The road to the 1994 election

A franchise built on exclusion

South Africa had held elections for decades before 1994. They were not elections of the whole country. From the Union in 1910, the franchise was arranged so that white voters decided the government. The National Party’s victory in 1948 turned that exclusion into the legal system called apartheid: race classification, pass laws, separate political rights, and the “homeland” policy that tried to make Black citizenship a matter for territories the Pretoria government had marked out.

In 1983 a new constitution added separate parliamentary houses for Coloured and Indian voters. Black Africans, the majority of the people, remained outside. By the end of the 1980s the state of emergency, the armed struggle, sanctions, and revolt in the townships had made that settlement impossible to keep.

The opening in 1990

On 2 February 1990 President F. W. de Klerk unbanned the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress and the South African Communist Party, and announced that Nelson Mandela would be released. Mandela walked out of prison on 11 February, after 27 years. The ban on the liberation movements was over. Agreement on what would replace white rule was not.

Talks, and their collapse

The first plenary of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, CODESA, met at the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park on 20 and 21 December 1991. Nineteen parties and administrations sat down. A second plenary, in May 1992, broke up without adopting the reports of its working groups. In June 1992, after the killings at Boipatong, the ANC suspended constitutional talks.

Talks resumed after the Record of Understanding between the government and the ANC on 26 September 1992. The assassination of Chris Hani on 10 April 1993 brought the country close to a different kind of break. The Multi-Party Negotiating Process, which had opened that April, kept going. On 18 November 1993 the negotiators settled an interim constitution.

The months before the vote were still violent, especially in KwaZulu-Natal and on the East Rand, where supporters of the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party were killing one another. In March 1994 the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging tried to prop up the homeland administration in Bophuthatswana and was seen off. Constand Viljoen’s Freedom Front took the other path: it registered for the election and argued for Afrikaner self-determination through the ballot.

What the interim constitution set up

The text negotiated at Kempton Park was enacted by the last apartheid parliament as the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act 200 of 1993. It was assented to on 25 January 1994 and came into force on 27 April 1994. It was deliberately temporary. The parliament elected in 1994 would also sit as a constitutional assembly and write a final constitution, inside 34 principles the negotiators had already fixed.

For the election, the interim constitution mattered in concrete ways:

• A 400-member National Assembly, elected by proportional representation from party lists, with no formal threshold for a seat.
• Nine provinces, absorbing the four old provinces and the homelands, each with its own legislature.
• A 90-member Senate, ten members from each province, chosen by those legislatures.
• A bill of rights and a Constitutional Court.
• A government of national unity. A party with at least 20 seats in the National Assembly was entitled to cabinet posts in proportion to its strength. A party with at least 80 seats could designate a deputy president.

A Transitional Executive Council, drawn from the negotiating parties, shared oversight of the run-up so that the old government was not the only authority in the room.

The last week

The Inkatha Freedom Party, led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, had stayed out. An election without it, in the province where its support and the violence were concentrated, would have been a broken election. On 19 April 1994, a week before voting opened, Buthelezi agreed to take part. The ballots had already been printed. Stickers bearing Inkatha’s name were flown in and fixed to the bottom of the papers.

Voting opened on 26 April. The story of the queue, the missing ballots, and the extra day is on how the election worked. The count is on the results.