Future historians may describe 1997 as the year in which President Nelson Mandela began his phased withdrawal from the political arena in earnest. The year saw Mr Mandela, who was 79 in July, formally renounce his presidency of the African National Congress at the organisation's 50th annual conference in December, opening the way for Deputy President Thabo Mbeki to take over his mantle.
But even before then Mr Mbeki - as Mr Mandela acknowledged several times during the year - had assumed a major share of responsibility for the day-to-day administration of the country.
The 12 months saw the ANC lose its glitter as the party battled to fulfil its 1994 election promises of "a better future" for the black majority. A degree of disillusionment set in, and, judging from the opinion polls, the ANC will be hard put to attract the same proportion of votes - just under 63 per cent - which it did in 1994.
There was some solace for the ANC: the National Party, which polled the second highest number of votes after the ANC in 1994, shed even more support during the year, much of it after the retirement of its former leader, F.W. de Klerk. Its proportion of the vote might well halve, from the 20 per cent it won in the 1994 election to 10 per cent in that expected in 1999, according to several political analysts, including veteran pollster Lawrence Schlemmer.
The major beneficiaries of disenchantment with the two main parties were the Democratic Party (DP) and the Pan African Congress (PAC), each of which won less than 2 per cent of the vote in 1994. Since then, however, their surge in popularity has been nothing short of spectacular, even if full cognisance is taken of the minuscule support bases from which they started.
According to Markdata opinion polls, the DP growth between February 1994 and October 1997 has been 110 per cent. The PAC has registered a 170 per cent expansion over the same period. The spurt in popularity for the PAC is particularly worrying for the ANC because it is one of the few parties which has the otential to successfully woo voters in the ANC's core constituency, the majority black community. It does little to reassure the ANC that the PAC - which broke away from it in 1959 - claims to the custodian of the bigger party's African nationalist tradition.
The ANC had additional problems, not least of which was Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, president of the ANC Women's League and former wife of the President. Apart from being an embarrassment to the party because of renewed allegations that she was involved in serious abuses of human rights - including murder, she incurred the wrath of the ANC's incumbent leaders by publicly criticising them in a long interview with the Johannesburg-based paper the Star.
The public quarrel - in which Ms Madikizela-Mandela was labelled a "wayward charlatan" after she accused the leadership of reneging on election promises - followed the expulsion in late 1996 of former Transkei leader Bantu Holomisa from the party. Like Ms Madikizela-Mandela, Mr Holomisa commanded significant support among rank-and-file ANC members.
The ANC suffered another reverse when Judge Robert Nugent delivered his findings after a marathon inquest into the killing of people in Johannesburg on March 28th, 1994. Those who died on that day included eight Zulu protest marchers. They were killed by ANC security guards outside the party's national headquarters in Johannesburg. The judge rejected the ANC's two-tier defence for the action of its guards: first, that there had been a conspiracy by elements within the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party and rogue policemen to use a protest march on that day as a cover to attack the ANC headquarters and kill its leaders; second, that an actual attack was mounted on the fateful day, leading to the decision to "fire in self-defence". In a damning finding Judge Nugent said: "Prima facie there was no justification for shooting at the crowd at all. Moreover the barrage of fire was in any event grossly excessive. We do not accept that any warning was given."
In the minds of many South Africans, the judge's findings finally tarnished the ANC's pristine image of a liberation organisation which was morally superior to its political adversaries, an image which had already been damaged by revelations of torture and ill-treatment by ANC security personnel on the inmates of ANC detention camps in Angola during the armed struggle.
The year saw further "black empowerment", a process which enriched a few black families but - in the eyes of its critics - did little or nothing for the "black masses" on whose behalf the ANC waged the liberation struggle.
The government, however, cited impressive - but not undisputed - statistics which pointed to substantial progress in the provision of water, electricity, houses and school meals to black people who had been the pariahs of the apartheid system.
On the economic front 1997 was a mixed year for South Africa. While there was growth, it was unimpressive. The GDP grew by just under 2 per cent, well under the 3.2 per cent target laid down in the ANC's Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) policy. It was, unfortunately, another year of "jobless growth". If the economy grew, the official number of jobs declined, an unhappy situation where - according to the Reserve Bank - the unemployment level is close to 30 per cent of the active population. The fall in the price of gold to well below $300 an ounce cast a pall over the industry, foreshadowing the closure of marginal mines and the possible loss of thousands of jobs.
The fall in the value of the rand as measured against the US dollar and the British pound seemed to warn that the currency crisis of 1996 was not yet over. On the eve of 1998, South Africa had much to be grateful for as the spectre of race war faded. But there was still much to be concerned about.