JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, April 10 (UPI) -- The successor party to South Africa's National Party, which led apartheid, has voted to disband at a meeting in Johannesburg.
Marthinus van Schalkwyk, a leader of the New National Party, apologized for apartheid, which he described as "a system grounded in injustice."
He said dissolution of the NNP Saturday was throwing off the yoke of history and the end of the "division of the South African soul," the BBC reported Sunday.
Ex-South African President F.W. de Klerk told the BBC a new party was needed, but without the National Party's historical baggage.
The NNP had been losing support and gained only 2 percent of the vote and seven seats in Parliament in last year's general election.
The National Party introduced apartheid in South Africa in 1948, and governed until the first multiracial elections in 1994.
