Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Proceed, never mind
succeed
of 200 000, the IEC made it happen – had to make it happen – in just four months.
There was no voters’ roll, so nobody knew how many voters there were. The IEC worked to a rough estimate of 22.7 million eligible voters, and churned out 80 million ballots papers for delivery to some 9 000 polling stations, some so remote they couldn’t be reached by road.
And, of course, there were problems: ballot papers running out; polling stations failing to open; long delays. That was one thing. What is perhaps forgotten today is that not everybody was keen to see the election proceed, never mind succeed – and it was by no means obvious then how serious a threat the last-gasp reaction of a desperate white right posed.
Though the bombing campaign across the country exacted a tragically pointless toll, it soon became clear not only that the violence was the work of a peripheral minority, but also none of that mattered anymore.
The country was already living its future and nothing would deflect it.
The serpentine queues of patient voters were eloquent. It has been written elsewhere that “by the time they voted, many had waited for hours; most had waited a lifetime”.
None had any difficulty understanding what it meant to have a vote, and use it. And it worked. As the story of April 30 – with the simple, emphatic headline, “Free and fair” – predicted: “There is every likelihood that South Africa’s founding elections will be declared free and fair in spite of a series of breakdowns in the Independent Electoral Commission’s machinery.
“Foreign and local observer teams have labelled the elections a ‘definite success’ and a ‘victory for peace’, in spite of logistical and technical hitches.
“IEC chairman Johann Kriegler, ANC president Nelson Mandela and President De Klerk have also pronounced their satisfaction with the elections, which stretched to four days in some areas.”
Perhaps the greater measure of the success of the 1994 election was the uncomplicated ease with which ordinary people expressed just what they thought and voted accordingly. The result was unambiguous, but so was the range of choosing.
There is a hint of this quality in letters to the paper over those days.
Jo-Marie Claasen of Stellenbosch urged voters to “look at District Six – its weeds, its desolate churches and mosques – and remember the death of a vibrant community. It is good to forgive – but the bare wasteland does not allow us to forget”.
“Please, remember District Six, forgive the Nats, but do not feed the hands that unleashed dogs to bite your children. A vote for the NP is a vote for a party which, as recently as 1986, when the present leader was minister of education, was imprisoning school children for justified protest against a system that had razed a whole community and obliterated an integral part of Cape Town.”
Mark Burgers, of Blue Downs, had “no doubt the ANC will win in the Western Cape as well. People are sick and tired of being lied to.The feeling on the ground is: let’s give the ANC a chance, and rightly so”.
Margaret Kooy, of Three Anchor Bay, willed voters to ignore “those who use fear and hatred for political gain by painting other groups in negative colours. Why does ‘different’ have to be ‘dangerous’? We should see our differences as enormously enriching – not threatening.”
And a student weighed in, declaring herself a National Party supporter and urging others who felt the same way to use their vote. Against Cape history, and the larger story of the struggle for democracy, it would have come as a surprise to many in late April 1994 – and perhaps still does – that the author of this letter, a Ms R Bergsma, a democrat by any measure, was a resident of Mitchells Plain.
Then again, being free to choose is what democracy is all about.
In 1994, it turned out, Ms Bergsma was not alone: the National Party won the Western Cape with more than 1.1 million votes to the ANC’s 705 000. The Democratic Party, forerunner of the dominant DA today, clocked in at third place in 1994, garnering a mere 141 970 votes.