THUS FAR WE HAVE LEARNED THE FOLLOWING about the nature of society which came into vogue in May 1994: (1) it was an ‘imagined’ community, ‘a deep, horizontal comradeship’ born out of a dizzying variety of cultures and ethnicities, each of which made a tremendous sacrifice to a common necessity; and (2) that it was a ‘nation’ shorn of its historical roots – it was ‘utterly new and without precedent’. So imagined, the post-apartheid nation rang forever in the hearts of its inhabitants as a ‘modern’ society, a society which expressed ‘a future-oriented vision of time’ – if you like, a kind of ‘presentism’, to use Rita Felki's terminology in Modernist studies and historical studies. This put in different words, the ‘rainbow’ society that is South Africa had swung too far the apartheid way, insofar as it surpassed its most distasteful passions: influx control, pass laws, migrant labour system, Bantu education, Bantustans, job colour bars, total strategy, tricameralism, and so forth. Another way of saying this is that the process of being made into a ‘Republican’ after 1994 rested on arguments about the idea of historical discontinuity, which took apartheid and post-apartheid societies to be absolute distinctions between two types of societies.

In this segment of my story, my central argument can be more specifically stated as follows: the modern newspaper, the news reports of which are often presented in a melodramatic way, was central to the heroic interpretation of post-apartheid history, wanting for its readers to comprehend what exactly it was that went into the making of the legend of the ‘miracle nation’ as well as the Mandela legend.