differences caused in the population. The apartheid, which means
apartness in Afrikaans, is the name of the system that the Afrikaans National Party instituted in South Africa in 1948 as a
way to “cement their control over the economic and social system. (Stanford
University, 1995)”. The basis of this system was the racial separation to
create a white superiority, which lead to territory separation and the start of
political and police repression in the decade of the 60’s.
This meant that the citizens
had to be classified in: white, bantú,
black South Africans, or colored, a mix between both races, by the Department
of Home Affairs (DHA). This separation was done following criterions such as
the characteristics of the person's hair, skin color, facial features, home
language and especially the knowledge of Afrikaans, area where the person
lives, the person's friends and acquaintances, employment, socioeconomic status
and eating and drinking habits. (Posel, 2001).This separations entailed that
all the rights of the people classify as bantús
were taken by laws like the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950, which
prohibited inter-racial marriage and sexual activities that were punished with
the imprisonment of the people involved. Another example of that is the access
to health care that the black population had, which was limited and even lead
“to abuses such as the refusal of emergency care treatment, falsification of
medical records, denial or limitation of Blacks’ access to ongoing medical care
(Afrobarometer: Round II Survey of South Africa, 2002)”.
This was supposed to end in
1994 with the election of the African National Congress, the party of Nelson
Mandela, in the first democratic elections of the country, but actually left
the country with big social differences and a poor economy.
One of the other things that are
necessary to explain is the figure of Nelson Mandela in this period. Mandela’s
political career started in 1942 when he joined the African National Congress. He
joined the non-violent movement of protest against the apartheid of this party,
but was called to trial after his ‘Speech on the Dock’ during the events of
Rivona Trial, a trial for sabotage with other nine men. In said speech he
claimed that: “the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons
live together in harmony and with equal opportunities (…) is an ideal for which
I am prepared to die. (Mandela, 1963)”. After that, he and seven of the other
men who participated where taken condemned to an imprisonment in 1964. He was
released after 27 years of in prison in 1990 and was elected president of the
African National Congress in 1991 (Nelson Mandela Foundation, 2014). The idea
that Nelson Mandela had was to make a unite country where black and white
people were treated the same. This is important as it shows how Mandela’s
mindset was created, making him a humble man looking for social equality. When
the Mandela was elected president the black people were expecting to have a
revolution, to expel the white minority and rearrange the country. But Mandela
was actually looking to work with this minority, to make a ‘Rainbow Nation’,
the problem came when the economy started to go down. The problem was that some
aspects like health and education budgets needed to be extended, as the majority
of the black population, almost the 85%, weren’t covered by them during the
apartheid but needed to be included now.
That’s why in 1994, after the
elections took place, the government made The Reconstruction and Development
Program (RDP) and the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR which studied
all the social differences and their affects in the population, like the
division of the cities in well-suburb structured townships for whites and the
slum areas for blacks or the poor education and preparation of the uneducated
black population. (William Bowles, 2012). The government decided that the structural
changes were more urgent that the education ones, so the budgets to restructure
the cities and the health care program were raised, which has led to making South
Africa “the economic powerhouse of sub-Saharan Africa and the largest economy
in the second largest continent in the world. (Tara
Kangarlou, 2013)” but making the social gap even bigger
The problem with Mandela was
that after one term as a president he abandoned the position in 1999, and the
country was still in deep crisis. But not only that, following Greg Myre’s
theory (2014) “the country's leaders have fallen far short of the moral example
and high standards set by Mandela”. This could mean that after 20 years having
the power the American National Congress has lost the values that it was
created for? The problem with this party in the present is that it gives away
the same image that had in 1994: an image of a fighter against the apartheid
and for the black people’s rights. That’s why it won again the elections this
year in May, even though the actual president was accused in a recent
anti-corruption report of spending $23 million in upgrading his private home
(Greg Myre, 2014).
It’s true that only 20 years
is not enough time to change a whole nation, but it seems like all the
political measures are starting to fade away. As the South African Demographic
Health Survey made in 2011 shows, “economic growth has been at a level of about
2 percent per annum since 1994, but has been unable to address the high levels
of poverty and unemployment.” The
government of South Africa needs to start focusing in the social differences as
well, just because all the population has assured the basic rights in the
present does not mean that they can access to them with the same ease, what
should be the basis in every country.
Referencies
Ruiz-Giménez, 2013: http://www.20minutos.es/noticia/1853675/0/nelson-mandela/hombre-mito/africa-sudafrica/
Afrobarometer: Round II Survey
of South Africa, 2002: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2636545/
William Bowles, 2012: http://www.globalresearch.ca/economic-and-social-crisis-in-post-apartheid-south-africa/32505
Greg Myre, 2014: http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/05/06/310095463/20-years-after-apartheid-south-africa-asks-how-are-we-doing
South African Demographic
Health Survey, 2011: http://web.archive.org/web/20110726195853/http://www.doh.gov.za/facts/1998/sadhs98/chapter1.pdf
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