ABSTRACT
Dismantling apartheid is an on-going process that will take far longer to achieve than the nine-year transitional period surveyed in this chapter. In the period between 1990 and 1999 substantial progress was made in removing many of the more openly discriminatory measures of the apartheid era. However, other issues remained essentially conditioned by the apartheid mould as a legacy for the new millennium. Some of these are outlined in Chapter 9. Transition to the post-apartheid era began with the speech delivered to parliament by President F.W. de Klerk on 2 February 1990, in which he announced the unbanning of the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress, the South African Communist Party and other organizations. This was accompanied by the release of political prisoners, notably the African National Congress leader, Nelson Mandela.
