In the black township of Soweto outside Johannesburg, Ms Winnie Madikizela-Mandela voted yesterday, and forecast that the second all-race election would bring economic freedom to black South Africans.
"This time, the second time around, we are voting for the total political and economic freedom of our people," she told reporters.
"We didn't realise the extent to which we were just politically liberated in 1994 [after the first all-race vote]. Now we realise that without economic freedom of our people, we are not free."
The former wife of the President, Mr Nelson Mandela, walked to the polling station behind the shabby Orlando West High School, but had to wait about 20 minutes before voting while an aide fetched her identity document, which she had left at home.
While she waited, Ms Madikizela-Mandela, the popular president of the African National Congress's Women's League, greeted voters as they came into the polling station.
"One of the greatest aspects of these elections is the fact that they are peaceful and we are not going into governance with thousands of corpses of our people," she said.
However, the killing of two people in black townships of the KwaZulu-Natal flashpoint of Richmond was "tragic," she added. She said the ANC would eradicate poverty in its next five years of governance. The Deputy President, Mr Thabo Mbeki, would continue reform, she added.
"The President [Mandela] did his best in easing racial relations in this country [during his term].
"Comrade Thabo Mbeki is a no-nonsense man. The picnic is over for all those who took advantage of our elderly statesman and abused the process of transformation for their own agenda," warned Ms Madikizela-Mandela.
She said: "This time we [the ANC] cannot blame the past and apartheid for the failures of government, if we should have any in the next five years."
The head of a 19-member Commonwealth observer group monitoring South Africa's elections, Lord Steel, praised South Africa's growing democratic maturity underlined by the absence of terrorism which marred the country's first all-race vote in 1994.
"There is a very big contrast in what was a liberation election and this one which is much more like a normal election held in any country, with healthy debate between the parties and absence of the kind of terrorism and violence and intimidation that occurred last time round," Lord Steel told SABC radio.