FW de Klerk, South Africa's last white president, stunned the world on 2 February 1990 when he announced the lifting of the ban on the African National Congress, after three decades of illegality, and the imminent release of its leader, Nelson Mandela, after more than 27 years in prison. Black South Africans reacted with joyful stupefaction; white South Africans, programmed to view Mandela as the vengeful terrorist who would thrown them all into the sea, were in shock, none more so than the parliamentary caucus of the far right Conservative party.
The caucus held an emergency meeting at which their leader, Andries Treurnicht, better known as "Dr No", read a thunderous passage from the Old Testament, preparing his co-religionists for holy war. A conservative MP there recalled later that they had long been fearing the day might come when they would have to unleash "the Afrikaner tiger". "And, well," the MP said, "this was the tiger moment."
Nine days later, Mandela was out and the next morning he gave a press conference which I attended in the garden of Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Cape Town home. If Mandela had ever been a "terrorist" – he was jailed for founding and leading the armed wing of the ANC – he did not look much like one now. A fit, good-humoured, serene and kingly figure aged 71, he committed himself to finding a negotiated solution to a conflict that had been threatening during the violent Eighties to spill over into civil war.
His recipe for steering the country away from apartheid towards a one-person, one-vote democracy was straightforward: "Reconciling black aspirations with white fears." Mandela also displayed his skills at tiger-taming. Maybe the most memorable moment of the press conference was when the political editor of Die Burger, apartheid's Pravda, raised his hand and identified himself. "How very good to meet you!" Mandela responded, with a big, evidently heartfelt smile. "I have been reading you with great interest for years."
Mandela had begun the business of addressing white fears in a series of secret meetings he had held with leading figures of the apartheid government from the end of 1985. In the weeks following his release, he set about putting much of the Afrikaans-language press in his pocket too, helping create the conditions for the successful elections of 1994, after which he became president, and for the national ceremony of unification one year later at the rugby World Cup final, the happiest day in South Africa's history.
With the focus on South Africa unusually sharp today, due to the impending football World Cup, the question many are asking is whether the political triumphs of 1994 and 1995 were a false dawn. The question is asked because of a fairly widespread perception, in Britain and beyond, that things have turned out rather disappointingly.
The answer depends on what the level of expectation was. Anyone who imagined that all racial tension would vanish in two decades, after a 350-year history during which the white minority behaved towards the black majority as masters do towards slaves, was bound to feel somewhat let down; so was anyone who fancied that the ocean of black poverty surrounding South Africa's islands of white privilege would swiftly dry up, revealing a vast, green landmass of prosperous equality.
On the other hand, those who predicted (and there were plenty) that under black rule South Africa would rapidly subside into Zimbabwean-style basket-casery also have reason to be disappointed. The truth is that it is as frivolous and immature to pronounce South Africa a cheerful utopia today as it is to declare it to be an unmitigated disaster. The answer to the question was always going to be mixed, but with the balance, if one makes a fair assessment of where the country stood when Mandela was released, clearly inclining towards the conclusion that right now there is rather more to admire than to despise.
The South Africa that is preparing to host the World Cup in June has three big problems: rampant crime; corruption in government, especially at local level; and inefficiency in the battle against poverty. As such, the country is not in a much worse predicament than 50 others one might mention, and not as badly off as many more.
But it is the pluses that are the real surprise, given where the country was at the time of Mandela's release and during the four years until the country's first democratic elections were held. It is easy to forget now but if those of us who were making a living out of watching South African politics at that time cast our minds back, we oscillated almost daily between hope and despair. A tremendous wave of violence was unleashed on the black townships around Johannesburg by the black and white right wing (the black right was the primarily rural Zulu movement, Inkatha), with more deaths registered than at any point since the end of the Boer War. I remember in 1993 being asked to write an article comparing and contrasting the prospects for peace in South Africa and Israel/Palestine (following the signing of the Oslo Accords). A prevailing view then, remarkable as it may sound now, was that the odds on success were the same in both places.
Mandela would warn in those days that the country risked "drowning in blood"; de Klerk said he feared an outcome similar to that of the former Yugoslavia, then at war. And, indeed, it was no secret that during most of 1993 the far right, loaded with guns and men experienced in warfare, was mobilising for what they called the Boer "freedom struggle" and others called racist terrorism. Twenty one black people died in bomb explosions caused by the far right in the week before the elections of April 1994. When Mandela assumed the presidency the following month, he spelled out that his priority in office would be to try and cement the foundations of the fragile, infant, menaced democracy.
He succeeded. Thanks in large measure to Mandela's irresistibly seductive appeal to white South Africans, the country has a sound and stable democracy, with not a hint of a terrorist or secessionist movement anywhere on the horizon. The rule of law works. (The current president, Jacob Zuma, had to face charges of rape and corruption, and while he was acquitted on both counts, he endured years of legal hell after being forced to resign as vice-president, two things that might not have happened under similar circumstances in a number of European countries.) Freedom of expression, as seen in an often wildly critical press, is unchecked. And the trade union movement is big, powerful and a constant challenge to government and business alike.
This is not Zimbabwe. This is not, for that matter, Russia, which arrived at democracy at the same time. Socially, things have changed a lot too. South Africa is a country where ordinary, black and white people treat each other not with the arrogance and resentment of the apartheid era but, overwhelmingly, with cordiality and respect. I know this. I have been to South Africa six times in the past year. An American I know, who has spent some six months in South Africa over the last two years, observed that racial tensions remained significantly higher in the US.
As to black aspirations and white fears, both remain works in progress. But compared with how things were in 1990 – with black people now in power, white people having not been thrown into the sea and the Afrikaner tiger tamed – there is plenty to be thankful for.
John Carlin's Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation is the basis for the film Invictus