Among the millions who voted was my beloved grandmother, now nearly 90 years old. She had to wait a lifetime to be recognized as a human being in the land of her birth. As I thought of Granny and members of my family casting their ballots in the teeming ghetto of Alexandria, north of Johannesburg, where I was born and lived for 18 years, memories of the evil system whose death knell the voting tolled flooded back to me.
I remembered the brutal midnight police raids launched into the ghetto to enforce apartheid; the searing images of my father’s emasculation as he was repeatedly arrested for the crime of being unemployed; my parents constantly fleeing their own home in the dead of night to escape arrest for living together as husband and wife under the same roof, my family scavenging through garbage dumps for morsels of food and drinking boiled cattle blood as soup; hungry friends prostituting themselves for food, and myself, 6 years old, resisting the temptation to join them.
I remembered my mother and grandmother dragging me to school on the first day, desperate to rescue me from the dead-end life of the streets. I remembered the frequent beatings by my teachers for not having the proper books, not paying my school fees on time, not wearing the proper uniform-the $8 a week my father toiled for as a menial laborer was never enough to clothe, feed and shelter a growing family. I remembered how, at 10 years old, I contemplated suicide because I felt unwanted, abandoned and betrayed by a world which offered me nothing but hunger, pain, violence and death.
As I thought of Granny voting I wondered if she had defied the odds and clung to life so long because, sharing these bitter and indelible memories of her favorite grandchild, with her vote she was saying, emphatically: “Never again! Never again will we and our children and grandchildren be treated as subhumans in the land of our birth.”
I know the future of South Africa is fraught with difficulties and dangers. Voting has raised the black majority’s expectations of a better life. Yet the legacy spawned by institutionalized racism and oppression will take a long time to eradicate. But if the new government achieves justice for the black majority, and avoids making America’s mistakes-abandoning integration for segregation, being imprisoned in the hates of the past-it can transform South Africa into a powerful engine for the rebirth of the African continent, and make that beloved country a model democracy of multiracial and multicultural living.
