Nelson Mandela: Inaugural Address (1994)
Context
South Africa had a long history of racial segregation before the National Party government's adoption of a policy of apartheid in 1948. Black Africans had always formed a majority of the population of the area that in 1910 became the Union of South Africa, a nation that comprised Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal, and the Orange Free State, under primarily British dominion. The borders of the state formed in 1910 are virtually coterminous with those of the modern state. But the white population had conquered the indigenous peoples and dispossessed them of their land, and though whites wanted to use black labor, they kept blacks in subordinate positions.
Black challenges to colonialism had been in vain, and it was only gradually that new forms of resistance emerged. In the cities, members of the black African elite began to organize politically and to campaign for equal rights. To that end, the South African Native National Congress was formed in 1912, and in 1923 it...
