The day? The eleventh of February, 1990.
Why? It was the day on which Nelson Mandela was released from prison.
Here, finally, was the vindication of our decision not to emigrate. In 1989 I had a job organised in Melbourne; it was in my specialised field of mainframe database management systems; it would pay well; it offered a great future; it was with a large multi-national company; all the paper-work was completed. All we had to do was pack up and leave this sad country.
This is what I had written in my journal a year earlier, during our transition from Cape Town to Randburg:
TWENTY-NINE YEARS AFTER SHARPEVILLE (21/03/1989)
It's difficult to be a white South African these days…. And it's easy.
It's easy because you're obviously white—anyone can see that. Even if they are colour-blind you can still prove it. Look at your ID-number; it has the ‘right’ digits in the places that count, proving that you are a South African-born ‘whitey’. Look at the voters’ roll; your name is on it. Look at the property which you own; it's in a nice safe area, it's yours to bequeath to your children.
It’s difficult if you stop and think…. If you think of children who are hungry because their father is inadequately paid; if you think of families separated because of imprisonment for political ‘crimes’; if you think of families separated by exile. Even if you disregard the hotheads, the politically active types, the ‘terrorists’, the ‘communists’ and the ‘anarchists’, and consider the ordinary old man-in-the-street, who is constrained to leave his home and family for eleven months a year in order to find gainful employment, you have to feel that there’s something wrong.
I'm a family man. I've been separated from my family for four weeks due to a work-related transfer, and it’s killing me. I know it’s only temporary, but it gnaws at me like a cancer. My three children, two girls, with a boy in between, are well, and safe in their mother’s care. I spoke to them all on the telephone only two days ago. I'm going to see them at Easter; and yet…. And yet I need them in my life. I spoke to my wife too, but I need her physical presence. I need them, they are part of me. They are my reason for being.
If Mandela were as weak as I am, he’d have fled the country. He could have; in fact, he was out of the country. He just needn’t have come back. And he could have arranged for his family to have joined him. He could have ignored South Africa’s plight and devoted his obvious talents to being a father and a good Ugandan/Ethiopian/American—the choice could have been his. But no, his roots still lay in some little town in the Transkei, and, therefore, in South Africa.
For all the stress, it must be much easier to be a politician when things are going well than to be a politician for 27 years of a gaol sentence.
If I were as strong as Mandela, I should be in gaol for my beliefs. If I were as strong as Mandela, I should not be currently arranging employment overseas. No, I’m not a politician. Nor do I wish to be a politician; nor a ‘terrorist’…, nor an émigré. No, I am just an ordinary man-in-the-street who, because he loves his family to a selfish extreme, is prepared to submit to the hardships of settling in a foreign country because he sees no future for them here. History may prove my decision to be wrong, but I'm willing to take that chance.
Lines from Richard Lovelace come to mind: “I could not love thee still, my love, loved I not honour more.”
Hats off to the people of honour in this country! I wish I were courageous enough to be numbered among them!
That’s how I had felt in 1989.
And yet, and yet… something didn’t feel right. Our roots ran too deep. After much agonising, we cancelled our emigration plans and, instead, we bought a house in Gauteng.
My Mom always used to say (am I starting to sound like Forrest Gump?): “If a cat gives birth in an oven, that doesn’t mean that her offspring are cupcakes”. Well, this theory might (in most cases) work for cats and cupcakes, but it fails with regard to humans. Linda and I each had a century of family history in South Africa. We were second-generation Africans, even if we were a funny colour. This was home, we had no other!
Somehow, leaving home just didn’t feel right, even though it seemed that South Africa was heading for a civil war (or, worse, an un-civil war—just imagine a war when people couldn’t bother to speak nicely to one another!).
Shortly after we made our decision to stay, things began to get worse (we often have this effect upon world politics). The President was starting to seem increasingly paranoid and it looked as though our constitution didn’t really allow for a way to remove him. Fortunately, some enlightened thinkers in the ruling party negotiated a change.
What a joy it was to hear the new President’s speech at the opening of parliament in 1990! He announced that Nelson Mandela would be released from prison, and that negotiations would commence for a peaceful transition to true democracy. Suddenly, there was hope. Suddenly I could stop feeling ashamed of being a South African.
Having travelled overseas in 1987 and been made to feel like a pariah, I went abroad again in 1991 and suddenly felt like flavour of the month. Everyone wanted to speak to the South African. And we hadn’t even had the election yet!
We went to Bible school in 1994, and participated in an all-night prayer vigil the night before the country’s first truly democratic election. The next day, sleep-deprived though we were, we drove an 80-kilometre round trip to stand in a multi-coloured, multi-lingual, multi-cultural queue at a banana co-op (really!) in order to cast our first votes in a free South Africa. The spirit that prevailed in the country was euphoric. Downhearted war correspondents packed their cameras and notebooks and went home—there wasn’t going to be any news forthcoming from the New South Africa. Well, only good news, but good news doesn’t sell.
Nineteen-and-a-half years later, one sometimes has to struggle a bit to feel optimistic, but I refuse to allow the current problems to make me despair. It would be naïve to think that things might not get worse before they get better.
I hope that we can regain the spirit of 1994 in this lovely land.
Hosi, katekisa Afrika Dzonga! [1]
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1 Hosi, katekisa Afrika Dzonga (Xitsonga) – God, bless South Africa