IN LATE APRIL last year South Africans voted in their first multiracial election, ending 342 years of white domination.
President Nelson Mandela, a man not normally given to hyperbole, says the country's transition to democracy has succeeded "beyond my wildest dreams."His government of national unity, a coalition of former oppressors and oppressed, has defied the naysayers by holding together. Political violence has declined everywhere except in Kwa-Zu-lu/-Natal, where the African National Congress and the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party are still vying for power.
Elsewhere, ANC guerrilla leaders who never had any experience running a country are earning high marks for a style of governance that is both cautious and conciliatory.
Right-wing Afrikaners, who once threatened to launch a war against black rule, have been silenced. Other whites are no longer fearful about their future under an administration that is predominantly black and will probably be all-black after 1999.
That is when new elections will be held and Mandela plans to retire. The ANC already has announced that it will not continue to share power with the white-led National Party if it wins by as big a margin (63 percent) as it did in 1994.
Among its successes are a feeding program that provides one free meal a day for about 5 million undernourished children, free medical care for children under 6 and pregnant women, and safe drinking water for more than a million people in rural villages.
But Mandela is the first to admit that his government has yet to deliver its promise of a better life for the vast majority of South Africa's 40 million disadvantaged blacks.
"It is quite true that the poor, the homeless, the landless and the jobless want a speedy end to their wretched conditions," he said in a state of the nation speech earlier this week. "But it is wrong to assume that we can reverse three centuries of inequality in just 12 months."
The government has barely begun work on its ambitious Reconstruction and Development Program, budgeted at $10.5 billion over the next five years. It has built fewer than 1,000 of the 1.5 million houses promised for that period.
Unemployment among blacks is more than four times the white rate, and whites still dominate the economy. Of more than 600 companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, only 11 are controlled by blacks.
Although black-white tensions have eased, the feud between the ANC and Inkatha still raises the specter of a tribal-based civil war. Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi threatens "another Chechnya" if the ANC does not honor its promise to recognize the sovereignty of the Zulu monarchy and grant broader powers to the provincial governments.