The architecture of South Africa’s foreign policy was crafted between 1990 and 1994. ANC documents envisioned how the country’s post- apartheid foreign policy would be reconfigured.
In 1993, former president Nelson Mandela released a paper in which he spelt out how South Africa’s foreign policy would look under the new political dispensation.
Human rights and respect for other countries’ political sovereignty were at the centre of it.
The ANC preferred the “soft power” approach that was premised on a