Bitter Legacy the Loser as Voters Head for Polls

Against all odds, South Africans of all races will begin to go to the polls today to liberate themselves from their own bitter history.

After more than three centuries of white rule, four decades of apartheid and four years of bloodshed, the overwhelming black majority will cast ballots for the first time, today through Thursday, to elect a government that has pledged to repudiate racism and seek social and economic justice through multi-party democracy.

It is one of history’s most unusual revolutions: An elite white minority is surrendering political power to the impoverished black majority it oppressed with Kafkaesque rules of racial classification, rigid segregation and brutal force.

Those blacks now will be able to determine their own future and rule their own land. Today marks the end of the last white-ruled autocracy in Africa and the birth of the world’s newest democracy.

At exactly one minute before midnight tonight, South Africa’s 66-year-old flag, the tricolor standard of the old white-ruled regime, will be officially lowered for the last time. The old national anthem, the Afrikaans-language “Die Stem” (“The Voice”), will be played.

Then, at one minute past the hour, South Africa’s new flag, the six-color hope of a new nation, will be hoisted at nine new provincial capitals and at up to 6,000 government buildings, courts, police stations, embassies and ships in navy and merchant fleets.

The black liberation anthem, “Nikosi Sikelel iAfrika” (“God Bless Africa”) will echo over the land as the new constitution and charter of rights come into effect to officially guarantee basic rights and freedoms to all South Africans for the first time since Europeans landed in Cape Town in 1652.

Over the coming weeks and months, power and authority will pass inexorably from rich to poor, from leafy suburb to sprawling township, from 5 million whites to 30 million blacks.

Expectations are high, but so are the fears.

South Africa has a climate of intolerance and a culture of violence that won’t disappear when votes are counted. After generations in which nonwhites were denied decent housing, schools or jobs, the post-apartheid upheaval to a new form of government, a new legal system, new schools and other institutions may be as difficult as the anti-apartheid struggle.

The new government will inherit a heavy debt, a bloated civil service and desperate demands for housing, education and health care. “One thing we’ve learned is elections are the easiest part of a new democracy,” Madeleine Albright, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, warned during a recent visit here.

The task of holding this volatile new nation together almost certainly will fall on the patriarch of the liberation movement, a man who has never been allowed to vote in his 75 years of trial and triumph--Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. Under the new constitution, which creates posts for the opposition, one of Mandela’s top deputies is likely to be the last white president, Frederik W. de Klerk.

A beaming Mandela told supporters last week that his goal was in sight “after 27 years in jail, 20 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.”

A wave of last-minute terror bombings, the death rattle of white supremacy, marred the eve of the elections. It was the inevitable coda, perhaps, to a four-year transition from apartheid to democracy that saw almost 15,000 people, mostly black, killed by fighting for the spoils of white rule.

But the bombs, blamed so far on ultra-right-wing whites, have added a pall of gloom to the elections.

One bomb exploded outside a popular black restaurant Monday night in Pretoria, killing two people. Earlier, a huge car bomb devastated a busy taxi stand in Germiston, a Johannesburg suburb. Ten were killed and 40 injured. That followed a huge car bomb Sunday in Johannesburg that killed nine and wounded 98. Smaller bombs also exploded overnight at several empty polling stations and election offices.

Judge Johann Kriegler, head of the Independent Electoral Commission, said Monday that the bombings only “reinforced the determination” of the 22.7 million eligible voters--including up to 18 million first-time black voters--to cast their ballots. “The real message now is joy,” Kriegler said. “We’ve come light years in four years, and we’ll not be deterred by minor incidents.”

Kriegler and his commission--backed by more than 200,000 election workers and monitors, plus about 5,000 international observers--must certify whether the poll is free and fair. The commission has banned journalists from entering polling or counting stations, and Kriegler said Monday that it was “arrogant” for reporters to claim a right to do so.

Today, the first day of voting, is expected to draw fewer than 1 million “special voters.” Polls will be set up in hospitals, prisons and nursing and retirement homes. Pregnant women and blind and disabled voters will be able to cast ballots at special polling stations.

South Africans around the world also can vote today. Polls have been set up in 80 countries, from Argentina to Zambia. An estimated 100,000 South Africans will cast ballots at 24 polling places in 16 U.S. cities, including Los Angeles.

Mandela is scheduled to cast his vote at 7:30 Wednesday morning in a battle-scarred Zulu township outside Durban in Natal province. The rest of the nation will vote all day Wednesday and Thursday, flocking to 9,000 schools, clinics, courthouses, post offices and other makeshift polling stations.

Lawrence Schlemmer, a political scientist and pollster with Johannesburg’s Human Sciences Research Council, said reams of data from 22,000 interviews in the last year have proved “one thing” about the hopes and expectations of the newly enfranchised electorate:

“People expect to be treated with dignity; their status as a human being, as a South African, is non-negotiable,” he said. “Quite frankly, I feel this election is more about honor and status than about houses and jobs.”

More than 1 million spoiled ballots are expected from voters who mistakenly mark their X in the wrong place or otherwise invalidate their franchise. The official results won’t be announced for at least 48 hours after polls close, although unofficial tallies will be available.

For all the euphoria of the moment, the election is likely to reaffirm past divisions. Polls show that only a tiny fraction of whites will vote for the ANC and that only a tiny fraction of blacks will vote for De Klerk’s National Party. Instead, whites, Indians and mixed-race Colored voters--all minorities now--are likely to join a broad coalition against the black-led ANC.

“This is not an election about liberating minorities,” Schlemmer said. “It’s an election about liberating the majority.”