16 - Leaders

Summary

Cape Town, May 9 – The power that had belonged to whites since they first settled on this cape 342 years ago passed today to a Parliament as diverse as any in the world, a cast of proud survivors who began their work by electing Nelson Mandela to be the first black president of South Africa …

Ninety minutes later he appeared on a high balcony at the old Cape Town City Hall, gazed across a delirious throng toward the bay where he spent more than a third of his adult life on an island prison, and spoke his presidential theme of inclusion.

“We place our vision of a new constitutional order for South Africa on the table not as conquerors, prescribing to the conquered … We speak as fellow citizens to heal the wounds of the past with the intent of constructing a new order based on justice for all.”

news item

As the previous chapter makes clear, the age of subgroupism is upon us. Everywhere – in the former Soviet empire, throughout Africa, and in Canada, to cite only the more obvious cases – ethnic, religious, linguistic, racial, nationality, and a host of other subsystems lodged in a more encompassing authority arrangement are finding their voice and successfully pressing for greater control over their own affairs. And where such pressures seem unlikely to overcome economic hardships and political persecutions, the Frontier is crowded with people relocating their subgroupism, leaving their homes and migrating to new ones.