Ten years ago, as South Africa prepared to hold its first democratic election, the air was heavy with foreboding. Just getting to that moment had been traumatic.non-separatist deal, writes Allister Sparks
Foreign correspondents were streaming in to write doomsday stories about a racial bloodbath.
Or were we perhaps destined to join the list of intractable conflicts between rival ethno-nationalisms from Israel to Yugoslavia, from Sri Lanka to Northern Ireland?
Miraculously, the answer turned out to be no.
Last week, I reported on my country's third election in its decade of democracy, and the remarkable thing was how unremarkable it was. It was peaceful and orderly. The lines were so long that I waited until late evening before casting my vote. Although the ANC dominated once again, we can truly say we have more than a one-party state: in all, 12 groups won representation.
It was an election in which the centre triumphed. The white extremists and the black parties of the far left are no more. All the major parties fought to claim the middle ground.
And although the ANC's two-thirds majority gives it the power to change the constitution, the party has said it will not do so.
The country still faces grave problems. It has one of the world's worst incidences of AIDS, and stubborn unemployment confines large numbers of black South Africans to sprawling, dirt-poor shanty towns. Crime is rampant.
But this bad news is, in one sense, good news. These problems, while severe, are the problems of many developing nations and democracies. Contentious issues of race, ethnicity and religion no longer dominate our political debate.
In a world going through a frightening phase of ethnic cleansing and religious fundamentalism, the new integrated South Africa is an unsung success story.
It is a country in which all schools and universities, all health and other civic services, all living areas and fields of employment, are now racially integrated. Even the geopolitical map of the country has been redrawn to wrap the 10 little tribal bantustans, supposed to be apartheid's separatist solution to the race conflict, into a single nation of nine provinces, each with its own legislature.
Hundreds of black townships have been incorporated into adjacent, formerly white-run towns and cities, each governed by a single municipal council in which black mayors and councillors predominate.
Much of the country's wealth is being transferred to a rapidly growing black middle class, now bigger than the white middle class.
Overlaying the old racial divide between white and black, a new class stratification has emerged, resembling Brazil's combination of an affluent multiracial middle class and a large black underclass. Although race relations are more relaxed than ever, closing that wealth gap between the two classes is the biggest challenge.
All this amounts to a significant achievement in a single decade. Yet the biggest achievement of all is one seldom noted - the resolution of the conflict between two nationalisms.
Though often compared to segregation in the US, apartheid was much more than a matter of separate schools, park benches, buses and lunch counters. At bottom, it was a struggle over ownership of the country.
Whose country was South Africa? Afrikaner nationalists claimed it as theirs. Descended from Dutch settlers who landed three-and-a-half centuries ago, the Afrikaners saw South Africa as a white nation. They believed their pioneering ancestors had come here on a divine mission to Christianise and civilise the "dark continent".
The African nationalists, led by the ANC, rejected that notion and claimed their right to be full citizens and part of a ruling majority.
Where else do you find such a struggle with rival claims to the same piece of territory? Not in the US, but between Israelis and Palestinians, the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland, the Greeks and Turks of Cyprus, or the Tamils and Sinhalese of Sri Lanka. And how are they doing? Not very well. South Africa alone has cracked it.
It has done so by recognizing, as others have not, that there comes a point of violent equilibrium in such struggles where there can be no victor, where the struggle can only drag on and on. There came a moment when the National Party government, once thought to be irredeemably pig-headed, woke up to the fact that you could not defeat a freedom struggle supported by an oppressed majority by military means alone. You may repress it for a time, but it will always bounce back, more militant than ever.
The only way to end the conflict is to seek a solution negotiated not with "moderates" of the regime's own choosing, as the old South Africa tried repeatedly, but with authentic leaders whose authority extends to the most militant elements of the liberation struggle.
South Africa was fortunate in having leaders of rare quality in then-President Frederik W. de Klerk and then-prisoner Nelson Mandela - the former capable of making a bold leap of faith, the latter able to respond to it - who together were able to chart a way forward to a new constitution.
Ultimately, this do-it-yourself agreement was the key to success. Although international sanctions supplied some pressure, no agreement was ever imposed or even proposed from outside.
There were no foreign mediators, no Lancaster House conference in London as there was for Zimbabwe, no handshake on the White House lawn as there was for Israeli and Palestinian leaders. The adversaries thrashed it out for themselves. That it was of their own making is what has given it stability.
To appreciate what an exceptional achievement this has been, imagine this model for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I don't mean the two-state solution of the Oslo accords or the Bush administration's "roadmap", for those are segregationist, apartheid solutions.
No, a South African solution in the Middle East would consolidate Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank into one country ruled by an elected majority, which soon would be Palestinian. The Jewish people would live as a minority group, albeit an economically dominant one.
If that strikes anyone as improbable, then let it be the measure of judging South Africa's achievement - one that has turned this country, so recently the racist polecat of the world, into a paradigm for a world riven by racial and religious strife.
Mbeki was inaugurated on Tuesday and this brought to mind the crisp May day in 1994 when I found myself in the midst of a great crowd watching Nelson Mandela take the oath of office as South Africa's first black president.
It was the most stirring moment of my life. For more than 40 years as a journalist in South Africa, I had written about the pain and injustices that apartheid inflicted on people. I had been harassed and threatened by a white regime. It is terrible to feel alienated from one's own people. Although I was a fifth-generation white South African, I described myself as "emotionally stateless".
But on that day in 1994, as I stood before a new flag, listening to a new anthem, watching a new president being sworn in, I felt, yes, my very first twinge of national pride.
Allister Sparks is a veteran South African journalist. He is the author of Beyond the Miracle, an assessment of South Africa's 10 years of democracy. - (LA Times/Washington Post service)