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Nelson Mandela Speech after election as President

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Nelson Mandela inauguration speech. This is part of the documentary "Faces Of Unity - featuring Nelson Mandela". Be part of history - become a Face of Unity with one click. Like us on Facebook (Faces Of Unity) and you will be added to the Nelson Mandela mosaic and literally be one the Faces of Unity.

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White supremacy in South Africa continued to segregate the black citizens for over 50 years and came to a peak when the 1913 Land Act was passed. The law forced black citizens to live on special reserves that were set aside for them and made it against the law for them to work as sharecroppers. This caused the formation of the organization called the South African National Congress), who opposed the laws, which became the ANC (African National Congress). Nelson Mandela became the leader of the ANC and he began to fight against the new laws that outlawed interracial marriages and the Population Registration Act of 1950.

The last law classified people by their 'race' and then they would be given or refused rights based on that classification. Additional laws were passed requiring 'non-white' citizens to carry proof documents and other laws reduced the rights of the various African tribes and their leaders, who had lived in these areas of South Africa for centuries. By 1958, the government leaders removed black citizens from their homes, relocated them to other areas and sold their land for cheap prices to white farmers.

As it is with any movement, resistance to apartheid covered many years and appeared in many forms. Some were peaceful protests, while other situations were violent. By 1952, the ANC organized a protest with the South Indian National Congress to burn their 'passbooks'. By 1955 groups were gathering to try to bring about equality and they were met with police and government officials that arrested them and they were charged with high treason.

Many groups were attacked and killed by the white police officers and the violence became worse as they tried to enforce the 'white laws'. Nelson Mandela led many of the protests but was then accused of treason and had to go 'underground' to avoid arrest. When the officials did locate him in 1961, he was arrested and thrown into prison. The arrest of Nelson Mandela became an outraged cry and symbol for others to continue the fight. His arrest also brought attention to the condition of Apartheid for the rest of the world.

In 1973, the United Nations General Assembly focused on apartheid and denounced it. By 1976 the UN Security Council voted to impose embargos against the sale of firearms to South Africa. People from all over the world began to join the anti-apartheid movement and to protest the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela.

The movement was joined by artists, musicians, politicians, humanitarians and groups from every country. By 1985 both the United States and the United Kingdom imposed 'economic sanctions' against South Africa, which reduced the amount of trade that they could receive from both countries.

By 1989, the South African government fell to the pressure and began seeking reforms which included getting rid of some of the laws. A new constitution was drawn up to give blacks and other racial groups their freedoms back. Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and became the popular representative that worked together with the political groups for reform. In 1994, elections were held and, for the first time, there was a nonwhite majority which led to the end of apartheid.

Nelson Mandela was sworn in as President in May, 1994.

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Apartheid means 'apart-hood' or 'the state of being apart' and was the system of racial inequality, segregation and discrimination in South Africa that was started after World War II. It was enforced by the laws of the South African National Party governments from 1948 to 1994.

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The African National Congress (ANC) is South Africa's governing party and has been in power since the transition to democracy in April 1994. The organisation was initially founded as the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) on 8 January 1912 in Bloemfontein, with the aim of fighting for the rights of black South Africans. The organization was renamed the ANC in 1923. While the organization's early period was characterized by political inertia due to power struggles and lack of resources, increasing repression and the entrenchment of white minority rule galvanized the party. As a result of the establishment of apartheid, its aversion to dissent by Black people and brutal crackdown of political activists, the ANC together with the SACP formed a military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation/ MK) in 1961.

Through MK, the ANC waged the armed struggle and obtained support from some African countries and the Soviet bloc for its activities. With the increasing internal dissent, international pressure and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the apartheid government was forced to enter into negotiations with the ANC. This saw the collapse of apartheid and the ushering in of democratic rule in 1994.

In the national elections from 1994 to 2004, the ANC had consistently risen in electoral popularity. With the 2009 elections, the party suffered a drop in popularity that was repeated in 2014. This time period also coincided with the presidency of Jacob Zuma.

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The African National Congress (ANC) is South Africa's governing party and has been in power since the transition to democracy in April 1994. The organisation was initially founded as the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) on 8 January 1912 in Bloemfontein, with the aim of fighting for the rights of black South Africans.

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Soweto Uprising 1976

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The Sharpeville massacre occurred on 21 March 1960 at the police station in the township of Sharpeville in the then Transvaal Province of the then Union of South Africa (today part of Gauteng). After demonstrating against pass laws, a crowd of about 7,000 protesters went to the police station.

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life after the Apartheid

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Phumelele Gura survived a barrage of police bullets and more than two weeks in prison, where he lay awake listening to the sound of workmates allegedly being tortured. His grandfather and his father backed the ANC. He no longer will.

"I won't vote for the ANC next time because they failed the people," he said. "My family always voted ANC but we don't trust it any more."

Gura, 49, is not alone in thinking the events of 16 August 2012 marked a tectonic shift in South Africa. That was the day when police, enforcing the will of the country's black-majority government, opened fire on striking miners, killing 34 and injuring 78.

The massacre represented "probably the lowest moment in the short history of a democratic South Africa", wrote Cyril Ramaphosa, a senior figure in the African National Congress and a former mining union leader.

Comparisons were made with the bloodiest days of apartheid: Sharpeville, Soweto, now Marikana.

Three weeks on, the strike persists and the dust has not settled. But it is increasingly apparent that this tragedy has shaken faith in the ANC and its union allies as never before; that it has focused scrutiny on the exploitative 140-year relationship between foreign capital and black labour and led some to speculate that the tinderbox of South African inequality is just a spark away from conflagration.

Mining has powered the South African economy, and warped its society, since the arrival of the empire builder Cecil Rhodes. Like many of the millions who burrowed underground to extract diamonds, gold and other minerals, Gura came a long way from home in search of a working wage. He found it as a rock driller at the Marikana platinum mine, owned by the British-based company Lonmin.

"It's hard work and sometimes you drill the rock and a rock falls down on you," he reflected. "That's what we're afraid of.

"We spend eight hours underground. It's very hot and you can't see daylight. There is no air sometimes and you have to get air from the pipes down there."

Gura said he lived in a tin shack with a pit toilet and intermittent electricity and water. He earned about 5,000 rand (£380) a month and, like many workers here, sent a portion home to his family in Eastern Cape province. He ran for his life when the shooting began on 16 August, but was arrested and jailed. "From my cell I could hear the police beating my brothers, telling them to speak what they want."

Betrayed

His partner, Primrose Magwangqana, 45, was afraid she would never see him again. "I thought he was dead," she recalled. "They said to some people, 'your husband is in prison', but later they found out he was in the mortuary."

She too feels betrayed by the party she supported all her life. "I am an ANC member but I won't vote for them next time because they failed us. Only [the expelled youth leader] Julius Malema helped us."

Striking mineworkers interviewed by the Guardian in Marikana this week echoed the sentiment. The ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela, which liberated black South Africans and is celebrating its centenary year, can no longer take their support for granted.

Samkele Mpampani, 36, a ringleader who marched on another Lonmin mineshaft this week, said: "I won't vote ANC. They have killed our workers. I don't recognise the ANC any more. Jacob Zuma must step down. It's over now. It's over."

The ANC was already bleeding electoral support before Marikana and sinking into factionalism. The party is accused of enriching a tiny black elite while failing to bring decent education, healthcare and jobs to the poor.

Once a courageous anti-apartheid warrior, Ramaphosa now sits on the board of Lonmin and, it was recently reported, can afford to bid up to R19.5m (£1,480,000) for a prize buffalo.

Protests over poor service delivery have been swelling for years, sometimes fatally, but the scale of Marikana looks like a watershed.

Allister Sparks, a veteran journalist and analyst, said: "It is a cataclysm. Black people saw the police of the black ANC government shooting their own workers. It's shattered the deep-seated trust of the ANC as 'our party', the party you're born into, the party your fathers belonged to.

"The ANC was in the black mind, the black soul, it took on an almost mystical quality. But now they've lost faith in it. The bond is shattered and it happened on television."

The unwritten, almost Faustian, pact made by the ANC at the end of apartheid is creaking under the weight of curdled promises. It set up the ANC's union allies to deliver modestly higher wages for workers while also ensuring labour stability for big business. It saw Thabo Mbeki, the former president, assuring business owners that they should donate to the ANC because "people trust us, we fought for them ... they will be patient".

The patience now appears exhausted. Critics say white capital was essentially left untouched and that the purportedly socialist ANC was co-opted by the establishment.

Malema has been calling for a revolution that will make the mines ungovernable until they are nationalised. He has lashed out at British firms such as Lonmin for scooping mineral resources from under the soil upon which workers live in squalid conditions.

Lonmin is easily portrayed as a ruthless capitalist vulture presiding over Orwellian conditions, but the details are bitterly disputed. Mineworkers continue to insist they are paid R4,000 a month and want R12,500. Lonmin asserts that most workers get about 10,500, if bonuses are included.

Economists claim this amount would put them in the top 25% of formal-sector earners in South Africa. "There are a hell of a lot of people in the country worse off than those miners," said one.

Yet it is hard to gloss over the bleak landscape in Marikana, where mine headgear spins, chimneys belch smoke, and giant corrugated steel and concrete silos loom over scrubland dotted with shacks, rubbish and dung.

The Bench Marks Foundation, an organisation monitoring corporate social responsibility, has described a "yawning gap" between Lonmin's promises and the experience of local communities. "They don't engage, they don't communicate properly with the community," it said.

Defenders of Lonmin argue that housing is also a local government responsibility and that many mine workers use part of their wage to maintain homes in distant provinces.

Lonmin claimed: "There are factual inaccuracies within the Bench Marks report and the company doesn't agree with all the findings. However, it does acknowledge that there are certain areas in which it could be doing better. This is a challenge faced by the entire mining community and requires the co-operation and involvement of many parties."

Writing in South Africa's Sunday Times, Ramaphosa admitted: "There are few innocents in this tragic saga ... For wherever we find ourselves, we cannot escape the sense that, through our action or inaction, we bear some responsibility for the circumstances that made such a tragedy possible.

"As we mourn, so too must we introspect ... What we do now as a people will determine what we become as a nation."

The government has expressed frustration at the mining sector's slow pace of transformation. The sector failed to meet last year's target of 15% black ownership, transferring only 9% of wealth into black hands. It looks unlikely to achieve the required 26% by 2014.

The horror of Marikana and the daily grinding poverty of mines like it can be traced to boardrooms in London and elsewhere.

Robust

Moeletsi Mbeki, an economist and brother of the former president, said: "It's a 140-year-old problem. The mining industry in South Africa effectively started in 1870. Marikana is telling us that the change in 1994 was to incorporate the black elite into the socioeconomic system that the white elite had been running for 140 years. It is a formula loaded with conflict in which violence keeps repeating itself."

Mbeki does not expect a national "catastrophe" to follow but warned: "There is a lot of popular discontent; you can't say popular discontent is not endemic. The reason why the government reacted the way it did is that they have got to show the poor they can react like the previous regime and crack down on discontent.

"We have seen it before with service delivery protests around the country. The difference this time is a lot of people died in one place on the property of a foreign company."

Just how far could the rage spill in this, one of the world's most unequal and violent industrial societies?

Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, has cast Marikana as a warning, "a bomb waiting to explode".

Justice Malala, a political analyst, wrote of the disenfranchised: "It might make many of us quiver with fear, but here is the cold, hard, truth: they will opt out of the current social, economic and political arrangements and they will choose anarchy."

Paul Verryn, a Methodist minister visiting Marikana this week where he helped broker talks between striking workers and mine management, said the prospect of more violence "nestles in the consciousness of all of us".

He said: "We've got to look very carefully at history. It teaches us that this kind of disparity between rich and poor doesn't go to bed at night. If we don't shift we are preparing ourselves for a revolution."

But while the scars of apartheid unquestionably run deep, other voices warn against nihilism. They argue that racial disparities are narrowing due to the growth of a black middle-class and a gradual but discernible increase in black ownership of companies, homes and land.

Unlike regimes toppled by the Arab spring, South Africa is a country with robust democratic institutions, courts and civil society.

Asked if South Africa was hurtling towards disaster, Sparks said: "I've read that in foreign newspapers for the last 18 years. This is a substantial country, not just a pile of bricks. This is not a country in imminent crisis but it is a country being badly governed, and the constituency that always supported it is losing faith in it."

Meanwhile, amid allegations that police in Marikana shot some miners in cold blood or ran over them in armoured vehicles, the strike continues to boil.

On Wednesday more than 3,000 workers took to the streets. At the head of the march one man carried a handwritten cardboard sign that read: "Lonmin, who gave you power to kill us on our own land? Protect us Juju [Malema].

One demonstrator said: "We work very hard to earn peanuts. Whenever you enter the [lift] cage you risk your life. If they don't give us 12,500, we'll go back to where we're from and break the bank. We will do whatever we have to do to get money. Even if we have to kill to get money, we'll do it."

Asked if he believed whether violence could ever be the answer, the miner replied: "Sometimes violence is the answer."
Topics

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Marikana mine shootings revive bitter days of Soweto and Sharpeville

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Phumelele Gura survived a barrage of police bullets and more than two weeks in prison, where he lay awake listening to the sound of workmates allegedly being tortured. His grandfather and his father backed the ANC. He no longer will. "I won't vote for the ANC next time because they failed the people," he said.

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SEGREGATION | Meaning & Definition for UK English | Lexico.com

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UK English definition of SEGREGATION along with additional meanings, example sentences, and ways to say.

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The End of Apartheid - HistoryWiz South Africa

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Key Takeaways

South Africa's Population Registration Act No. 30 (commenced on July 7) was passed in 1950 and defined in clear terms who belonged to a particular race. Race was defined by physical appearance and the act required people to be identified and registered from birth as belonging to one of four distinct racial groups: White, Coloured, Bantu (Black African), and Other. It was one of the "pillars" of Apartheid. When the law was implemented, citizens were issued identity documents and race was reflected by the individual's Identity Number.

The Act was typified by humiliating tests which determined race through perceived linguistic and/or physical characteristics. The wording of the Act was imprecise, but it was applied with great enthusiasm:

A White person is one who is in appearance obviously white - and not generally accepted as Coloured - or who is generally accepted as White - and is not obviously Non-White, provided that a person shall not be classified as a White person if one of his natural parents has been classified as a Coloured person or a Bantu...

A Bantu is a person who is, or is generally accepted as, a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa...

A Coloured is a person who is not a White person or a Bantu...

Racial Test

The following elements were used for determining the Coloureds from the Whites:

Skin color

Facial features

Characteristics of the person's hair on their head

Characteristics of the person's other hair

Home language and the knowledge of Afrikaans

The area where the person lives

The person's friends

Eating and drinking habits

Employment

Socioeconomic status

The Pencil Test

If the authorities doubted the color of someone's skin, they would use a "pencil in hair test." A pencil was pushed in the hair, and if it remained in place without dropping, the hair was designated as frizzy hair and the person would then be classified as colored. If the pencil dropped out of the hair, the person would be deemed white.

Incorrect Determination

Many decisions were wrong, and families wound up being split and/or evicted for living in the wrong area. Hundreds of colored families were reclassified as white and in a handful of instances, Afrikaners were designated as colored. In addition, some Afrikaner parents abandoned children with frizzy hair or children with dark skin who were considered outcasts.

Other Apartheid Laws

The Population Registration Act No. 30 worked in conjunction with other laws passed under the apartheid system. Under the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, it was illegal for a white person to marry someone of another race. The Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 made it a crime for a white person to have sex with someone from another race.

Repeal of The Population Registration Act

The South African Parliament repealed the act on June 17, 1991. However, the racial categories set forth by the act are still ingrained in the culture of South Africa. They also still underlie some of the official policies designed to remedy past economic inequalities.

"War Measures Continuation. Population Registration." South African History Online, June 22, 1950.

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The Population Registration Act No 30. of 1950 Under Apartheid

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The Population Registration Act made it so that South Africans had to be identified and registered as belonging to one of four distinct racial groups.

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South Africa

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By the end of the 1980s it was clear that apartheid as a political system would soon end. What no one knew was how it would end - and what would replace it. The end of the Cold War meant that the United States and Britain no longer felt they had to prop up dictatorships - or white power in South Africa. West European countries could now allow a measure of democracy to flourish in the rest of the world. Change was possible not just in former communist countries.

Many people assumed that democracy and majority rule in South Africa would bring chaos and bloodshed. No political organisation was allowed to non-white South Africans except those created by the apartheid state. Crushed by the repression of the early 1960s and dominated by the South African Communist Party (SACP), the African National Congress was unimpressive. Some of its leaders, including Nelson Mandela, were in prison in South Africa. The rest were in exile. At its headquarters in the Zambian capital, Lusaka, journalists were offered interviews with an incoherent alcoholic spokesman, Tom Sabina, who claimed that armed struggle would soon achieve total victory. Its public message was a mishmash of liberal aspirations and violent Marxist slogans. Despite this, the ANC managed to survive, held together by the personal charm of its indefatigable president, Oliver Tambo, and the rigorous, secretive structures of the SACP. Once they trusted you, its leaders would discuss the changes that were taking place in South Africa. But they had no idea how quickly the end of apartheid would come. They were not even close to preparing for government.

No one knew what Nelson Mandela was like. When news reached the ANC's exiled leaders in the late 1980s that he had talked with senior representatives of the apartheid government and even met P W Botha, they panicked. Under the ANC's rigid rules, he had not been authorised to do that. There were fears that Mandela had been turned while he was in jail. Senior ANC members started to brief the press to prepare them for the dumping of Mandela. Frene Ginwala, later Speaker of the Parliament, and Aziz Pahad, who became Deputy Foreign Minister, began to lay the groundwork, saying: "We just don't know what they have been giving him ... He's an old man and has been in prison for a long time... He may not quite understand ..."

Their fears were groundless. Looking back, it is impossible to imagine the end of apartheid and the birth of the new South Africa without Mandela. He was seen as the hinge on which transition turned. Historians will find it hard to disentangle the economic and political inevitability of apartheid's collapse from the personal mission of its remarkable new president. At a distance, the two merge in a glorious moment of fairytale history.

Jail had strengthened and matured Mandela. More importantly for the exiled ANC, he had remained firmly within the ideology and policy of the party, describing himself as its humble servant. He had not done or said anything of political importance that the movement had not sanctioned. But, ironically, locked up and deprived of news, he saw further than the exiled leaders of the ANC living in Lusaka and London. And he still believed the rhetoric of the Freedom Charter: "that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white ... that only a democratic state, based on the will of the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or creed."

Mandela's impact on the world was immense. The passionate re-assertion of the fundamental principles of human civilisation by a merry old black man imprisoned for 27 years for being black was like the rediscovery of childhood innocence and happiness. In South Africa, those principles became the foundation of the world's most liberal constitution. In the rest of Africa, however, the impact was less certain. To other African rulers, Mandela's belief in freedom, democracy and justice sounded like something from another planet.

Until the beginning of the 1990s there were only two nominal multi-party democracies on the continent: Botswana and Gambia. Most African countries were one-party states ruled by dictators, many of them military. Opposition was not tolerated. But to Britain, France and the US, Mandela and the new South Africa gave hope for the rest of Africa. The continent could be taken seriously.

Mandela also gave hope to ordinary people in Africa. Wherever he went, he was greeted by cheering and dancing crowds. But he did not explicitly promote an agenda of freedom and democracy on these early journeys. Most of the visits were to thank African rulers for the support they had given the ANC during the struggle.

Although many of these leaders were themselves unrepentant old dictators, Mandela was always very careful not to criticise the governments of countries he visited, especially when, like Libya, they had helped the ANC. If asked about the human rights situation in a particular African country, he would smile and say that he had been away for a while and was not well-informed about latest developments. This was disingenuous but smart. He wanted to meet everyone, even if they were crooks or murderers. But the point was not missed. The words he used; freedom, rights, justice, caused many African dictators to pause and look over their shoulders. After all, he had talked to the most evil regime on the planet; nothing would be lost by a handshake and a few words. But many African opposition activists who had suffered in jail pointed out that Mandela would not have survived 27 years if he had been jailed in their countries.

During white rule in South Africa, the ANC and its supporters argued that Africa's poverty was the result of apartheid. Africa could begin to develop only once South Africa's industrial energy could be put to use for the benefit of the whole continent. At one level, it was true; Africa's biggest economy was cut off from all but its immediate neighbours. But it was clearly nonsense to blame hunger in Ethiopia on South Africa's race laws. At a deeper level, one legacy of colonialism has been a lack of self-belief, belief in Africa, Africans' ability and African institutions. "This is a wonderful country, the only problem is that it is run by Africans" has been a distressingly common sentiment across Africa. Nelson Mandela changed that. His dignity, self-belief and refusal to become a victim inspired millions of people, especially Africans. Here was a role model for any black people facing oppression. He renewed Africa's pride in itself.

When the ANC came to power, the big question for South Africa was whether it would embrace or remain separate from the rest of the continent. Its economy worked well but needed foreign investment. But foreign investors were put off by Africa's image of inefficiency, instability and corruption. So it made economic sense for the new South Africa to maintain a discreet distance from the rest of Africa. But would Mandela's government show solidarity with the continent or follow its self-interest?

It was not even a question for Mandela. He committed South Africa to being totally African. But where African rulers demanded solidarity against the "West" by asserting undefined "African values", Mandela preached universal values: freedom of speech, human rights and democracy. The continent's dictators had oppressed their people, claiming their rule was the "African way", and fended off criticism from the rest of the world by claiming it was neo-colonialist or racist interference in their internal affairs. The formula worked well, especially against former colonial powers. Mandela was careful not to condemn African rulers, but he began to undermine that defence with his call for universal human rights and freedoms.

Thus, South Africa came to have one of the most liberal constitutions in the world, making it as different from the rest of Africa as the old South Africa had been - but this time in the opposite direction. The new constitution enshrined rights for women and gays. In much of the rest of Africa, women are expected to stay at home and defer to men. Women's rights are a joke and gay rights unmentionable - in many African states homosexuality is a crime. Mandela's support for law and personal freedom flew in the face of many African customs and attitudes. He may have committed South Africa to Africa but it remained a very different country to the rest of the continent.

It was a difficult path to tread. South Africa's immense economic, political and military power could not but influence the rest of the continent. Yet the ANC government, deeply conscious that South Africa had bullied its neighbours in the past, did not want to use coercion again, even in the cause of its liberal values. Somehow it had to turn from a malign to a benign giant. But how? Mandela's principle was that if he could talk to the apartheid regime, he could talk to anybody. He approached people with an assumption of goodwill and emphasised forgiveness and reconciliation. Power sharing - even with evil murderers - was acceptable politically if it brought peace. Immediately after his release, for example, he upset the West by trying to heal the rift between Libya and the West over the Lockerbie bombing. He sought to have the men convicted of the bombing brought back to Libya and showed sympathy for them as imprisoned individuals. It was one of his few direct foreign policy successes.

Mandela demonstrated that he was not afraid to upset Western governments in his statements of solidarity with the rest of Africa. At one level, there seemed to be a common interest in making peace. Western countries were keen for Mandela and South Africa to sort out Africa on their behalf. "African solutions to African problems," a phrase that came from the Clinton administration, seemed to fulfil Africans' ambitions to be masters of their own fate. But it was in part a cynical ploy of the West to wash its hands of Africa.

The Americans and British, and to a lesser extent the French, hoped that South Africa would become the policeman of the continent on their behalf. That was the last thing South Africa wanted; to be seen as the cat's paw of the West in Africa.

In 2000, Mandela threw South Africa's weight behind the plan to replace the Organisation of African Unity with the African Union. Given a wider and deeper mandate than its predecessor, the AU charter commits Africa to the principles of democracy and respect for human rights. Most importantly, the principle of intervention under certain circumstances replaced the principle of non-interference.

Mandela was also keen to get involved in making peace directly in Africa. But he would often make up foreign policy over the phone as he went along. As he got older, he sometimes forgot to brief his officials on what he had said.

Right from the start, Africa's ecstasy and agony confronted the new government. In 1994, against all predictions, as South Africa's first democratic election passed off peacefully and brought Mandela to power, hundreds of thousands of people were being murdered in Rwanda in the world's fastest genocide. Mandela later apologised for not doing more at the time, but it would have been hard to break off the party. He tried to make up for it by taking the lead in the Burundi peace process. It was a long, tortuous road and the Burundians showed no particular respect for Mandela. Only 10 years later was there an election and the beginnings of peace.

Under Mandela, South Africa took the political lead in other African crises, too. In 1996, Congo - then Zaire - was in crisis and Mandela tried to broker peace between President Mobutu Sese Seko and the rebels headed by Laurent Kabila and backed by Rwanda and Uganda. He did not succeed. Kabila and his allies also rebuffed his attempts at a power-sharing agreement and pressed on to take the whole country.

In 1995, when the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha hanged Ken Saro Wiwa in the middle of a Commonwealth conference, Mandela was outraged. Nigeria's Foreign Minister hit back, saying Mandela could not be trusted, calling him "the black president of a white state". That was the first time someone had insulted Mandela in such a way, but the Nigerians got away with it. Mandela's magisterial condemnation of Saro Wiwa's judicial murder was thrown back in his face.

In 1998, Mandela sent the South African army into the tiny state of Lesotho, landlocked by South Africa, when an election ended in violence. Embarrassingly, it encountered unexpected resistance from the Lesotho army and suffered casualties before order was restored. But it began to be clear that when it came down to realpolitik, the new South Africa might be no more popular than the old South Africa.

Robert Mugabe gave Mandela the most grief. His party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu), had been aligned to the Pan Africanist Congress, the ANC's South African rival, with the ANC aligned to Mugabe's rival, the Zimbabwe African Patriotic Union. This mattered. Even after independence, the abstruse but internecine infighting between the liberation movements continued. During apartheid, Mugabe had been chairman of the Frontline States, the alliance of southern African countries fending off South Africa's attacks in the region. With the end of apartheid, his role was redundant. Both politically and personally, Mugabe felt marginalised. Beside Mandela, he began to sound bitter and outdated.

In 1998, Mandela was involved in Congo again. Mugabe led an alliance of southern African states to protect President Kabila from rebels backed by Uganda and Rwanda. This was, in the words of Madeleine Albright, Africa's first world war. South Africa vigorously opposed the move but Mandela was outmanoeuvred and forced to support it. It was a personal and political public humiliation for Mandela. An aide recalls taking a call from Mugabe and Mandela, head in hands, saying: "Please don't tell me I have to talk to Comrade Mugabe again."

If Mandela's Africa diplomacy was sometimes thwarted, South Africa's new commercial activities in the rest of the continent were often rejected outright. Held back by the boycotts in the apartheid era, South African businesses and transnational corporations burst into action as soon as apartheid was declared dead. They sold cheap South African goods and bought up local businesses. Their impact on the region's economies was not always benign and they were regarded as arrogant and domineering. But they have persisted and are far more prepared to work in zones of political instability than their European or American counterparts.

So the new South Africa under Nelson Mandela was not always the bridge that linked Africa to the rest of the world. Both politically and commercially, it was often perceived as a wolf in sheep's clothing: politically a tool of Western governments, commercially gobbling up African businesses or starving them to death by undercutting their prices. While Mandela was a great African hero to ordinary Africans, to many African politicians he was just another interfering and powerful African ruler to be outmanoeuvred.
Richard Dowden is director of the Royal African Society
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Nelson Mandela: The man who shaped the new South Africa

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By the end of the 1980s it was clear that apartheid as a political system would soon end. What no one knew was how it would end - and what would replace it. The end of the Cold War meant that the United States and Britain no longer felt they had to prop up dictatorships - or white power in South Africa.