History has a compelling importance in South Africa. Political protagonists often refer to historical events and individuals in expounding their different points of view. The African National Congress ,for example, has as one of its symbols the shield of Bambatha, a Zulu chief who died leading the last armed uprising of Africans against the British in 1906. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the former KwaZulu homeland and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), often refers to Shaka Zulu, the first great monarch to arise in South Africa, who created a large military state in the 1820s. Afrikaners have often called themselves a "chosen people," ordained by God to rule in South Africa. They have argued that their ancestors settled the subcontinent before any African, but that for the past 200 years they have had to fight against the treachery of Africans and the oppression of British imperialists. The study of the history of South Africa, therefore, is a highly contentious arena marked by wide variations of interpretation and infused with politics.

Nelson Mandela, South Africa's most popular anti-apartheid leader, had witnessed the rise and decline of apartheid firsthand. In the mid-1980s, after more than twenty years in prison for opposing apartheid, he assumed a central role in helping to end it. Government and opposition leaders met for talks--tentative ones at first, and then with greater confidence and amid more publicity--and they agreed on a general approach to political reform. Four years of difficult and uneven progress, amid escalating violence and competing political pressures, finally paid off in 1994, when South Africa held its first multiracial democratic elections. And while both sides could claim some of the success in achieving this historic goal, both sides also faced even greater challenges in trying to establish a stable multiracial society in the decades ahead.