A time to heal: Mandela elected South Africa’s first black President
Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black president, ending more than three centuries of white minority rule.
Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) party won 252 of the 400 seats in the country’s first free and democratic elections.
Until 1994 South Africa had a segregationist and racist system of legislation known as apartheid (“apartness” in Afrikaans).
Anti-apartheid revolutionary Mandela spent 27 years in prison before his predecessor as president, FW de Klerk, released him in 1990.
Mandela’s inauguration ceremony took place in the Union Buildings amphitheatre in Pretoria and was attended by politicians and dignitaries from more than 140 countries around the world.
When the new president, flanked by first deputy president Thabo Mbeki and second deputy president FW de Klerk, appeared on the Botha Lawn beneath the Union Buildings the crowd went wild.
More than 100,000 South African men, women and children of all races sang and danced with joy as more than a billion people worldwide watched on television.
Addressing the crowd, Mandela spoke of the “human disaster” of apartheid. He said: “That spiritual and physical oneness we all share with this common homeland explains the depth of the pain we all carried in our hearts as we saw our country tear itself apart in terrible conflict, and as we saw it spurned, outlawed and isolated by the peoples of the world, precisely because it had become the universal base of the pernicious ideology and practice of racism and racial oppression.
“We, the people of South Africa, feel fulfilled that humanity has taken us back into its bosom, that we, who were outlaws not so long ago, have today been given the rare privilege to be host to the nations of the world on our own soil.”
Mandela also urged forgiveness, saying in Afrikaans: “Wat is verby verby” – “What is past is past”. He paid tribute to de Klerk, describing him as one of the greatest reformers of South Africa.
As part of the ceremony Mandela pledged to work for reconciliation. He said: “We are both humbled and elevated by the honour and privilege that you, the people of South Africa, have bestowed on us, as the first president of a united, democratic, non-racial and non-sexist South Africa, to lead our country out of the valley of darkness.
“We understand it still that there is no easy road to freedom. We know it well that none of us acting alone can achieve success. We must therefore act together as a united people, for national reconciliation, for nation-building, for the birth of a new world.
“The time for the healing of the wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us.”
Mandela would remain in office for five years before stepping down in 1999 at the age of 80. He visited Scotland in 1993 to receive his award of Freeman of the City of Glasgow. He received similar honours from eight other parts of the UK, including Aberdeen, Dundee and Midlothian.
He was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, before he died in 2013, aged 95.