As President Thabo Mbeki's government puts greater store on policy execution following Mandela's focus on nation building, even a rare line or two of Afrikaans from the president raises hopes of better relations with those in power.
"After the speech people were saying `well maybe Thabo is our man.'" There is a kind of desperation for a sign that they are loved," said du Preez.
One clear sign of change is the political fragmentation of the once cohesive Afrikaner "volk," or people.
In an ironic twist, the renamed New National Party (NNP) now rules the Western Cape province in cooperation with the ANC, while the Democratic Alliance (DA) -- successors to white anti-apartheid parliamentarians -- are seen as conservatives.
Stellenbosch University politics professor Willie Breytenbach said that the Anglophile DA is likely to mop up most Afrikaner votes in the April 14 general election, entrenching their position in the last decade as the heavily outgunned opposition.
"The DA has become the party of conservative white South Africa. The NNP is seen as in bed with the ANC and it's just too much to stomach for conservative Afrikaners," he said.
Pollsters predict the NNP will shrink to around 4 percent -- much of it coming from mixed race "coloreds" in the Cape -- down from 20 percent of the vote in 1994.
Outside the walls of Cape Town's parliament, Afrikaner culture -- or more precisely, the language of Afrikaans -- is cutting up the streets of gangster-ridden ghettos nearby.
Freed from its associations with the repressive past and spoken by millions of coloreds, the distinction between a people defined by race and those defined by language has blurred into a vibrant cultural movement.
Deon Maas, a TV documentary maker and media guru says Afrikaans music, theater and literature are booming in contrast to the import-dominated offerings in Anglophone South Africa.
"You can draw a comparison between Afrikaans culture and post-Franco Spain ... all the restrictions have been lifted and there's been a huge creative explosion," Maas said.
"I feel really sorry for English-speaking South Africans. They are the one group in this country that has absolutely no identity. They get pop music from England and plays from Broadway; they've never formed a strong African identity."
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