Vote Yes

Last week I was sitting in front of the TV, waiting to hear the result of the Polokwane vote: Zuma or Mbeki, the big question. Sitting there I was taken back to 1992, my eleven year old self anxiously sitting on the same mat in front of an older TV waiting for the results of the Vote Yes/Vote No referendum.

A quick history lesson to give some background for my reminiscing:
In about 1990 the then National Party led South African government was beginning to move away from apartheid. Political parties such as the ANC were unbanned, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the government was in negotiations with the ANC. There was resistance to the reforms, so the then president F.W. de Klerk called for a referendum (for white South Africans) to show how much of the (white) population supported the reforms. The referendum was Vote Yes/Vote No for continuing the reforms. There were posters all over the street lights, I remember: "Vote yes!" "Vote no!"
More info from our friend wikipedia

I was just a kid, I didn't know anything about politics, anything about apartheid (beyond the fact that our maid's children weren't allowed to be in the same school as me). I don't remember my parents ever saying anything much about politics or race, so the issues of South Africa just had no place in my little eleven year old mind. There were terrorist drills at school: push the desks to the side of the room and hide under them. So the terrorists couldn't shoot us, I suppose. But I didn't link that to the political environment in South Africa, the fear of the white populace as things were changing. I couldn't. As I said, I was just a kid. More concerned with friends from school and my inability to pass times table tests (yes, its true).

Now my parents were also pretty liberal, so I didn't grow up with a lot of the racism that I expect many other South African kids did. So when one of the kids at school told me that if the result of the upcoming election was "no," the "black people were going to come kill us all," this was news to me. I was horrified. So I sat in front of that TV and watched the votes come in, distraught. In the wake of this revelation of my potential impending doom I had discussed the situation with some friends from school. It seems everyone else's family had planned for the worst - they spoke of plans to leave for various European countries, mostly. I have no recent foreign ancestry, so my eleven year old imagination envisioned my family being left to be slaughtered, while watching my friends fly off to European safety.

The results were coming in slowly, as they were counted in different areas. Eventually the stress of it all overcame me and I told my mother that if things turned out badly, so and so's family was going to Italy, so and so's family was leaving for Austria and so forth... but what about us mom, what will we do? Where will we go?

I was pretty upset and scared by that stage, but I've always remembered her answer and how it settled the issue for me. She said that South Africa is our home, and we were not going anywhere.

Which may sound like an entirely unsatisfactory answer. It didn't address the "kill us all" problem at all. But it somehow satisfied my eleven year old self. Perhaps it was my mothers confidence - if we were going to stay, it would have to be okay, somehow. There is no place to run to, because this is the only place that is ours, so it has to be okay.

South Africa is our home, and we were not going anywhere.

---

I started writing this blog post during the wait for the Polokwane results - now of course we know that Zuma is the new ANC president. There is alot of fear in South Africa about this at the moment. Probably alot of people considering their options: Italy, Austria, Australia, Canada...
And I confess that as I heard the results, for an instant I wished (for the first time) that I was eligible for an ancestral UK visa. But you know what, South Africa is my home, and I'm not going anywhere.

South Africa is doing better now than we have ever done. We are in our thirteenth year of being a democracy, only twenty or so years ago we were oppressing, brutalising, pretty much enslaving millions of people. Today I can watch bollywood movies with a friend who I would not have shared eating utensils with twenty or thirty years ago. We are living one of the great miracles of our time.

We're not perfect, by no means, we're broken nation. But we're being fixed. And we're going to have some ups and downs, no doubt. But, by the grace of God, lets stick around and do this thing.