Historic Vote in South Africa

When I was 11, I remember standing on a beach in Cape Town, South Africa, with my toes in the white sand, a bucket of starfish and shells in one hand, looking out across the ice-cold caps of the Atlantic Ocean at a place that my father, who held my other hand, pointed to. “See that island out there,” he said, looking out at a vague piece of land on the horizon, “that’s Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela is. He’s a black political prisoner and will probably spend the rest of his life there. He’s a very brave man.”

I thought of Nelson Mandela as I shoveled sand into my bucket. I built a sand prison with a moat and a turret and I marked an X with a stick in the sand in the place where he might be. I imagined him shoveling gravel, covered with sweat in the heat of the African summer, while an Afrikaans armed guard stood watch over him.

Recently, I stood on La Cienega Boulevard with my father and other South African expatriates, both black and white. I held the hand of my 5-year-old American daughter and told her that I was there to vote for a very brave man named Nelson Mandela who was far away across the Atlantic Ocean. My vision of him was no longer vague across a misty horizon, but was clearly in front of me on the historic ballot sheet that had been handed to me inside the South African Consulate. On it was a picture of Mandela’s smiling face, and in the assigned space, I marked, not with a stick in sand, but with a pen, an X for him.

LINZI ALEX GLASS

Los Angeles

This could be entitled reflections on South Africa:

“Whenever in a given community, at a crucial given point, great, heroic and superhuman actions must be accomplished in order for more fairness and justice to be created; then from within that community a spark is produced, which synthesizes in its personal equation the full conscience of the entire community.”

The name of Nelson Mandela immediately comes to mind.

After a very long, overdue pregnancy, a free democratic South Africa is finally born. A bloodless revolution, as it were. This qualification, however, would deny any credits to the ultraconservative white right-wingers and regrettably to Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, who will be remembered in history for his open and fierce opposition to the operations and movements that turn this dream--his dream as well as that of the Zulu tribes he rules--into sheer reality.

JEAN G. NICOLAS

Fullerton

South Africa had 18 parties on its ballot. America had one party (Republicrat) and an irritating billionaire in the last presidential election. Gee, maybe South Africa’s on to something. What’s it called? Democracy?

MONICA REX

Los Angeles

Nelson Mandela became the first person of color to be elected president in the new South African democratic government. Much congratulations are in order, and my hat is off to President Frederik W. de Klerk for having the courage, character and wisdom to recognize change, and allow it to take place. We here in the United States have been a democracy for some 218 years, and have yet to come close to electing a person of color to the White House.

Wake up, America! Change is here; as in South Africa, basic demographics will dictate who the future leaders of this country will be. I hope our future leaders in power recognize this trend and have the grace, courage and brains to allow it to happen.

GARY R. COOK

Los Angeles

I was pleased to see you headlining the Opinion section (May 1) with a column on South Africa by Walter Russell Mead. The spirit of his piece is commendable. The election in South Africa is “a statement about human dignity” which should be admired by all. Unfortunately, Mead’s history of the country is flawed in several places. Churchill’s services as “a dashing British cavalry officer” was in the battle of Omdurman in the Sudan, not during the Anglo-Boer War, in which he served as a heroic newspaper correspondent. The Zulu King Shaka did not “mount one of history’s great military campaigns against the whites.” Shaka died before it began. “The last Napoleonic heir to the French imperial throne” did not die “serving in a British force that was massacred by Zulu warriors,” but rather during a skirmish subsequent to the battle of Isandhlwana to which Mead alludes.

Perhaps most distressing to me is the fact that Mead, a foreign policy specialist, failed to address the misguided U.S. foreign policy which sustained the apartheid system and prolonged the suffering of Mandela and his people. Readers deserve an accurate article on South Africa which asks us to confront the U.S. role in opposing sanctions, promoting Buthelezi, and otherwise thwarting the expression of human dignity we have just witnessed.

DONALD S. WILL

Delp-Wilkinson Professor of Peace Studies

Department of Political Science

Chapman University, Orange