ABSTRACT
As the spotlight of international interest in ethnic conflict moves from one part of the globe to another in the early part of the twenty-first century, it tends to focus only fleetingly on South Africa. It is easy to forget that as recently as the 1990s South Africa was rarely out of its glare. The struggle for a new democratic political order that then reached its climax had simmered on for decades, with the rulers of the old South African regime having given a new word to the English language: apartheid.1
