People queue to cast their votes In Soweto, South Africa April 27, 1994, in the country's first all-race elections. South Africans celebrate"Freedom Day" every April 27.People queue to cast their votes In Soweto, South Africa April 27, 1994, in the country's first all-race elections. South Africans celebrate"Freedom Day" every April 27.
Here's what you need to know about that iconic moment and a South Africa that's changing again 30 years on:The 1994 election was the culmination of a process that began four years earlier when F.W. de Klerk, the last apartheid-era president, shocked the world and his country by announcing that the ANC and other anti-apartheid parties would be unbanned.
A country that had been shunned and sanctioned by the international community for decades because of apartheid emerged as a fully-fledged democracy.Nearly 20 million South Africans of all races voted, compared with just 3 million white people in the last general election under apartheid in 1989. Apartheid, which began in 1948 and lasted for nearly half-a-century, had oppressed Black and other non-white people through a series of race-based laws. Not only did the laws deny them a vote, they controlled where Black people lived, where they were allowed to go on any given day, what jobs they were allowed to hold and who they were allowed to marry.
Millions of Black South Africans still live in neglected, impoverished townships and informal settlements on the fringes of cities in what many see as a betrayal of the heroes Mandela referred to. South Africa is still rated as one of the most unequal countries in the world.
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