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Freedom Day, on April 27, in South Africa celebrates the very first free and democratic elections to be held in the country, ever. Millions queued in lines over the voting period. Almost 20 million South Africans voted. This is out of a population of about 38 million at the time.
In fact, the queues were so bad, the government had to allocate another day to the voting making it a three day public holiday at the time. Of course there were other reasons such as the ballot papers had to have an additional strip attached as the predominantly Zulu supported IFP created a bit of a diversion.
I was there in Durban, and it was also the first and only time I voted. People with permanent residence were able to vote then and that didn't happen again. I had never taken up South African citizenship. It was probably one of the most emotional moments in the country's history. Even the most staunch anti universal suffrage supporters, were touched by the way the South African people, white, black, coloured, Indian and others like myself, rallied to go to the polling stations.
After that we stayed glued to our TVs waiting for the results to roll in. And boy did they just. It was a landslide victory for the ANC. Which we had kind of anticipated. Well anybody with half a brain did. The old Nationalist Party still thought they were in with a chance, but nah, it wasn't going to happen for them.
Then you look at the western democracies and you see the lack of political participation, and you think back at that moment in 1994, where millions of people who had been denied the vote, stood up to cast their vote. There were people in their nineties who queued up in the searing heat, but were nevertheless determined to vote. This was their chance to show their solidarity to the party whose leaders had fought for them, some of them like the first democratically elected president Nelson Mandela incarcerated for 27 years on an island, others hounded out of the country or killed by security police.
The hope of the whole world focused on this remote country at the tip of Africa. A country that had overcome huge discrimination, hardship to the majority of its people and whose people were prepared to move on towards a democracy without major bloodshed and revolutionary processes. It was a small miracle, and for that moment, the rest of the world held its breath and wished it could happen everywhere.
Regrettably that only lasted a moment. It was like a pause button had been hit. But then the killing, mayhem and other nasty stuff started all over again and all over the world.
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