Fault-Lines in South African Democracy

The transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa has raised questions, on the one hand, about the tension between the imperatives of justice and equality and, on the other, reconciliation. Transforming the decades' old apartheid system under conditions of a political compromise has turned out to be a formidable challenge. This paper is about the complexity of the transformation processgoing on in South Africa. Although too early for a real assessmentof the experiment, the tensions, dilemmas, contradictions, paradoxes and some of the changes have already begun to manifest themselves.