‘Free at last’: When South Africa voted in democracy, kicked out apartheid

Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna reflects on April 27, 1994 and the lessons from the transition from apartheid to democracy.

He cast a vote.

There is nothing remarkable about that. In this year alone nearly 50 percent of the world’s population will head to the polls in at least 64 countries. They may not all meet the bar of being free and fair but that is still some four billion people who will fill in a ballot in some form or another.

But this particular vote was cast 30 years ago on April 27, 1994. It was South Africa’s first democratic election and the man voting for the first time was Nelson Mandela.

He chose to vote in Inanda in KwaZulu-Natal – the polling station close to the grave of John Dube who was the founding president of Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC). Being Mandela, he stopped to pay his respects at the graveside, and then being Mandela he waited his turn to vote rather than go straight to the front.

I’d joined the queue shortly before him to be in place when he voted – and I, along with about 20 million other South Africans, cast a ballot for the first time. The vast majority had been forbidden from voting in the apartheid state because they were not white. In my case, I had chosen not to exercise the right to vote until everyone who wanted to could – a white-only vote was one, I believed, in support of a white-only state.