Extract I’ve been immersed in SA history in recent weeks. It seemed a fitting prequel to our elections, coming as they did this week, a quarter of a century after the end of apartheid, and the beginning of what promised to be “a new dawn”. Well, it certainly is no longer daybreak in SA. If anything, it’s terrifyingly close to dusk, to that bewitching hour that is twilight. Just before the dark. But I get ahead of myself…
It is said that when asked, the beloved first president of our shiny new democracy, Nelson Mandela, credited Free State-born lawyer Bram Fischer for saving him and senior ANC members from being sentenced to death at the Rivonia Trial.
It becomes obvious as to why in a newly released movie, An Act Of Defiance.
This historically accurate film highlights the crucial role played by Fischer — the only revolutionary communist who played rugby as scrum half against the All Blacks — when Mandela and ANC leadership were arrested at Liliesleaf Farm.
There’s a gut-wrenching scene at the end of the movie in which Bram’s wife Molly, a political activist herself, is killed in a freak car accident. She dies soon after the Rivonia Trial verdict: life in prison rather than death by hanging. A week later, Bram goes to Robben Island to visit the prisoners but does not mention her death; he didn’t want to burden them with his sad news.
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It’s an expression of selflessness that I find astonishing; an act of chivalry that, when I look around me, belongs to another age, another time.
Also this week, I watched four hours of the very rough first cut of a friend’s movie that records the life of Winnie Mandela and the dark period that was knife-edge SA politics in the 1980s.
Nothing meaningful in life is one-dimensional; nothing good is ever flat, without contours, without sharp edges and rounded, smooth curves. Life is delicious and nuanced because it consists of roller-coaster highs and lows.
And so it was watching this astonishing body of work in which the pace and complexity was as twisty as a Lee Child “Jack Reacher” thriller.
I’d forgotten what a daily part of our lives Casspirs were, how those (mostly yellow) mine-resistant, ambush-protected beasts roamed the townships and invaded public spaces.
Yes we lived and laughed and loved and danced and wept and were afraid and sighed and raised our fists in anger. It was a time of contradictions, but we were all in agreement: the system of apartheid was just wrong and spat on the dignity of the most of us; it was a cruel, dehumanising time.
And so when, on April 27 1994 we stood in long, long queues waiting to cast our ballot, there was a sense of victory; we were united. We’d come through the long dark night. Our version of the horrific 1934 purge in Nazi Germany — The Night of the Long Knives — was over.
The arrival of a new dawn was breathtakingly refreshing. It came with hope. At last, we could exhale and look forward. The wrongs of the past would be righted; those who had, for so long, gone unseen, unheard, would have a voice.
I remember every minute of that fateful day that I was finally allowed to vote. I was 35 years old, a journalist on Africa’s largest circulation Sunday Paper, the prestigious Sunday Times. I had recently come home from serving as the paper’s London correspondent.
I remember calling my parents (from a landline — remember it was “the olden days”) early that morning. My father, usually reluctant to show any display of emotion, said only this: “I’ve waited a long time for this.” My mother, given to huge displays of emotion — whether the occasion called for it or not — wept. I had a lump in my throat myself.
A baptism
That election day, it felt like a coming of age ceremony, a rite of passage; a baptism. You see, although we were adults, we were only now being initiated into the halls of grownupness.
My friends Mike and Jeremy scooped me up and off we went to visit polling stations across Johannesburg — Jeremy and I were to write “colour” pieces while Mike covered the politics.
We marveled at the people standing shoulder to shoulder in impossibly long lines that snaked through parks and parking lots and along roads and through buildings; lines that heaved and sighed in the warm sun, lines that laughed and shared. It was a sight that filled my heart and made it dance with joy.
It made me remember the times that my lovely dad was humiliated for having a brown skin; that my refined, elegant, dignified mother was refused permission to try on a frock in a store. It reminded me of how I was refused entry to His Majesty’s movie theatre in Grahamstown; or asked to leave the bar at The Grand Hotel in that same small town.
At last I could be a part of my own world; live in it fully, without fear of being rejected because my surname is Naidoo.
Who would have thought that this dream that Mandela and Fischer and Winnie fought for, and countless men and women died for, would — so quickly — be dashed.
Just a quarter of a century later, I stood in a queue waiting to vote on Wednesday and the mood was very, very different than it was when I first voted in 1994. Gone was the sense of hope. In its place was confusion about who to vote for. Got to try and choose the best of a bad lot the man behind me, an oncologist, said.
There was talk of corruption and graft and government theft and the politicians who are thugs and crooks; our failing state and poverty and inequality and the failure of service delivery; and anger and frustration and bewilderment and, and, and…
It somehow diminishes Fischer’s “act of defiance”; diminishes the Rivonia Trial; diminishes the sacrifices made and the lives lost.
It was not a happy day, May 8, election day 25 years on. Whoever wins doesn’t matter; it’s a Pyrrhic victory.
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