THENEWSOUTHAFRICA
conference, Mandela himself "challenged the right of opposition parties
to oppose his government in the style that would be commonplace in
democracies.v'"
The ANC, moreover, had significant centralizing tenden-
cies. But there were strong checks on abuse of power by the ANC: a free
press, a vigorous civil society, and powerful business and trade union
organizations.
Indeed, as political scientist David Welsh said, "South
Africa's stability rests upon a tacit trade-off between the political power of
the majority as represented by the ANC and the economic and social power
of the minority.t'J?
Deracializing State Institutions
The established Supreme Court of South Africa, with appellate and
provincial divisions (renamed the Supreme Court of Appeals and the High
Court in 1996), remained in place under Chief Justice Michael Corbett
until that year, when he was succeeded by Ismail Mahomed. White male
judges, some of them unsympathetic
to the new regime, continued to
dominate the judiciary; there were very few black or female lawyers, and
the tenure of existing judges was protected by the sunset clause in the in-
terim constitution. As late as 1998, only about 30 out of 275 judges were
not white.e? Even the new Constitutional
Court, whose members Man-