Nelson Mandela: Inaugural Address

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 changed its name to the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC went through a period of decline in the 1920s and 1930s, but under the influence of its Youth League, of which Mandela was a member, it revived in the 1940s.

The Afrikaner National Party came to power in 1948 on a program of rigid and more extensive racial segregation than before, known as apartheid. (“Afrikaner” refers to an ethnic group descended from seventeenth-century settlers from northwestern Europe.) In response, the ANC launched a new campaign involving civil disobedience and strike action. In 1952, for example, the ANC joined with the South African Indian Congress to embark on the Campaign of Defiance against Unjust Laws, a passive resistance protest launched on June 26 in which more than eight thousand people, including some whites, defied key racial laws. Many were imprisoned, including Nelson Mandela. The campaign lost steam after the government banned all meetings of more than ten Africans. Further, the Public Safety Act suppressed future campaigns by allowing the government to declare a state of emergency in response to threats to the public peace, and the Criminal Law Amendment Act imposed severe penalties, including fines, imprisonment, and whipping, for publically protesting a law. During the campaign, the ANC attracted more members, growing to more than one hundred thousand, but the organization's leaders were unsure how to maintain the momentum of protest action.

One step taken to continue the momentum was the drafting of the Freedom Charter of South Africa, which became a key document in the struggle against apartheid. It was drafted by a small committee, on the basis of a large number of submissions, and during the Congress of the People, held at Kliptown outside Johannesburg on June 25–26, 1955, the charter was adopted. It became a document of immense symbolic importance, for it embodied a vision of a future democratic South Africa that was not organized around distinctions of race. It would later become significant in the 1980s, when “charterists,” or those whose philosophy was based on the charter, dominated resistance to apartheid; after apartheid had come to an end, the nation's new constitution, adopted in 1996, was in part based on ideas in the Freedom Charter.

The apartheid regime retaliated against this and other instances of activism with more brutally repressive policies, and in March 1960, in the township of Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg, the police shot dead sixty-nine black Africans who were engaged in peaceful protest against the law that required them to carry identity books, which prevented them from moving around the country freely.

After that, Mandela and others in the ANC decided that they had to take up arms to challenge the state. Mandela himself became the commander in chief of a new organization formed to lead the armed struggle. Known as Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), meaning “Spear of the Nation,” this group became the armed wing of the ANC. Within a few years, however, the leadership of MK had been arrested, and Mandela and others were imprisoned on Robben Island in Table Bay, off the coast of Cape Town. After Mandela was released on February 11, 1990, South Africa went through a turbulent period in which there was considerable political violence, but eventually the government of President F. W. de Klerk agreed to meet in a negotiating forum in Cape Town with leaders of the ANC to hammer out a settlement. The settlement took the form of an interim constitution and provision for the election of a new parliament, comprising the Constitutional Assembly and the National Council of Provinces. The democratically elected parliament was to be responsible for drawing up a final constitution. The interim constitution specified that the head of state was to be elected by the parliament for a five-year term. In May 1994, Mandela became that president.