5/1994 Mandela Named President, Closing the Era of Apartheid

HISTORY: On May 9, 1994 Mandela is Named President, Closing the Era of Apartheid
By BILL KELLER
Special to The New York Times

CAPE TOWN, May 9, 1994 -- 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.

Unopposed, Mr. Mandela was proclaimed president without a word of dissent or even a show of hands, then sat, strangely grim-faced, while his giddy followers whooped in unparliamentary delight.

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,' he declared, from the same perch where he first addressed his followers four years ago after he was released and the negotiated revolution began in earnest.

'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,' he said. Afterwards Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, the irrepressible Anglican Primate of Southern Africa, who serves as a kind of national toastmaster, sprang to the microphone and gleefully shrieked, 'We are free today! We are free today!'

Mr. Mandela does not become president until Tuesday when he is to be sworn in at a pageant in Pretoria, but the symbolic redefining of South Africa was already dizzily under way.

Entering the Parliamentary chamber from which blacks were previously excluded, Mr. Mandela was announced by a bare-chested tribal imbongi, or praise-singer, shouting tributes to this most famous prisoner of apartheid.

Before the new Parliament adjourned its maiden session, the Speaker -- for centuries a white man in a black morning coat -- was an Indian woman in a sari, Frene Ginwala, an eloquent lawyer and women's rights campaigner who found cause for celebration in the more than 70 women elected among the 400 lawmakers.

Mr. Mandela entered the chamber with his arm around his predecessor, F. W. de Klerk, and settled into the brown leather seat from which Mr. de Klerk led the repeal of apartheid during the last four years.

Mr. de Klerk, still president for a day, moved across the aisle to the place from which the pro-apartheid opposition used to harangue him as a traitor to his race. In the new order, he is one of two vice presidents.

Behind them the assembly fanned out in a florid display of races and costumes, white men in suits outnumbered by black women in the bright hats that are the feminine custom of the house. The Parliament is roughly a mirror of the public, which is about 75 percent black, 15 percent white, and 10 percent Indian and mixed-race.

The spectacle today shattered not only the South African tradition of minority dominion but also the stereotype of liberation parliaments, for here the former prisoners were sworn in alongside their former jailers, returned exiles sat across from recycled racists, and the descendants of the system joined its victims and the next of kin.

Bitter Foes Embrace

All are now $55,000-a-year incumbents who will address each other as 'honorable member' in the same spirit with which Mr. Mandela bounded from his place today to embrace his Zulu nationalist rival, Chief Mangosuthu G. Buthelezi, and to pump the hand of Gen. Constandt Viljoen, parliamentary leader of the nine-member white separatist delegation.

The new legislators came forward in flights of 10 to be sworn in, each lineup containing several novels' worth of pain endured and history upended.

In the first batch, together with Mr. Mandela, stood his estranged wife Winnie, the militant champion of the dispossessed and convicted kidnapper. Mr. Mandela ignored her, staring away as they pledged their devotion to the new South Africa, and ignored her again later when she sat briefly beside him to nominate the deputy Speaker.

In recent weeks she has spoken of reconciliation, and he has denied it. He invited their two daughters to escort him to the main inaugural party Tuesday, but Mrs. Mandela is not on the guest list.

A Display of Red Socks

Sharing the first oath, too, was Joe Slovo, the Communist Party chairman and one of about 50 Communists who serve under the umbrella of Mr. Mandela's African National Congress -- allies of convenience, nothing more, Mr. Mandela always explains, but a reliable source of white anxiety. Mr. Slovo wore his trademark red socks, and on the way in hoisted his trouser legs for the TV cameras.

Another group included Ahmed Kathrada, perhaps the new order's most perfect example of whimsical reversal. Mr. Kathrada shared a cell block with Mr. Mandela on Robben Island and served as scribe and editor of illicit prison writings. Now he is Mr. Mandela's designated Minister of Correctional Services, responsible for overseeing the prison system.

The African National Congress, which won 252 of the 400 seats, held its first caucus Sunday in the older parliamentary chamber where the apartheid laws were enacted and where the founding ideologist of separation, Hendrik F. Verwoerd, survived two bullets from a would-be assassin.

Today the whole assembly gathered in a chamber built in 1985 for joint sessions of a tricameral parliament, an apartheid device that excluded blacks but provided houses to represent Indians and mixed-race people.

Passing along the once forbidden corridors, the tortured and exiled gawked at stiffly heroic paintings of the Afrikaners who have run the country since 1948.

Will the Gallery Change?

'I hope some of the portraits that are hanging here will be taken to the museum so that there really will be a change,' said Gen. Bantu Holomisa, the former dictator of the Transkei homeland, elected on Mr. Mandela's ticket.

'I'm excited like a young boy,' said Cyril Ramaphosa, the African National Congress's chief negotiator and party leader, who eschewed a Cabinet post after being passed over for a vice-presidency but showed no sign of depression today. 'This is a Parliament we've been storming all these years and finally, through negotiations, the doors are open and we are walking in very majestically.'

By the end of the week Mr. Mandela is expected to have a full complement of 27 Cabinet ministers, and by June the Parliament should be at work on his first budget.

De Klerk's Choices for Cabinet

Mr. de Klerk today announced the six members of his party who will be included in the unity Cabinet, including Roelof F. Botha, the world's longest serving Foreign Minister, who will take over the mining portfolio, Roelf Meyer, the party's chief negotiator, who will handle constitutional issues and relations with the provinces, and Derek Keys, who retains his post as Finance Minister.

Mr. Mandela announced most of the Cabinet choices from his own party last week.

Leaders of Chief Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party said today that they would accept three posts in the new Cabinet, joining the unity Government despite months of insisting that the Constitution was fatally flawed.

The only determined outsider in the new panoply was General Viljoen, who ran in hope of winning the Afrikaners an independent homeland by fighting from the inside.

Asked what would be his role in the new Parliament, he declared: 'Opposition, of course. There is no other way.'