Ubuntu says I am human only because you are human. If I undermine your humanity, I dehumanize myself. You must do what you can, in the new South Africa, to maintain this great harmony, which is perpetually threatened by resentment, anger, desire for vengeance. That’s why African jurisprudence is restorative rather than retributive.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Since my return to the Peninsula a week ago life has been stimulating, bewildering, exasperating and just occasionally alarming. (As yesterday, when a mob of Coloured Nat supporters ran out of control at President de Klerk’s final election rally in the Good Hope Centre.) My notebook is full of comments on various ANC, Nat and DP rallies, some cerebral and decorous, others emotional and rowdy.
At no rally was there any sense of the speakers having the power to influence their listeners’ voting intentions. These were gatherings of the faithful, people who had turned out not to weigh up the politicians’ policies or promises but to support them with uncritical enthusiasm. Being well aware of this, party leaders regard the printed word as the most valuable electioneering tool – one that has been shamefully abused by the Nats. Here in the Western Cape their virulently racist ‘swart gevaar’ campaign makes nonsense of their claim to be ‘the New Nats’. One brochure warns: ‘Under an ANC government, this could easily become the slogan – KILL A COLOURED! KILL A FARMER!’ Another brochure depicts a snarling Communist wolf inadequately disguised by an ANC sheepskin and the bilingual text asks,
What lies beneath the ANC? Communist lies! The Communists, with their own agenda, have infiltrated the ANC to its core. How can they be trusted? Their policies have failed everywhere. If they are not stopped, they will ruin South Africa as well. Only the NP can stop the ANC!
Repeatedly the Nats insist that an ANC/Communist government will oppress the Churches. Outsiders may find such a recycling of the Total Onslaught myth merely ridiculous but to the ill-informed it is spine-chilling stuff, as Saatchi and Saatchi well know.
At the end of March the Nats went too far by distributing 70,000 glossy, reprehensible, comic-type booklets. These show a black youth named Mike Sibasa beating up with his rifle-butt an elderly Coloured lady – carrying prayer books – while he shouts, ‘There is no God! The government is your God!’ On the next page Mike is shooting dead a gentle young Coloured man as he plays his guitar. ‘Now we’re finished with you!’ taunts Mike. ‘You were useful idiots!’
The IEC, responding to ANC and other protests, quickly banned this publication and confiscated the unused copies. President de Klerk and Hernus Kriel, the Nats’ candidate for the Cape premiership, of course knew nothing about it – just as they know nothing about Third Force operations.
Saatchi and Saatchi are being helped to run the Nats’ campaign by Sir Tim Bell of Lowe-Bell Communications who is credited in the local media with ‘Margaret Thatcher’s transformation from Lincs. grocer’s daughter to Iron Lady’. He may find the transformation of the Nats’ image rather more difficult; in that Lincs. grocery store the iron was already there.
As for the ANC, they steadfastly preach their 82-year-old non-racist gospel and both their literature and their leaders’ speeches are above reproach. But some of their rank-and-file supporters, ignoring Madiba’s pleas, are behaving abominably – and some of their local organizers not too well.
However, the Western Cape – an Inkatha-free zone – remains comparatively peaceful. Unlike the PWV where last weekend an ANC-versus-Inkatha gun-battle left nineteen dead. The victims included the young photographer Ken Oosterbroek, thrice South Africa’s News Photographer of the Year; two of his colleagues were badly wounded. On the edge of Tokoza an army officer had warned journalists, ‘Our situation is very bad. You may enter but you do so at your own risk.’
Subsequently Themba Khoza, the PWV Inkatha leader, threatened to spread the violence throughout his region. Recently Judge Goldstone’s Commission revealed that Mr Khoza has been in the pay of the SAP secret terror unit since 1989.
Yesterday, in Ulundi, two ANC canvassers were shot dead in the KZP station while another was being burned to death outside, in his car. Several IEC monitors were also attacked and imprisoned in the police station; white KZP officers protected them until Buthelezi arrived from Bloemfontein by air and ordered his loyal Inkatha Youth Brigade to disperse. Mr Mandela then requested him – as kwaZulu Minister of Police – to confine the KZP to barracks until after the elections.
Throughout South Africa hearts have been lighter since 19 April when Buthelezi at last gave in, accepting far less than was previously offered. It seems the country has reasons to be grateful to an elderly Kenyan, Professor Washington Jalang’o Okumu, a member of the ‘damp-squib’ mediation team who lingered when the rest left and quietly set about making the Inkatha leader see sense. The Cape Times quoted him: ‘Western mindsets clouded an essentially African problem. You give deadlines and say you must do such and such by this date. In Africa that does not work. You must address sensitivities and deeply felt prejudices.’ Doubtless the professor helped Buthelezi to realize that having failed to delay the elections or secure more power for provincial governments he would soon find himself in a cul-de-sac with the AWB and the Afrikaner Volksfront. Not a prestigious – or lucrative – place to be under GNU. Now he is sure of a cabinet post.
According to Judge Kriegler of the IEC, Buthelezi’s brinkmanship will add millions of rands to the election bill. Eighty million IFP stickers have had to be hurriedly printed and stuck to the end of the ballot papers where there is barely room for them. And in kwaZulu/Natal 700 polling stations must be set up within six days. Many are smirking because the Nats have lost their place at the foot of the ballot papers only hours after a new rash of posters urged the populace: ‘To be tops, vote at the bottom!’
On 21 April came more reassuring news: another right-wing split, providing a safety-valve for those who might otherwise favour the bullet over the ballot. General Viljoen’s new Freedom Front party has rejected a ‘Boycott the Elections’ pact with the CP and instead made a pact with GNU-to-be. At once most CP-controlled councils deserted their leadership and urged whites to vote Freedom Front. In this context ‘freedom’ means freedom for the Afrikaners to set up their own volkstaat, an ambition few take seriously – least of all, I suspect, General Viljoen. An intelligent man, he is much respected by right-wingers as a general who led from the front during South Africa’s covert war in Angola. But of course his pact with GNU has enraged the CP leadership. In reaction, Mr Kobus Beyers, MP, warned that his followers will disrupt the elections and ‘it might be dangerous to vote in certain areas’. That evening we also had an AWB announcement: ‘Thousands of members of the AWB are already moving into the Transvaal and Free State to secure a base against a future Communist government.’
Three days ago all this fantasizing seemed to me a giggling matter. But this morning a colossal car bomb, planted in Jo’burg between the ANC and PAC headquarters, killed nine people and wounded more than a hundred. One woman lost her three small children when a ceiling collapsed. Another victim was an Irish-born ANC election candidate, Susan Keane, who happened to be waiting in her car for traffic lights to change. The police have offered half a million rands reward for information.
Unsurprisingly, the IEC have advised me not to visit Khayelitsha at present. Nat and DP canvassers ‘have no access’ – as the IEC delicately puts it – to any of the black townships or squatter camps. (To balance this, ANC canvassers ‘have no access’ to that one-fifth of the black electorate who live, countrywide, on white farms.) However, in a brave attempt to demonstrate how democracy should work the IEC, a few days ago, organized ‘Operation Access’. Nat, ANC and DP speakers were escorted to four Khayelitsha venues where they gave bland speeches in each other’s presence. There was no threat of violence. Nor was there any heckling because nobody gathered to listen. The politicians found this quite an eerie experience – addressing large empty spaces through a megaphone.
Another of these elections’ eccentricities is the population mystery. How many South Africans are there? No one knows; when people are surplus you don’t bother to count them. Officially, in the Western Cape, blacks make up 18 per cent of the population; unofficial estimates range from 20 to 45 per cent. It is impossible to guess how many have recently arrived.
A local idiosyncrasy is the invisibility of Hernus Kriel, the Nat candidate for the provincial premiership and a known ally of the Third Force. Throughout his career, but especially as Minister of Law and Order (!) in the present government, he has shown a dangerous and sometimes ludicrous lack of judgement. Last week an emergency meeting of 1,000 policemen and women of all races passed a unanimous vote of no confidence in their minister, something unprecedented in SAP history. So far I haven’t seen the hated Kriel face on a single poster, lapel badge or leaflet. Instead, President de Klerk beams fondly on the populace. Nor does Kriel often share a platform with his leader as de Klerk energetically tours the Western Cape, the only province where a Nat victory is possible because of the Coloured vote.
Both contenders for this provincial premiership are flawed in the public’s perception. The ANC’s Revd Allan Boesak, though a powerful orator, didn’t much appeal to me at last year’s Sowetan Day rally. And he seemed no more appealing when I listened to him a few days ago at a UWC-organized debate with the DP’s Hennie Bester. Many ANC activists deplore Mr Mandela’s choice of this Coloured clergyman with an unorthodox (by clerical standards) view of matrimony, a man who not long ago was a source of bitter dissension within his Dutch Reformed Mission Church. Madiba does have one serious handicap as leader, an allergy to unwelcome advice however sound it may be.
Two days ago a small blurred black-and-white handbill – ‘Unite Against Racism’ – was stuck to Cape Town’s lamp-posts, scarcely noticeable amidst the profusion of garish election posters. It invited people to a Cape Against Racism (CAR) ecumenical gathering in the Concert Hall (part of the City Hall) at 3 p.m. today. CAR is a tiny organization, newly formed to counter the Nats’ irresponsible electioneering.
The Concert Hall boasts a famously sonorous organ behind a vast stage and, as a setting for CAR’s meeting, there was something piquantly incongruous about the baroque décor, the ornate brass chandeliers, the four gilded boxes on either side of the high-ceilinged auditorium. We were only 250 or so (mostly black) when the celebrated Langa Adult Choir filed onto the stage, the women wearing crimson and white, the men crimson and black.
This was indeed an ecumenical occasion, chaired by a black Anglican theologian, Barney Pityana, one of the founders with Steve Biko of the Black Consciousness Movement. Other speakers included a white Buddhist monk, a Coloured Baha’i preacher, a black Methodist minister, an Afrikaner Unitarian and a Muslim imam – Faried Essak, who yesterday was badly beaten up by Nat marshals during the Good Hope Centre fracas. From their exhilarating variety of theological/philosophical perspectives these remarkable men – the majority youngish – considered South Africa’s most urgent problems without any soggy piety or platitudinous reassurances. It was therapeutic to be transported from a world of political rhetoric and scheming into their world of genuine compassion and intellectual integrity.
I woke this morning longing for physical exercise in a motor-free zone and soon was pushing Chris up cobbled Longmarket Street towards Signal Hill above Bo-Kaap. Near the summit, rich Muslims have recently built a colony of two- and three-storey mansions and here the road becomes concrete. Dismal piles of builders’ rubble still stand around and the verges are sordidly littered – blemishes unthinkable in rich white areas.
Beyond the colony two kind Eksom workers lifted Chris over a wire fence and showed me where to wriggle underneath. Then, as we bumped along a rough track, smoke began to rise from the far side of the hill. Astonishingly quickly the puffs became a towering cloud – black, flecked with crimson morsels. Soon the urgent sirens of speeding fire engines could be heard on the roads below; I had chosen the wrong hill on which to exercise.
From a high shoulder I watched the drama, feeling an oddly pleasurable frisson of primitive fear. Starting low, above Ocean View Drive, the flames swept up a steep slope with a crackling roar, devouring the dry grasses and indigenous vegetation. Scores of firemen, helped by Forestry Department workers, struggled to drag hosepipes uphill while others led them downwards from tankers parked on the summit viewing-point. One could see their plan: to contain the flames by a pincer movement. Then, as it seemed they were succeeding, the strengthening wind swung from north-west to south-east and the flames jumped Signal Road – a truly scary sight – and raced away towards Green Point along a sheer inaccessible 1,200-foot mountain flank.
Back in Cape Town’s centre I chanced to notice a small crowd – mostly media folk – gathered as close to the House of Assembly as the police would permit. A friendly Coloured SAP officer told me that South Africa’s white parliament was sitting for the last time – a special one-day sitting to secure the position of King Zwelithini, as recently agreed with Buthelezi, by amending the new Constitution. Soon the King’s emissary, Prince Gideon Zulu, appeared on the steps surrounded by five Paramount Chiefs – naked torsos gleaming, pot-bellies protruding, each carrying his shield and sporting a leopard-skin cloak, leopard-skin wristbands, armbands woven from the tail-hairs of white oxen, belts of jackals’ tails and a lion-claw necklace. This was the moment the cameramen had been waiting for. But before posing the chiefs demanded the return of their spears and knobkerries, confiscated as they entered Parliament. I looked in vain for President de Klerk; perhaps he sensibly chose to make his last exit as President through a side door.
Today Cape Town is SAP-saturated, with good reason. Less than twenty-four hours after yesterday’s Jo’burg bomb, another killed ten and seriously injured forty-one at a black taxi-rank on the East Rand. The police have doubled their information reward to R1 million but no arrests have been made.
This evening, in Pretoria, two were killed and twenty-nine injured when white motorists threw a bomb into a black restaurant while driving past. Within the last three days ten other major bombings have caused immense damage but no casualties, though one exploded in the ‘Ladies’ of the Randfontein taxi-rank during the morning rush-hour. Others wrecked a Wonderfontein electricity pylon and several polling stations in right-wing areas. At noon yesterday three empty taxis parked below a bridge near Pochefstroom were demolished when white motorists tossed a bomb over the parapet.
The Deputy Law and Order Minister guarantees that more than 100,000 police, supported by tens of thousands of soldiers, will be protecting all polling stations. There has been the biggest call-up of reserve forces in the peace-time history of South Africa. From tomorrow until 29 April, the sale or public consumption of alcohol has been forbidden.
Wondrously, the right-wingers’ violence seems to be having little or no effect on public morale; one senses it being dismissed as the last convulsive spasm of a doomed monster.
This morning polling stations opened for the elderly, the disabled, the pregnant, hospital patients and South African citizens abroad. Nobody can accuse Judge Kriegler’s team of laziness; on the 23rd, a charter flight carried 140 whites to a beachfront hotel on the Comoros Islands where, by special arrangement with the IEC, a polling booth has been installed.
As I toured the Peninsula this afternoon a joyous calm prevailed. Perhaps the orderly functioning of those ‘special’ polling stations has turned a key releasing all races from their cage of pre-election tension. My Mandela badges and Chris’s ANC stickers prompted many beaming blacks to greet me by punching the air and shouting, ‘Viva President Mandela Viva!’ Forget ‘irregularities at the polls’! Already the whole world knows who the majority of South Africans want to lead their country.
It is now 11.30 p.m. In half an hour the Interim Constitution will come into force marking the birth of the new South Africa. At 11.59 the old baasskap flag will be lowered, to the strains of Die Stem, in the nine capitals of the new provincial legislatures. At 12.01 the new flag will be raised and both anthems played (Die Stem and Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica). All speeches have been banned during these ceremonies. Given this country’s history, the two-anthem symbolism is moving beyond words. Who but Madiba could have inspired it?
As I write I feel curiously numb, sitting alone in my little room in Obs while the last minutes of the old South Africa tick away. Evidently the sheer improbability of the new South Africa is paralysing my emotions; some occasions are so awesomely significant that one fails to react to them. But I find myself questioning the current buzz-phrases: ‘democracy for all’, ‘gender equality’, ‘a new constitutional order’. What is happening here and now is something peculiarly African: ubuntu in action. (Or, cynics might say, the exploitation of ubuntu.) My watch lies on the desk in front of me. It is 11.57 and I am about to open a Long Tom to drink to the new South Africa.
A still grey morning, clouds low, a hush over the city as I cycled to the nearest polling station at 6 a.m. Already the queue was in place and lengthening by the minute. Hundreds of Coloureds, blacks, whites: not talking, looking rather solemn. As yet there were no Monitors or Observers on duty and only one of those 100,000 police officers. Strangely, unchecked cars were allowed to park within easy bomb-reach of the queue.
Sitting on a bollard I thought, tritely but accurately, ‘This is the day – the hour – for which so many have suffered so much.’ And then my mind roved over all those places I know, between Cape Town and Messina – everywhere everyone queuing together, in a ritual discarding of the past.
Many steps lead up to the entrance to Woodstock’s polling station. At the head of the queue, on the top step, stood an elderly black couple. Precisely at 7 a.m the door opened and they entered to cast their vote. That was the trigger. A wave of emotion rippled through the crowd. Still no one spoke but people turned to look at one another, whites and blacks and Coloureds communicating without words. Tears flowed, including mine. Ostensibly this was a political event, the election of a government. In reality it was – what was it? It felt then, and all day, like a sacrament of healing.
Near the exit behind the building only one journalist was visible, defying the 600-metre exclusion zone – a young Dutchman, diligently seeking ‘reactions’ as the voters emerged. But seemingly he was a sensitive character and he soon gave up. For the world’s journalists, today was a major media event. For most South Africans it was a profound, private experience, something to be happily celebrated yet in its essence beyond the reach of words.
At a Bo-Kaap polling station, a new school on a hillside, two police officers had just arrived in an armoured vehicle drawing a kennel-trailer full of snarling Alsatians. Many in the queue objected to this. ‘We’ve no problems here,’ shouted one young man. ‘Why bring those dogs to start trouble?’
I could see his point; police dogs reek of baasskap terrorism. Yet the police have been ordered to make their protective presence felt everywhere and right-wingers on the rampage might fancy a soft target like Bo-Kaap. As three International Observers remonstrated with the officers everyone intently watched while the dogs continued to scrabble at their wire mesh and bare their teeth. Those Australians were exceeding their brief by intervening and the police might justifiably have told them so. Instead, they removed their provocative canine back-up. ‘Off to make trouble someplace else!’ muttered the young woman beside me, adjusting her headscarf. Happily she was wrong.
Countrywide, 11,000 South African Monitors and 5,000 International Observers were on duty today. The latter are just that – passive observers, supposed merely to report their observations to the IEC. They have been drifting around the country for weeks and by now are generally viewed as freeloaders enjoying an extended holiday in sunny South Africa. Said one Monitor this afternoon, ‘Most are too ignorant to know the meaning of what they observe. Only foreigners who’ve lived here in the past are useful.’
The Monitors themselves come in three colourful varieties: IEC Monitors (white bibs and pale green baseball caps), Peace Committee Monitors (bright orange bibs and armbands) and the Network of Independent Monitors (pale blue jackets and baseball caps) – known as NIMS.
Today only the weather was unkind. As I cycled to Retreat and Grassy Park, stopping at various polling stations en route, a strong wind drove sheets of cold rain along the Peninsula. But this did nothing to shorten queues or dampen spirits. Instead, it emphasized the prevailing harmony as umbrellas or plastic sacks were shared, and whites who lived near the queues made thermos flasks of tea for shivering blacks and Coloureds.
At Newlands I heard about this morning’s 7.15 car bomb at Jan Smuts airport – a mega-bomb, its timing significant. Inexplicably no one was killed though three were seriously injured and much structural damage done.
Near Claremont’s polling station I sheltered under an arcade beside three ‘information tables’ presided over by several ebullient young blacks and Coloureds. They were handing out ANC literature – until an electoral officer arrived, following a DP complaint about breaking IEC regulations. An argument then started with the Claremont presiding officer – why had he reduced the 600-metre control area? When I returned three hours later negotiations had just ended peacefully. At most stations similar mini-squabbles were arising but even incidents with the potential to turn nasty never did so. Everyone finally accepted IEC decisions – despite the increasingly apparent muddle within the commission itself – even if it took them three hours to climb down.
Outside Mowbray’s station a policeman moved me on when I inadvertently entered the control area; the ANC sticker running along Chris’s crossbar broke IEC rules. Then, as I stood just beyond the line of white tape, a nervous NIM told me that reports were coming in of crises (no ballot papers!) in Khayelitsha and other black townships. As she spoke a solitary troublemaker appeared, a small, slight, goatee-bearded Xhosa, elderly and well dressed. Loudly he ranted against the Third Force saboteurs who were now depriving blacks of their democratic rights. Everyone ignored him – except the police, who conferred by radio with IEC headquarters and were advised to take no action.
Moments later, the various species of Monitor and the Coloured ANC marshals became perceptibly agitated. According to their radios, the ANC Youth League had hired one hundred buses to transport township voters to white suburbs not short of ballot papers.
Soon the first convoy arrived from Khayelitsha and parked on the main road. Again tears came to my eyes as I watched those Xhosas toyi-toying and dancing down a side-street to the polling station, cheering and singing and laughing and clapping, waving South Africa’s new flag and radiating joy. Many habitually wear ANC T-shirts or baseball caps or badges; today, all respected the rule forbidding ‘party favours or colours’. On reaching the end of the queue – more than half a mile long, stretching around two blocks – they joined it in as orderly a fashion as any citizens from Constantia or Green Point. And for hours they stood there, patiently, happily, singing and laughing and being drenched at intervals when another squall of rain came riding on the wind. Many young women carried babies and did a brisk trade by renting them to those who could afford to expedite their exercise of the franchise. (Baby-laden mothers were given special treatment and infants were not invisibly inked.)
But where were all the thugs, the tsotsies, the hooligans, the extremists of every colour? Nowhere to be seen today, in any region of South Africa. Yet this influx of township voters was the very stuff of pre-election white nightmares – the invasion of ‘our’ areas by thousands of hyped-up young blacks who would certainly run amok. Those fears proved how little whites understood the significance for blacks of 27 April 1994. Why should they, on today of all days, run destructively out of control? Now the new flag of liberated South Africa – their flag! – is to be seen flying high, outstretched in the wind, above every police station, army post and public building. Moreover, all SAPS officers have a tiny patch of sticky tape at the end of their name-badges obliterating the old flag. To people who have suffered so much at their hands (and their batons, guns and dogs) this is the most potent symbol of all.
Outside Green Point’s station I happened upon a Peace Committee Monitor friend. She offered me a mug of coffee from her flask and wondered, ‘How many ballot papers will be spoiled?’ I, too, had been wondering that. The TEC’s reverence for democracy led them to over-indulge dotty minuscule parties like KISS (Keep It Straight and Simple) and SOCCER (Sports Organization for Collective Contributions and Equal Rights). Not to mention the Ximoko Progressive Party, which has never let the public glimpse its policy. And the Dikwankwetla Party, led by T.K. Mopeli of whom no one has ever heard – but surely anyone swayed solely by euphony would vote for the Dikwankwetlas. All this works against South Africa’s novice voters who must cope with a foot-long national ballot paper listing the names, logos and leaders’ photographs of eighteen parties, the greater number completely irrelevant. And some of the provincial ballot papers list twenty-eight parties.
This evening’s TV Election Special revealed that eight of Khayelitsha’s sixteen polling stations opened seven hours late and thirteen closed early for lack of ballot papers, invisible ink and infra-red lamps. Miles of voters queued for up to ten hours, until the IEC and army got their acts together and dropped papers by helicopter. An IEC spokesman admitted to ‘major systems failures’ which I suppose is computerese for a cock-up. The problems, he assured a throng of infuriated presiding officers, would be given ‘top priority’ overnight, with more helicopter drops at dawn.
For many, a busy night lies ahead. The army will be printing an extra 9.3 million ballot papers to supplement the 80 million already printed in Britain. But how are the IEC going to deliver them to remote areas all over the country by 7 a.m. tomorrow? It seems there are many more South Africans than anyone ever suspected. And virtually all of them over the age of 17 are determined to vote. Some IEC officials are privately confessing that thousands in kwaZulu/Natal will be frustrated, Buthelezi’s brinkmanship having caused insuperable logistical problems. And now he is being tiresome again, threatening to pull out of the elections because some papers were minus their IFP stickers. Peevishly he rejected an IEC concession allowing individual voters to write in the IFP – some 60 per cent of ‘his’ people are illiterate and already unnerved at the prospect of having to handle a pen …
To the fury of employers and the delight of everyone else, tomorrow has been hastily declared another paid public holiday; and, if necessary, the voting period will be extended to 29 April.
Something mysterious has happened within South Africa during the past forty-eight hours. Extreme tension has been replaced by an extraordinary calm, a deep calm that can be felt as though it were a climatic change – physically felt, in the body as well as the soul. And this phenomenon is nationwide.
Since 25 April there has been an eerie lack of crime. My favourite explanation was hinted at by Colonel Henriette Bester of the West Rand police: ‘I’ve visited all the polling stations and there’s so much goodwill going around you can feel it.’ Even in kwaZulu/Natal and on the East Rand, the security forces have been able to relax. And in the Free State, during the past three days, the police have recorded no crime of any kind – not even one stolen chicken. Cartoonists and columnists are beginning to mock those whites who crammed their cellars, garages and garden sheds with every sort of durable but unappetizing comestible. How soon will the divorce rate go up as husbands rebel against tinned beans and frankfurters five times a week?
Meanwhile the electoral shambles has fallen over the edge into comedy and the count will take longer than expected – much longer. Computers are playing up or being fed the wrong diet. (Everyone is astonished to hear that the Irish run all their elections with flawless efficiency sans computers.) Ballot papers beyond reckoning have not been delivered to the 800 counting centres because their armed escorts failed to turn up. Accusations and denials of intimidation, muddle, rigging and conspiracy are flying in every direction. Here we wonder who secreted 900,000 ballot papers in a merchant’s warehouse near Cape Town’s airport on the 26th? On discovering the contents of the boxes the merchant called the police, then received an anonymous death-threat. Allegedly the boxes were moved to a security company’s store but no one knows what happened next. Does their fate explain the Khayelitsha crisis? A flustered IEC spokeswoman explained, ‘We are now reorganizing the distribution of ballot papers. Serious misplacement [sic] has taken place and we are asking the police to investigate.’
Today SAPS announced that thirty-one men, including a policeman and a police reservist, have been arrested in connection with the recent car-bombings. Among them are ET’s son-in-law, Leon van der Merwe, and the AWB’s executive secretary and Chief of Staff. Unusually, none is being granted bail. That million-rand reward, the largest in South Africa’s history, was money well spent.
The first three new South Africans were named Freedom and Happiness (boys) and Thankful (a girl) – all born within five minutes of midnight on the 27th.
This has been the fourth day of voting, though only in kwaZulu/Natal where Buthelezi insisted on ‘his’ people being given time to use the newly printed ballot papers.
During the past fortnight or so more than 3,000 foreign media folk have been swarming all over South Africa, the majority endearing themselves only to hoteliers and restaurant owners. Their pesterings reached ‘public-nuisance’ level in some black areas, especially kwaZulu/Natal where the search for gruesome details sickened bereaved locals. It was also noted that while themselves wearing bullet-proof vests, they expected their interpreters to enter danger zones unprotected. And their lack of interest in an area’s everyday problems did not impress. Now most have moved on to genocidal Rwanda.
‘And yet’ – commented my host – ‘our present peacefulness is surely among the “stories” of the century!’
‘But they’re vampires,’ said his wife, ‘can’t survive without a blood diet!’
Passing through Simonstown at noon, I stopped off at the Navy pub where a 17-year-old English-speaking midshipman – a beardless youth, pink-cheeked and blue-eyed with curly blond hair – was sad to have missed voting by ten months. ‘I would have liked to help make history. But you know, it wasn’t a mystery or a miracle, like people are saying. It only seemed that way because whites got so panicky beforehand.’
Out of the mouths of babes and teenagers … ‘Go on,’ I urged, ‘say more.’
‘Isn’t it obvious? I’ve nothing clever to say. It’s just that most South Africans want peace. The elections were to set things up so we could have it. So why should they have caused trouble? When things change people go along with it. My dad was a racist five years ago, now he’s not. Well, what I mean is he can take a black president now, I don’t mean he’d ever have black friends. Maybe he couldn’t take every black president but Mandela made it easy. Even people who go on about him being a Commie really trust him. You have to, you’d be screwed up yourself if you couldn’t see he’s a good guy.’
A good guy … Yes, indeed. While pedalling across the Peninsula to Scarborough, I reflected that Madiba is no mere politician; that’s what distinguishes him from other national leaders. He has the dignity and confidence of someone who has inherited authority rather than striven to acquire it. Truly he has become the Father of the Nation and he talks like a kind but firm Victorian papa – his vocabulary democratic, his tone more often benignly authoritarian. This paternalism has been especially noticeable recently as he addressed mass-rallies that in spirit were celebrations of his imminent election as President. Even here on Nat territory he made no effort to avoid unpopular home-truths and, as the responsibilities of the Presidency drew closer, I noted his speeches becoming increasingly didactic and explicit. (During these past weeks I have watched more television than in all my previous 62 years.) Consistently he has impressed upon his followers the need to wait for change. And he has urged them to support the security forces – no longer the ‘enemy’ but their security forces. And to respect the chiefs, even those on the side of ‘reactionary elements’. And to remember that, under GNU, most white civil servants will retain their jobs ‘because we need them for a future government’.
All the election results were supposed to be in by midnight tonight; none will be. Some counters have failed to turn up, others have been accused of innumeracy, others are on strike for more pay. The ballot boxes from Mitchells Plain, this province’s most populous district, arrived at the counting station only yesterday afternoon. On 28 April Mitchells Plain’s chief electoral officer, Mr K. Mqamqo, strode off the scene, having quarrelled with colleagues, and hasn’t been seen since. As no replacement was appointed the collection of boxes simply didn’t happen.
The Free State has discovered that 115 per cent of its voters turned out – 200,000 more than expected. In parts of the Northern Transvaal, Northern Natal and the Transkei, thousands were disenfranchised by the failure of ballot papers ever to turn up. Hundreds of thousands of unused papers were found in warehouses in the East and West Rand, a matter now under investigation by the IEC and SAPS. All over the country boxes are missing, or have been found unsealed, or in kwaZulu have been tightly packed with neat piles of papers marked in favour of the IFP.
At Nasrec, near Jo’burg, security has broken down in the main counting centre and ballot papers have been photographed strewn all over the floor. Outside Nasrec, Nat and ANC agents exchanged blows when twelve boxes of unused papers were found in the back of an unguarded unofficial car. An IFP agent provoked the fight by citing this irregularity as evidence of collusion between the IEC and ANC. Soldiers had to be called in to control the crowd.
Long delays in the ‘reconciliation’ of papers have forced the IEC to declare that this process, previously described as ‘essential’, is not really necessary. ANC, Nat and DP officials have criticized the IEC’s ‘breathtaking inefficiency and outrageously lax security’, then hastened to assure everyone that these flaws cannot affect the result. Judge Kriegler, who two days ago pronounced the elections ‘substantially free and fair’, is being reviled by many – though still defended by a few – and looks like a man who won’t ever again run an election.
Strangely, only today have I myself felt the new South Africa, in the sense of fully realizing the glory and the wonder of it. That appreciation came to me like a vision as I sat beside Chris on Chapman’s Peak Drive. Below me, a calm Atlantic sparkled blue – or turquoise, where the water broke on grey-brown boulders, the dissipating foam making map-shapes. I was looking down high sheer cliffs, supporting numerous varieties of aromatic fynbos. Above me towered the reddish and fawn precipices of layered Chapman’s Peak – sandstone and mudstone, deposited near the shore of a shallow sea 450 million years ago. (So said a nearby notice.) The waves were rhythmically languid and peaceful. Hout Bay’s sentinel peak leaned out towards the ocean in a listening position. Three little fishing-boats were drifting towards me – and suddenly I was filled with a pure uncomplicated joy. All the anxious pre-election debates (how to loosen the corporate grip, how to reform the educational system, how to salvage the Lost Generation and so on) – all those concerns were temporarily dissolved in the realization that the new South Africa exists, as a fact, a dream become a constitutional entity, a State led by President Mandela. I have been so immersed in other people’s powerful and complex emotions that all my energies were going into trying to understand ‘the miracle’. Hence my own emotions had not crystallized – until this magic moment, alone on a silent clifftop, with brightness and beauty all about me.
Freewheeling down to Hout Bay, it seemed joy instead of blood was coursing through my veins. And I remembered Archbishop Tutu’s characteristic exclamation on Election Day: ‘It’s like falling in love!’ Now I know what he meant.
After the Chapman’s Peak climb, sweat-replacement is indicated. Sitting with a Long Tom outside Pitchers Bar I watched one of those meteorological dramas typical of the Cape. A cloud swiftly advanced from the sea, a silver mist against which autumn-sombre trees, still sunlit, stood out glowingly – briefly golden. Then the sun was obscured and a damp chill replaced pleasant heat. The Peninsula is a playground for clouds; they move among the mountains like live things, pouring and coiling over the Lion’s Head, Devils’ Peak, Table Mountain, Sentinel Hill, the Twelve Apostles – changing the light, meeting each other along the shore of Table Bay, then separating and rising – fickle, graceful vapours.
Late this evening President-elect Mandela came live on TV and radio to make his ‘Victory Speech’ and, as I write, millions all over the contry will be staging impromptu street parties. On the Grand Parade jubilant blacks from the townships are gathering and I have been caught in the wrong place, staying with white friends in Hout Bay. Naively I expected these celebrations to take place a few days hence when all – rather than half – the votes had been counted. But South Africa is not as other countries are; it is running this show in its own zany way. A headline in today’s Argus perfectly conveyed the flavour: ‘Provisional Final Results Out Today, Says IEC.’
This evening we also know that the thuggish Hernus Kriel will be Premier of the Western Cape – an expected Nat victory, not as yet unduly depressing ANC supporters.
An IEC Commissioner has warned the organizers of the 10 May Inauguration celebrations that they should make contingency plans; the counting may not be completed in time. As almost every Head of State in the world has been invited, this warning spread panic. One organizer yelped, ‘You just don’t tell Prince Philip to come next week instead!’ But the constitutional process is cumbersome: nine provincial legislatures must meet to elect senators to the Upper House before Parliament can meet to elect the President who, reasonably enough, must be elected before being inaugurated. Almost certainly his election, planned for 6 May, will have to be postponed.
By last evening, in kwaZulu/Natal, counters had got through less than 1 million of some 9 million votes. An infuriated IEC officer has accused them of ‘taking their time’. Unwisely, they are being paid by the hour and most are jobless so naturally they are taking their time. A moment’s thought would have avoided this source of delay.
Sadly, violence has been resumed in kwaZulu/Natal; thirty political murders marred the weekend. Elsewhere, South Africa remains at peace.
At 7 a.m., on the way to Khayelitsha, most of my fellow-passengers were singing and sharing bottles of cane-spirit and two youths hung out of the taxi windows waving sheet-sized ANC flags. At intervals these were blown across the windscreen – while the general celebratory mood inspired each driver to try even harder than usual to overtake all others.
For a time I avoided Blocks L and M, savouring my freedom to wander alone and unguarded where eleven months ago I was at risk. The shebeens were full of swaying customers who had been drinking all night – or maybe ever since Madiba’s Victory Speech? Young faces that last year were surly and closed – eyes averted when Whitey appeared – today were laughing and open and direct welcoming looks came from bright eyes. Older faces, previously tense and worn, today looked relaxed and jolly. Everyone seemed to be walking – when they weren’t dancing – with a spring in their step. Yet daily life is no easier now than then. Economic equality remains invisible, away over the horizon: whites will continue to enjoy lives of luxury, joined by more and more successful blacks, but the average shack-dweller does not expect soon to have adequate schooling and medical care, four-bedroomed houses, good jobs, Toyota Corollas. (Only in the Macassar squatter camp did I meet a few recent arrivals from a remote Transkei village who cherished such illusions.) Those ‘unrealistic black expectations’, so often pinpointed as ‘the main threat to future stability’, are yet another urban legend.
To me, the change in atmosphere felt like a spiritual regeneration, a liberation from something even more destructive than extreme poverty. Last year the new South Africa was in utero, yet people could still be beaten up, tortured, killed, jeered at, stolen from – with no possibility of redress. Now the new constitution guarantees legal equality: no longer are blacks defenceless non-citizens counting for nothing in their own country. No wonder Khayelitsha is so jubilant today!
Most of my Xhosa friends, apart from senior community leaders, have only the vaguest notion – or no notion – of the structures of government in their new South Africa. And they are not much interested – Madiba is President! Viva President Mandela Viva! Some of those who crowded into Blossom’s shack displayed a certain puzzled unease about the Nats’ local victory but were easily reassured. Of course all will be well, the country is to be run from now on by President Mandela and as a mere provincial premier Kriel must obey Madiba – which prospect gave the most exquisite pleasure to all present.
It is emerging that in some regions good luck contributed to the miracle of peaceful elections. According to my reliable community leader friends, an ANC Youth League activist single-handedly defused a ballot-paper time-bomb in Khayelitsha by decisively taking the initiative and organizing transport to ‘white’ polling stations. But five days later, when the Nats’ local victory was confirmed, this same 23-year-old at once began to organize a pride of Young Lions to invade Mitchells Plain that night to kill Coloureds. Madiba’s Victory Speech came just in time. Then it was realized that Kriel’s election did not mean a nationwide defeat for the ANC.
On 30 April someone calculated that vote-counting, at the rate it was then going, would take eight and a half years. Things have since speeded up, but not enough from my point of view. Madiba’s election by Parliament has been postponed to 9 May, which kills my plan to take the Transkaroo Express on 7 May and revel with the Inauguration crowds in Pretoria. Now what do I do? In fact this choice is not too difficult. The Inauguration – an immensely elaborate and formal event, a global TV Spectacular – appeals to me less than that moment when Nelson Mandela will first address his people as President of the Republic of South Africa.
Some of Cape Town’s architectural juxtapositions can be eloquent. Like the arrogant domination of the Houses of Parliament by the Hendrik Verwoerd Building, a Stalinesque block of skyscraping government offices. (Afrikanerdom’s fondness for the Stalinesque is not surprising, when you think about it.) Today black workmen were enthusiastically painting the Parliament’s dignified façade; from the scaffolding one looked down at me with a big grin and shouted, ‘Now this belongs to us!’
I felt elated with him, yet his words induced a muddled sort of sadness. Neither the Houses of Parliament nor what goes on within them is part of the black tradition. Had Africa been left undisturbed (a fantasy concept) its peoples would never have constructed such a building or designed the system of government that will henceforth (we hope) operate within its walls. Why can’t one utter this important truth aloud without being accused of racism?
The friendly Afrikaner SAPS officer on duty at the gate wanted to know why ouma (granny) was using a bicycle. We talked for quarter of an hour. ‘Us police’ – said this young lieutenant – ‘we don’t have problems with our new South Africa … We’re only ordinary South Africans, we’re not devils. OK, some of us had to do tough things in the old days – but now same as everyone else we want peace.’
Sitting in the Gardens, I watched a feral kitten stalking a grey squirrel. A Coloured couple, aged fiftyish, chose the same bench and were also curious about Chris. Soon the new South Africa was again under consideration.
‘What upsets me,’ said the husband, ‘is how this election was supposed to unite us all but now on the Cape we’re more divided than ever.’
His wife deplored the Nats’ bribing of black squatters to take over houses newly built for Coloureds. ‘There’s no quicker way to set us at each other’s throats! But still we knew we had to vote Nat – our only defence against affirmative action. We haven’t forgotten the past but now we must think of the future. Politics is about survival.’
Later, in the Heidelberg, a Coloured student wearing three finger rings and a gaudy cravat offered the opinion that bloodshed has merely been postponed. ‘Mandela’s lekker but the rest of that lot are only shit. Day he dies the ANC falls apart, they’ll kill each other, fighting for top jobs. And the township tsotsies will have Winnie to lead them, she’s going mad not being First Lady. She’s a greedy racist bitch. You heard she wants UWC for blacks only? Says if we’re so fond of Whitey we should clear out to UCT. I’m UWC and those illiterate black fuckers have no place there – it’s primary schooling they need. You know Mandela’s a Coloured but he won’t admit? He’s no Xhosa, he’s Coloured. That’s why he’s so cosy with whites. De Klerk knows he’s Coloured, that’s why he can talk to him. He couldn’t talk that same way with a black.’
At 2 p.m. today the final election results came through because the parties had agreed to ‘fix it’. Judge Kriegler admitted as much. ‘Let’s not get overly squeamish,’ said he. ‘I expected the election results to be manipulated to resolve political disputes and election irregularities. They’re in a power game with one another, and if they want to settle on the basis that they withdraw objections there’s nothing wrong with it, ethically or legally. We’ve never been asked to certify this particular political process is substantially free and fair. Verneukery [crookery] was expected, but what mattered was its effect on the outcome of the elections. You can’t work in a brothel and remain chaste.’
We have all thoroughly enjoyed the electoral shambles, chuckling as the comedy of errors unfolded. On 3 May the Jo’burg Stock Exchange reeled when the IEC announced that 744,039 spoiled papers had been recorded in the PWV district; shares were about to plummet when someone discovered a typing mistake. It seems the IEC and ANC did indeed have a special relationship. Most of the 300,000 comparatively well-paid IEC employees were unskilled ANC supporters, beneficiaries of Affirmative Action. Few of these tyros exerted themselves to thwart the many underage voters, equipped with forged ID cards, who contrived to outwit (or intimidate?) the Monitors. Moreover, the prevailing chaos has facilitated the disappearance of 45 per cent of all IEC computers, including 80 per cent of laptops. If this is a ‘negotiated revolution’, who needs the other sort?
Listening to Madiba today, I wondered if he needs to rein in his reconciliation campaign. While addressing an emotional crowd in Cape Town’s oldest mosque – the Owal Mosque in Bo-Kaap – he stressed the need for GNU to be seen as South Africa’s first corruption-free government. Then he talked about ‘all religions supporting morality’. Well, yes – but who is to define ‘morality’ in the new South Africa? My anthology of election literature includes a half-page newspaper advertisement explaining:
WHY NON-MUSLIMS SHOULD VOTE FOR THE ISLAMIC PARTY
Madiba continued, ‘It is our task to find a role for the churches, to keep moral standards very high. We would like the Muslims’ high moral values to penetrate into government structures.’ But ANC and Islamic Party policies are fundamentally irreconcilable as Madiba must be aware. This listener feels uncomfortable when logic and honesty are sacrificed to reconciliation – which then becomes tainted by hypocrisy.
During the past two days King Edward VII has been gradually disappearing amidst the Grand Parade’s soaring tiers of seats; but he remains unscathed, having two Xhosa workmen specially delegated to protect him.
This afternoon, to one side of the City Hall balcony, a high wide stage was being erected for the dance groups, singers and acrobats who will entertain tomorrow’s waiting crowd. Manholes were being checked, then given a permanent guard. I spoke to several Coloureds whose nearby stalls were burned and/or looted during the Hani riots, now referred to as ‘Cape Town’s Day of Shame’. In the changed atmosphere they are unworried about tomorrow when 2,000 police officers, 800 ANC marshals and 400 Peace Committee Monitors will be on duty.
This evening one of the new MPS (an old friend) invited me to watch the President’s election from the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery and I hesitated – but only briefly. Within Parliament I could watch history being made, as an observer. On the Grand Parade I will be able to feel history being made, as a participant.
On an early commuter train to Central Station I marvelled at my fellow-passengers’ stolidity. Surely, on 9 May 1994, they should have been waving little flags and clapping and singing, instead of reading fat romantic novels, or doing crosswords, or knitting, or exchanging office gossip in the English-sounding accent shared by educated Coloureds and suburban English-speakers. However, the sky was celebrating. Above the Hottentot Hollands floated a wide archipelago of pastel cloudlets – suddenly all golden, as the first sunrays slid over the mountain tops.
In that early light the City Hall’s sandstone façade glowed warmly and the urban crest and motto (SPES BONA: appropriate at last) glistened after yesterday’s scrubbing. Banners in the national colours, fifty feet long, were being draped on either side of the balcony; otherwise the scene was set. On an open space between the street and the grandstand – now completely concealing His Majesty – 300 red plastic chairs had been neatly arranged, no one seemed to know for whom. Both grandstand and chairs were surrounded by strong seven-foot-high wire-mesh fencing. And the public were forbidden to set foot on the street below the City Hall balcony.
It was a warm windless morning with a fringe of cloud draped over Table Mountain – not its heavy tablecloth, just translucent shreds. As yet only lines of alert police occupied the Grand Parade. But soon the first trainful arrived from the Cape Flats, led by a group of cheering elderly women waving large ANC flags and wearing Madiba gowns and scarves and headdresses. As the crowd swelled, black, green and gold predominated. An old Guguletu woman on crutches came to sit beside me on a kerb and observed that really the ANC had won in the Western Cape but no black votes were counted. First the boere tried to withhold ballot papers and when that didn’t work they discarded them. One more urban legend. Ironically, many township folk perceive the Kriegler-led IEC as a baasskap institution.
Sauntering towards Parliament, I paused to view the international-press corps congregating in the ground-floor auditorium of the Verwoerd Building to watch the ceremonies on big-screen TV. Hyperbolically they complained about ‘disorganization like nowhere else’ and several showed symptoms of incipient panic. Delays had been forecast, so how could they meet their deadlines? This was a small corps; most of their colleagues, I gathered, were relaxing in Pretoria.
Rambling around the colossal Verwoerd Building, I was startled to find myself alone on a low balcony opposite one entrance to Parliament – an entrance in use. An exuberant colourful throng of MPS and their families was slowly flowing through a narrow pedestrian way; from my unsought vantage point I could lean over and shake hands with passing friends. Why had no security officer prevented me from taking up such an ideal assassination position? I might have been a neo-Nazi from Poland or Bosnia … But then, no security system is perfect.
For half an hour I stood there, elated by the fairy-tale-come-true atmosphere, savouring the joyousness of a conquest without violence. This was the moment when the orderly defeat of white supremacy could be celebrated – was being celebrated – without rancour or vengefulness, when the miracle of the election days became visible. History incarnate was passing before me, individuals whose presence there and then personified the new South Africa.
Some faces were recognizable. Joe Slovo looked pallid but very happy; without his logjam-breaking ‘sunset clause’ we might still be waiting for the elections. Hernus Kriel, in a bright blue suit, for once was attempting to seem amiable. Thabo Mbeki – animated, eyes twinkling – went into exile as a teenager and is now, aged 51, First Deputy President of South Africa. Joe Modise, looking as crafty and tough as he is, commanded the MK from 1965 and, as Defence Minister, is already ominously close to Pretoria’s military establishment and European arms manufacturers. Derek Hanekom, the new Land Affairs Minister, also looks what he is, an Afrikaner farmer – but a Boer with a difference, an ANC member who served three years in jail for passing information to the MK about the SADF’s illegal activities in Mozambique. Bantu Holomisa, the youngish ex-military dictator of the Transkei, was laughing loudly; his qualifications for being Deputy Minister for Environmental Affairs are obscure. Kader Asmal, the Natal-born founder of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, I think of possessively if illogically as Ireland’s contribution to the new Cabinet. For many years he lived happily in Dublin as a Trinity College law lecturer; now he is Water and Forestry Minister. Chief Buthelezi came striding along with his head held high but looking grumpy despite being Home Affairs Minister. Terror Lekota, ex-convict with Mandela, has been elected Premier of the most conservative province, the Boers’ beloved Orange Free State. Kobie Coetsee, previously Justice Minister, is now President of the Senate; this is – they say – his reward for having been a key figure in the initial top-secret negotiations between his most distinguished prisoner and P. W. Botha’s government. His ruggedly handsome successor, Dullah Omar, was twice detained while a member of the Cape Bar. Next came Pik Botha, one of the staunchest defenders of apartheid, a vigorous and powerful ally of Renamo in the Mozambican war and, until last week, the world’s longest-serving Foreign Affairs Minister. He has been demoted to Mineral and Energy Affairs and replaced by Alfred Nzo – awarded the USSR Order of Friendship a mere nine years ago. Then, as I was turning away, I glimpsed the most ‘symbolic’ figure of all: Melanie Verwoerd, the 28-year-old granddaughter-in-law of Hendrik Verwoerd, now an ANC MP.
This is indeed a Government of National Unity: heroes and villains, the honest and the dishonest, the brilliant and the dim-witted, idealists and schemers, rabid racists and fervent liberals – all on their way, as I watched them, to vote unanimously for a black President of the Republic of South Africa.
Back on the Grand Parade I positioned myself beside the wire fence near the grandstand, from where I had a clear view of the balcony. By then a Mpondo dance group was bounding all over the enormous stage wearing ersatz ‘native dress’, mostly glitzy nylon and plastic with tall dyed ostrich plumes. Then came a famous Cape Flats band, the Sexy Boys, followed by a white pop group who were rapturously received and cheered semi-hysterically as they sang of ‘unity’. While watching them dance, a young woman in front of me exclaimed to no one in particular, ‘And you think whites can’t jump!’ Halfway up a tall palm tree, a Coloured youth and two blacks were clinging to the trunk while jiving – a more memorable achievement than anything happening on the stage. Beside me a Xhosa elder with cataract-blurred eyes, sunken cheeks, tidy shoddy clothes and a homburg hat stood leaning on two sticks, his expression serene. He was born, he told me, in 1907. ‘Soon I will die, happily, as a free man.’ One of the ANC marshals was his great-grandson. Today many marshals were unarmed MK, wearing smart new beige uniforms instead of jungle camouflage battledress. As the crowd grew denser, they advised that all small children should be lifted onto shoulders – where thousands already were, impatiently bouncing and brandishing miniature ANC flags.
Time passed. Everyone sang and clapped or ululated. The sun shone from a cloudless autumn sky and the air trembled with joy. But meanwhile many packed trains and buses were continuing to arrive from the townships, from rural areas, from nearby towns. Today the authorities provided free transport – an admirable ploy, were it not that the organizers of this event lack imagination. When some 150,000 Madiba-worshippers are expected to converge on an open space to see their idol it is worse than tactless to exclude them from the best vantage point by erecting a grandstand that blocks their view – apparently for the benefit of foreign media people who failed to attend. In the bad old days this crassness might have provoked a full-scale riot. In euphoric, Madiba-guided South Africa it at first seemed to be causing only a good-humoured crush. Inexplicably, the 300 red chairs, occupying a large space in front of me beyond the wire fence, remained empty.
At 12.20 – twenty minutes after the Presidential party was due to appear – the two marshals standing closest to me, on the other side of the wire, began anxiously to confer. Normally I am not crowd-allergic; I enjoy the casual intimacy of close physical contact with my fellow-beings. But now I began to sense danger. A new sound was mingling with the singing and clapping and saxophone-playing – angry shouting, coming from the railway station’s direction. Moments later we all realized that some of the thousands trapped behind the grandstand were trying to push their way around that irritating obstacle. This was mob madness; only a mouse could have moved among the throng already assembled.
As the surge of bodies became more urgent, an odd sort of muted panic gripped most of those around me. Beyond us, in that baffling and tantalizing open space, the ANC marshals reacted – as SAPS did not – to the incipient crisis. Swiftly they instructed those of us by the fence (mostly women) to grip the wire mesh, put one foot on the solid metal frame in which it was set, bend low as if in a rugger scrum and pull the fence towards us without a moment’s let-up.
‘This way our ribs won’t be broken,’ explained a cool young Khayelitsha woman on my right. Evidently she was a seasoned campaigner, accustomed to such life-threatening situations. On their side, the marshals were also keeping one foot on the frame and pushing the fence towards us. I remembered the recent Athlone stampede, at Madiba’s final election rally, in which three unfortunates were trampled to death and scores badly injured. Why hadn’t I opted to become a Distinguished Stranger?
‘Hey! We’re lucky!’ said the seasoned campaigner. ‘This is a strong fence – you get a weak fence, you have problems. Don’t worry, we’re fine while everyone pulls and pushes.’
Worry? I wasn’t worried, my guts were twisted with terror as time and again the surge behind us pressed on my buttocks and I strained harder to pull the wire towards us and push on the metal bar. This was grotesque, to be so frightened during the happiest event I have ever attended – frightened as rarely before in a long lifetime of travel.
Peace Monitors reinforced the marshals as the angry shouting grew louder and the surges more frequent. Then, at the very moment of President Mandela’s appearance, youths broke through from behind the grandstand, having demolished the fence, and swarmed onto the chair space yelling ‘Viva Madiba Viva!’ At once the marshals – the majority teenagers, a few mere children – fled from the scene and it seemed the fence would collapse. But quickly more Monitors replaced them as the police at last arrived.
Order was rapidly and roughly restored within the chair space, but throughout Nelson Mandela’s first public address as President that terrifying pressure was maintained behind us. In our scared and tumultuous corner Madiba was inaudible and those of us in the frontline – heads down, buttocks up – could only glimpse him out of the corners of our eyes. (So much for participation …) To most of the crowd what their new President said was unimportant – in fact unintelligible, to the non-English-speaking younger generations. Therefore the loudspeakers relaying his words did nothing to calm those behind the grandstand who yearned to see their idol taking precedence on the balcony over Mr de Klerk and various other white ex-supremacists.
Mercifully this historic event was not too prolonged. When we were freed from our duty as Upholders of the Fence, I found myself trembling all over.
As the crowd dispersed, long lines of police officers – seeming needlessly twitchy – moved to guard the city centre’s main shopping streets. On Adderley Street a stray police dog caused understandable panic among the blacks; these creatures are no better trained than their handlers. This morning, behind the City Hall, a loose dog approached me aggressively, ignored H.M.V. and would certainly have attacked me had I not stood still. He had to be dragged away by the collar, his handler having lost his chain. However, this stray’s only concern was to find his officer; looking pathetically anxious he ran to and fro, nose to ground, then heard a familiar whistle and raced around a corner.
Within an hour the contented township dwellers were making their way back to the railway station, showing off their most advanced toyi-toying skills or holding aloft huge banners: A BETTER LIFE FOR ALL, MANDELA FOR PRESIDENT, GOD BLESS AFRICA. Today Mandela is President, joy is unconfined, the time for looting is over.
I took a bus back to Obs. Several passengers, hanging from the windows, displayed life-sized placard photographs of President Mandela. En route the Coloured driver, wearing an ANC stocking-cap, played a triumphant tune on his hooter.
Now I am stiff and aching, my hands lacerated by the wire fence. Yet on TV the central drama of my day seemed no more than a blip. According to police estimates, at least 150,000 had assembled on the Grand Parade by 1 p.m. I can believe this. During the chaos in our corner, other sections of the crowd sang the Peace Song led by Archbishop Tutu. He faltered only for a moment when the fracas looked nasty a few yards from where an Irish citizen was contributing her mite to the new South Africa’s stability-image. So after all I did participate.