From dictatorship to democracy in South Africa

Abstract

South Africa’s transition to democracy in the early 1990s can be described as a complex transition. It was not only a transition from a dictatorship and an oppressive regime to a democratic dispensation. It was, first and foremost, a transition from apartheid (a deeply entrenched system of racial oppression) to a democratic system based on universal rights, the rule of law, and freedom. It was also a transition which was, in a sense, South Africa’s long overdue joining of the process of decolonisation that began several decades earlier for the rest of the African continent. On top of that, the transition also coincided with the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, thus prompting a repositioning of the liberation movements, notably the African National Congress (ANC) and its alliance partners, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). In short, the end of apartheid brought not only democracy to South Africa, it also required this new democracy to find its place in a fast-changing international dispensation that was no longer a somewhat simple binary of ‘East’ and ‘West’.