South Africa: The Freedom Vote

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Tuesday, May 3, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—Invoking the epic cry of another great liberation struggle, Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress proclaimed South Africa “Free at last.”
With only about half the ballots counted and the conclusion foregone, they claimed victory in the nation’s founding election, then vowed to roll up their sleeves immediately and begin improving the lots of millions of impoverished blacks.
“This is a joyous night for the human spirit, you have ended apartheid,” Mandela told a joyous throng of supporters at a downtown hotel. “Now is the time for all South Africans to join together to celebrate the birth of democracy.”
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My recent journey to South Africa to witness its epic sprint to democracy plunged me, like a pebble flung into a stream, deep into memories of my childhood in Africa.
Beside unleashing bred-in-bone memories, my sojourn forced me to examine thoughts I had long held, especially about myself. By the time I left South Africa, my persona, carefully constructed as to be shorn of race, had been sorely tested, shaken and ultimately redrawn.
My story began 31 years ago in Accra, Ghana, West Africa, where I was born.
The strongest ripple of boyhood memory was of a night lit by the moon as my mother, Esther Lamiley Mills, sang sweet songs to me while I tapped on a drum. It was masquerade season, similar to Halloween, and we sat in a makeshift hut of palm fronds we had put up in a small compound that my grandfather shared with his children. I was 5 years old and my mother was 20.
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