South Africa remembers an historic election every April 27. Here’s why this year is so poignant WSOC TV [Video]

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — (AP) — South Africans celebrate their “Freedom Day” every April 27, when they remember their country’s pivotal first democratic election in 1994 that announced the official end of the racial segregation and oppression of apartheid.

Saturday is the 30th anniversary of that momentous vote, when millions of Black South Africans, young and old, decided their own futures for the first time, a fundamental right they had been denied by a white minority government.

The first all-race election saw the previously banned African National Congress party win overwhelmingly and made its leader, Nelson Mandela, the country’s first Black president four years after he was released from prison.

Here’s what you need to know about that iconic moment and a South Africa that’s changing again 30 years on:

A TURNING POINT

The 1994 election was the culmination of a process that began four years earlier when F.W. de Klerk, the last apartheid-era president, shocked the world and his country …