outlets, trendy clothing outlets, photography studios and record shops. On the down side, drug dealers and a criminal element also moved into the area, taking advantage of the opportunities arising out of the almost 24-hour buzz of activity in the street. 1980s The 1980s was a time of political turmoil in South Africa as the United Democratic Front (UDF), a legal internal organisation sympathetic to (indeed for some a front for) the African National Congress (ANC, the banned liberation movement), took the apartheid state on with a fury not seen since the 1960s. Rockey St (always mistakenly located in people's minds in Yeoville while it was actually in Bellevue) and indeed the entire area, became something of a liberated zone as black and white met and ate and listened to music together in defiance of prevailing apartheid laws. Some blacks even lived in the area in flats rented for them by white nominees. Yeoville continued to be a popular place for young fashionable people to congregate with many varied businesses on Rockey Street. One of the well known professional photography studios on Rockey Street was Latent Image, owned and operated by the photographers Alan Aarons and Ian Joseph. 1990s In 1990, the apartheid government unbanned the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the Pan Africanist Congress and began to release political prisoners, the most famous of whom was Nelson Mandela (Mandela has a link to Yeoville – he was apparently given refuge in the Webb St flat of one of his white comrades when he was on the run from the police in the early 1960s). This started the process that led to the holding of the first-ever fully democratic elections in South Africa in April 1994. The end of apartheid had a profound impact on Yeoville and Bellevue. In the early 1990s, Rockey Street remained a hotbed of radicals, activists, artists and musicians. Journalists from around the world lived and worked there during the transition, and places like Ba-Pita, the Harbour Cafe, Coffee Society, Tandoor and many others attracted large numbers of visitors. However, in the hiatus period between 1990 and 1994, as South Africa's political opponents went through alternating bouts of negotiation and confrontation, and after 1994, urban management went into decline. Added to this, there began a dramatic demographic shift, with the population of Yeoville changing from 85% white in 1990 to 90% black in 1998.