Perspectives on the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The now substantial literature on the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa defines ‘transition’ in different ways. In the third edition of his History of South Africa (2001), Leonard Thompson devoted a chapter to the political transition that took place between 1989 and 1994.1 Rodney Davenport wrote in similar vein in lectures published in Canada as The Birth of the New South Africa and in South Africa as The Transfer of Power in South Africa. 2 Both historians implied that the fundamentals of the apartheid order were still in place in 1989, and that the apartheid order could have continued for some time, for the state was not on its knees and the security forces stood firmly behind it. Instead of apartheid continuing, however, we know that its pillars – the Population Registration Act, Group Areas Act and Land Act prime among them – were repealed in the early 1990s, and in 1994 political apartheid was ended with the introduction of a constitution providing for one person one vote and that all citizens were equal before the law. So within the remarkably short period of five years, in this interpretation, a transition took place from an apartheid order to a formally democratic one, with a new government taking office after the first democratic election in April 1994.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".