On 27 April 1994, South Africans voted. That day, for the first time in the country's history, all citizens of age held franchise eligibility. The election symbolized the end of apartheid, a system of racial segregation that had pervaded since its 1948 implementation. It ushered in the presidential victory of one of the world's most famous political prisoners and his Government of National Unity. As such, it claimed a place as one of the country’s—and one of the twentieth century’s—iconic events. Further, it became one of the century's most substantial political transitions.

The road to 1994 had been bloody in both the short and long terms. South Africa is one of the world's most ethnically and racially diverse societies. Within it, Khoisan people established some of the oldest human communities. State formation of groups such as the Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Tsonga, Tswana, Xhosa, Venda and Zulu began during the ancient era and continued through colonization. Afrikaners developed from seventeenth- century free burghers of the Dutch East India Company. Their forebears included Dutch settlers such as those led by Jan Van Riebeeck, or French and German Protestants, as well as indigenous Africans and enslaved, imported Asians. British colonization brought additional European interest, notably from Portugal and Germany. It also brought the migration of free and indentured Indians—the largest population outside the Indian subcontinent. By the late nineteenth century, South Africa also boasted one of the world's largest Jewish populations, as Eastern Europeans ventured south to flee pogroms.

Apartheid was a response in many ways to white South Africans’ search for social cohesion within this diffuse society. Public memory has largely accepted the narrative of rising Afrikaner nationalism in the wake of the South African War. This holds that in 1910 the Union of South Africa formed after the South African War and British abuses of Black and Afrikaner South Africans, including institutionalization within concentration camps. Afrikaner bitterness from that abuse, many historians and southern Africans will say, gave rise to nationalism and, eventually, apartheid.