ABSTRACT
The demise of apartheid was a watershed experience for every South African. That the early 1990s breathed change and hope was the notion that characterised private and public lives of that era. For many South Africans, the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first black President of the Republic of South Africa presaged the imminent realisation of a “rainbow nation.” Moreover, the whole world had followed South Africa’s peaceful transition and had watched when the country’s people were allowed to vote for the first time in 1994. The implementation of the world’s most democratic and egalitarian constitution two years later was as much understood as the tombstone of apartheid as the birth announcement of “the new South Africa.”
