South Africa transformed but not perfect

Wednesday's Elections in South Africa remind me of those historic days in April 1994 when that country's women stood in line for many hours to participate in the nation's first fully democratic vote.

How have South Africans fared since then? Did the groundbreaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), whose work followed the 1994 election, successfully heal the wounds of earlier decades? What does the country's future look like?

Democracy's record in South Africa thus far looks mixed. Certainly, life is better for many newly enfranchised nonwhite citizens. The government, dominated by the African National Congress (ANC) which retained its parliamentary majority in the polls Wednesday, has made a priority of delivering safe water, electricity, roads, and schools to far-flung black communities. Meanwhile, many whites have seen living standards decline after the privileges they once kept for themselves were stripped away.

(Some mixed-race "coloreds," and "Indians" also speak of such a decline.) It has not helped that revenues from the country's huge gold-mining and other extraction industries have stayed low.

HIV/AIDS has spread alarmingly fast. The UN estimates that more than 20 percent of South Africans between 15 and 49 years of age carry the infection. The government's response has been marred by ideology, and until recently has been very ineffective. In many communities, a high proportion of teachers and other professionals have already died. Partly because of this scourge the country's score on the UN's Human Development Index, an indicator of physical well-being, slipped significantly between 1995 and 2001.

Matters of physical well-being are certainly crucial for people lacking basic human needs. But democracy has other important goals, too. One is to support institutions through which differences can be addressed without the use of force. In this respect, South Africa's democracy has indubitably triumphed.

Can anyone name another country where a power-wielding minority has negotiated the handover of power to the majority; where that handover has occurred with so little violence; and where the minority continued afterward as part of the new democratic nation?

Those are South Africa's crowning political achievements. Credit for them lies principally in the hands of the courageous white leaders who saw that such a future was possible, and opted for it, and in the ANC leaders who long ago broadened their vision to make a place within the "nation" they sought to build for their white compatriots. (Indeed, many significant ANC leaders have been white.)

Of course, building a new relationship between the white former powerholders and South Africa's massive nonwhite majority has not been easy. One of the most inspiring mechanisms through which this transformation has occurred was the TRC. This body was created in a most unlikely way: as the result of a fairly sordid political deal.

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