Nelson Mandela is inaugurated as South Africa's first Black president
On this day · 10 May 1994
After 27 years in prison, Mandela took the oath at Pretoria's Union Buildings, closing the book on apartheid rule.
On 10 May 1994, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as South Africa’s first Black president at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, having been unanimously elected by the newly seated parliament. He had spent 27 years as a political prisoner of the very state he now led.
The ceremony followed the country’s first non-racial elections, held in April 1994, in which more than 22 million South Africans cast ballots. Mandela replaced the outgoing National Party leader F. W. de Klerk, who became a deputy president alongside the ANC’s Thabo Mbeki in a Government of National Unity.
“The time for the healing of the wounds has come,” Mandela told the watching world.
Foreign dignitaries from across the political spectrum attended, and the proceedings were broadcast to a global audience. The moment formally ended decades of legalized white-minority rule and inaugurated South Africa’s first multiracial democracy, with an ANC-led government that had no prior experience of governing.
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