The pre-history of the post-apartheid settlement: Non-racial democracy in South Africa’s Cape Colony, 1853-1936

Abstract

As the political underpinnings of South Africa’s apartheid regime began to give way in the early 1990s, observers both inside and outside the country expected a major transformation, not just of the scope of the electorate, but also of the character of political and economic life. Having been branded, by American and British politicians as well as by proponents of the apartheid state, as a communist and terrorist organization, the African National Congress (ANC) might easily have been expected to have arrived in power with a revolutionary agenda. As Anthony Butler recalls of the period, ‘conservative. scaremongering reinforced radicals’ trumpeting of the revolution to come. For visitors, the collapse of the apartheid state seemed to promise (or threaten) revolutionary upheaval’ (Butler, 1998: 127). Nor was this expectation of imminent transformation unique to scholarly or privileged observers. ‘Mandela has been released, now where is my house?’ one woman from a squatter settlement outside Cape Town wrote to a local newspaper (cited in Murray, 1994: 4).