The Birth of a Democratic Nation : South Africans Go To The Polls

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly, wrote G.K. Chesterton, and South Africa’s first democratic election has proven him right.

By every normal standard, the South African election was a disaster. The run-up to the voting was chaotic and violent. Hundreds died in clashes between supporters of the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party. Hard-line racist whites, unreconciled to the idea of majority rule, launched a national campaign of terrorist bombing. One major party boycotted the poll until almost the eve of voting; stickers were hastily slapped on millions of pre-printed ballots so the Inkatha Party could appear.

It only got worse when the polls opened. Ballot papers were lost, were shipped to the wrong destinations. Voters waited on line for hours before being told that they would have to go home because voting supplies had run short. The process was so chaotic that the voting period had to be extended.

It was a mess, a disaster--and one of the greatest triumphs for democracy and the human spirit that this weary old world has seen. Administrative chaos meant millions of South Africans had to stand on lines that stretched in some cases for miles; what is remarkable, and what the world should remember as we wonder about South Africa’s future, is that millions of people patiently waited on those lines--and peacefully voted.

They had been waiting a long time--since young Mohandas K. Gandhi led protests against racial segregation and the African National Congress called for a non-racial South Africa at its founding in 1912. Nelson Mandela waited 27 years in prison before emerging to lead South Africa’s largest political party in elections from which he was expected to emerge as the first genuinely democratic elected leader in the country’s long, troubled history.

Today, the eyes of the world are on South Africa as never before. If the new democratic South Africa can rebuild its economy, and combine the often conflicting demands of economic justice and economic efficiency, it will point the way to a new political and economic era for all of black Africa. South African business and expertise can become the locomotive of change for its neighbors and bring an end to Africa’s poverty and impotence.

But the importance of South Africa’s election goes farther. At a time when democracy seems on the retreat--when communists and nationalists are rising to power in much of Eastern Europe, when supporters of Benito Mussolini are joining the government in Italy and when corruption and incompetence have dimmed the allure of democratic principles and parties from Washington to Tokyo--South Africa reminds us what democracy is.

It is more than a method of government: It is a statement about human dignity. Those South African voters who stood patiently for hours waiting to cast their ballots weren’t just participating in a political process; they were also participating in a moral and spiritual process. After years of oppression, they were standing up to say, as Jesse Jackson would put it, “I am somebody.” And no bombs, no threats, no long lines or administrative chaos could keep South Africans from making that statement.

South Africa is used to the limelight. This beloved country has always played an important role in the world’s imagination since Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope. South Africa’s natural beauty, its geographic isolation, the vast wealth of its resources, the stark contrasts and conflicts among the many brave peoples who have loved it and called it their home have given it an importance far beyond the numbers of people who live there.

This is a land of heroes. Winston Churchill rose to fame as a dashing British cavalry officer in the Boer War. The Zulu King Shaka mounted one of history’s great military campaigns against the whites who sought to take Zulu land. The Afrikaners who fought the British in the Boer Wars won the world’s admiration for their brave struggle against impossible odds. The last Napoleonic heir to the French imperial throne died in South Africa, serving in a British force that was massacred by Zulu warriors.

More recently, South Africa’s long liberation struggle has created thousands of heroes, black and white, female and male. The ANC was sustained for decades by the patient and heroic efforts of tens of thousands who risked prison, exile and death to fight racism. The Black Sash, an organization of mostly white South African women, bore witness at great risk and cost to the dignity and worth of all of South Africa’s people. Names like Steven Biko, Desmond Tutu, Alan Boesak, Cyril Ramaphosa and Chris Hani are known and honored wherever freedom is loved.

The election is not just a victory for South Africa’s oppressed blacks. It is a victory also for the Afrikaners, the descendants of white settlers who came to South Africa at the time whites first settled the American colonies and who built a society much like the early United States.

As fiercely democratic and egalitarian among themselves as the U.S. colonists, they even share the same national myths as Americans. Like Americans, Afrikaners are a people who look back to revolutionary struggles with Britain and to epic pioneer journeys in covered wagons. Like Americans, the Afrikaners have a proud heritage that is disfigured by racism. The Afrikaner nationalists who framed the laws of apartheid were, in part, inspired by the Jim Crow segregation laws of the American South. But, like white America, white Afrikanerdom was finally driven to struggle against the racism of its own heritage; that struggle is only beginning, but already men like Frederik W. de Klerk have come farther and faster than anyone could have imagined.

Now, as votes are counted and parties maneuver for power in the new South African order, South Africa’s troubles are far from over. But in a time when too often the news is of defeats for peace and democracy, of breakdowns in order and decency, and of conflicts among the world’s great religions and its feuding nations, we should all stand back for a moment and join the people of South Africa in celebrating the immense if untidy victory that this election represents. “Nkosi Sikelel’ i-Afrika!” God Bless Africa! This is a sentiment, and a prayer, that all share at this great and shining moment.*