By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Sunday, April 3, 1994
JOHANNESBURG—Against a backdrop of hope and fear, a nation’s epic march toward democracy has entered a bloody home stretch.
The people of South Africa—including, for the first time, the majority black population—will go to the polls later this month and alter the course of their bitter history.
They will elect a new national government and officially close the door on apartheid—the code of racist law by which some 5.6 million whites kept 24 million blacks and others of mixed race in symbolic chains for nearly half a century.
“It’s a liberation election that finally puts the beast of apartheid in the grave,” said Larry Shore, a Hunter College professor who, like many white activist South Africans, left the country long ago out of fear or disgust.
By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Sunday, April 3, 1994
Saraan Ajaye did not even know South Africa was a country until she took a human rights course a year ago.
Ajaye, a senior at the Bronx alternative high school Schomburg Satelite Academy, now sees the country’s gallop to democracy after three centuries of oppression as a civics lesson.
Never take your vote for granted, she said, pointing out how low turnout of African-American and Latino voters affected the outcome of the recent mayoral election. “As soon as I turned 18, I registered to vote,” she added.
By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Sunday, April 3, 1994
JOHANNESBURG—The epicenter of the violence that rattled this city last week remained a place of frayed nerves and bullet-riddled glass yesterday.
Outside the headquarters of the African National Congress Party, a security guard quickly confronted two visitors who stepped beneath the red and white tape strung chest high along the sidewalk.
Seemingly out of nowhere a car with three men wearing sunglasses and looks of suspicion pulled up to the curb.
Once convinced the visitors came in peace, the guard relaxed enough to talk about the violent moments that led late last week to a war-like state of emergency being declared in the Natal province—the Zulu heartland.
“The shooting here lasted only five minutes,” he said, standing beside the display window commemorating the upcoming all-race elections.
“Over there,” he added, pointing across Plein St., to a 12-story apartment building. “Snipers started firing. And if there’s trouble again, I will know what to do.”
Text: MICHAEL O. ALLEN; Maps & Design: JIM WILLIS | Sunday, April 3, 1994
HISTORY’S LESSONS
South Africa, as it enters a world made uncertain by the end of apartheid, should look to the post-independence experiences of Namibia and Zimbabwe.
The same fears being raised today about South Africa’s stumble to democracy were raised in Zimbabwe leading up to its independence from Britain in 1980. and in Namibia a decade later when it emerged from under the thumb of South Africa.
A quick answer—if Namibia and Zimbabwe are guides—is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The liberation fighters who took power retain firm control in both nations. Power has not made blacks wealthier, however. In both instances, they are as poor today as they ever were under white domination.
Whites in both situations, retain economic power and live as well as they ever have.
Namibia, though its blacks remain dreadfully poor, is peaceful today and is much forgotten by the rest of the world.
Zimbabwe, after a brief but violent aftermath to its independence, is poised for its third election next year. It has the most vigorous press in Africa, a stable, though not vibrant, economy and a fairly content white population.
1. IN TRANSITION
The multi-racial Transitional Executive Council shares broad governing powers with South Africa’s ruling National Party.
A friend of mine, Martin, sent me an e-mail with three pictures attached. I have not asked his permission to post this but this is the subject line of his e-mail: “Three pictures one of slang, the other of a little box, and the message from Obama to his people, apparently the world, not the armed forces”
Here’s his e-mail, which I took the liberty of chopping into paragraphs:
The first picture:
Hi Guys!
I always interpreted the term “guys” instead of more respectful custom as the totalitarian modality of work and consumption of higher-based custom after Hitler took over Europe.
These are fast paced times, good to know that.
I have a hard time waking up in the morning if it wasn’t for my cat, Jasper.
I have no reverence for the activities I pursue on a day/to/day perspective but have little faith in anything other than god, the government is out of control and we are living here in the United States in a personal holocaust for the mentally ill, and if that includes for you Foucault’s jail population, then you are on par with me at the end of the links.
Someone has to save these people and they are dying.
The Second picture:
They took the sixties and they put them either to forced work by owning their materialist homes where they found vagrancy of comfort after the likes of Malcolm X, Huey Newton and Martin Luther King, Janis Joplin and John Lennon, JFK and all the others slaughtered for the right of passage to the end of the world.
I’m sick I have you know that each e-mail, but who is going to take care of the people in my family whom need help when they need it, like always, evermore. ???
I hope that sometimes when people think of me they will think of the concept of survivor, not akin at all to the retro-demand of Hitler from all corners and walks and likes of the Earth just to make yourself busy and survive for the Establishment to come stomping on the ground you walk on soon as you’re able to look down outside of your watch.
The third picture:
I never read the Harvard Classics, most of my education came from the school of hard knocks, but I do know this:
we’re doomed, unless someone or something can listen and learn and listen as they act, which takes a lot of tightrope wakling and a lot of zen buddhism while I’m only a buddhist I am not the zen variety that sort of practise is doomed unless you combine it with a healthy job which pays enough money to clean the sheets on the mattress once you “just go” and “let it be”.
We need more people to act as the great Sacha Baron Cohen and his message of love peace and tolerance as he smashes all the dim-witted ideologues to hell incarnate when they are so embarrassed as to lose their job at the catholic church due to embarrassment, after so much hatred.
I’m beginning to think not only a dog doesn’t learn new tricks also God doesn’t, spelled backwards or forwards, dog/god is out to get each and every last goddamn fascist in the book and I know from checking, or like the back of my hand that every person on this dang list of e-mails is a good person. Don’t worry.
A diplomat is a man who says you have an open mind, instead of telling you that you have a hole in the head — Unknown
By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Sunday, April 3, 1994
JOHANNESBURG—He carries himself like he was born to power—and he was, 75 years ago, in a hut at the bottom of the African continent.
His family ran the village; a cousin, with whom he lived while a teen, was chief of the surrounding region. Under a stand of eucalyptus trees that was the tribal courthouse, they prepared Nelson Mandela to follow in their footsteps.
“The genesis of my ideas is under these trees,” said the Old Man, as he is known among his followers, during a homecoming last month.
By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Sunday, April 3, 1994
The scenes are stunning: blacks lustily cheering apartheid scion Frederik Willem de Klerk as he campaigns for re-election to the presidency of South Africa.
The happy candidate obliges by donning Zulu tribal hats, carrying spears and cowhide shields.
“I’m white,” he told one black audience, “but my heart pumps the same red blood as the red blood in the heart of every South African.”
De Klerk, 58, was born into a staunchly political Afrikaner family in the Transvaal. As his great-grandfather and his father, he represented the province in parliament. So, the deeply religious father of three caught most people by surprise when he began dismantling apartheid.