By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and GENE MUSTAIN, Daily News Staff Writers | Thursday, April 28, 1994
SOWETO—As dusk turned to dawn on the historic day, Wilson Gwala forgot about his bad heart and his recent kidney problems, and refused to wait.
Someone was supposed to come take him to the polls later in the day, so Gwala — an apartheid lifetime of arrrets and detentions now behind him — could vote in an election in South Africa for the first time. But sunlight streaming through his tiny home was a symbol too powerful to ignore.
“It seemed like it was the first time the sun rose over Soweto,” the 70-year-old grandfather said, “like I was seeing the sun for the first time, like someone peeled the scales off my eyes, like I was born again.”