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Every Step of the Way: The Journey To Freedom in South Africa

by Michael Morris - £17.50  Human Sciences Research Council (2004)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9780796920614 | ISBN 10: 0796920613

Serpentine queues, some stretching for kilometres, showed that, despite the bomb blasts of the previous few days, the country's democratic resolve was in good shape. There was plenty of patience and spirits were high. By the time they voted, many had waited for hours. Most had waited a lifetime.
 
When South Africans crossed their ballot papers in the country's first democratic elections on 27 April 1994, they crossed the line that divided a long, complex and often bitter past from a future of hope, equality and common nationhood. The challenges they faced were no less daunting, but now, for the first time, they could confront them together. What liberated South Africans could not do was alter the past, or even free themselves from it. Their identities as individuals and communities were, and remain, embedded in the loves and hates, the contests and the bonds that define a compelling narrative.
 
Drawing on wide-ranging sources to tell this story, Every Step of the Way traces the origins of the resistance and the idealism that ultimately assured South Africans their freedom, and raises provocative questions about the role of individuals in directing or going along with the history. Speeches and statements of the famous and the powerful are contrasted with the memories of the obscure and the downtrodden, the images of poetry and song and the immediacy of newspaper reports are interwoven with the insights and interpretations of leading historians and first-hand accounts of people who left a record of their world.
 
Every Step of the Way celebrates the tenth anniversary of South Africa's first democratic election, but also seeks to widen and promote a conversation about South Africa's contested pasts.

(Price & availability last checked: April 2018)