Despite a last attempt by right-wingers to disrupt the election by bombing Johannesburg International airport, the election of April 27, 1994 passed peacefully. At the age of 76, Mandela, along with millions of his fellow citizens, voted for the first time in his life in his country's elections. On May 2, De Klerk conceded defeat after an ANC landslide, in which they took 62.7 percent of the vote. Of the remaining parties, the National Party fared best with 20.4 percent, followed by the Inkatha Freedom Party with 10.5 percent; trailing way behind were the Freedom Front with 2.2 percent, the Democratic Party with 1.7 percent and the Pan Africanist Congress with 1.2 percent. The ANC was dominant in all but two of the provinces, the National Party taking the Western Cape decisively and Buthelezi's Inkatha achieving a tight 50.3 percent majority in its KwaZulu-Natal heartland. However, one of the disappointments for the ANC was its inability to appeal broadly to non-African racial groups. Ironically, the National Party won an overwhelming proportion of this Indian, coloured and white support.

 

For the ANC, the real struggle was only beginning. It inherited a country of 38 million people. Of these it was estimated that six million were unemployed, nine million were destitute, ten million had no access to running water, and twenty million had no electricity. Among adult blacks, sixty percent were illiterate and fewer than fifty percent of black children under 14 went to school. The gap between black and white was still gaping. One indicator of this, infant mortality, ran at eighty deaths per thousand among Africans, compared with just seven among whites