The crisis of apartheid might have been resolved with mass bloodshed, leading either to new forms of legal subjugation or to political and spatial separation. Both outcomes would likely have fostered more violence, in an ongoing cycle. Instead South Africa now has competing political constituencies working to achieve their goals under the aegis of a system seen as legitimate by the participants. This is possible because, in spite of the TRC, enough South Africans have been willing to rethink political identity. They have come to recognize that the racial political identities of the past were
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