Freedom Day 2010

April 27, 2010

Today is Freedom Day, a national holiday in South Africa commemorating the first nonracial democratic elections.

In his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela remembers voting on April 27, 1994, on the second of four days allowed for the elections, the first in which the majority of residents had been allowed to participate:

“I marked an X in the box next to the letters ANC and then slipped my folded ballot paper into a simple wooden box; I had cast the first vote of my life.”

Mandela was elected president with nearly two-thirds of the vote. Most of the nation and the world rejoiced at this peaceful, democratic end to apartheid. It was a year after he had shared the Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. DeKlerk (the man he defeated in the 1994 election), four years after his release from 27 years of prison.

The African National Congress still holds power and will for the foreseeable future, but his successors, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, don’t have near the leadership abilities or star power as Mandela. The glow of the peaceful transformation has worn off in real life, even as promoters try to burnish it anew for the spotlight hosting soccer’s World Cup this year provides. The thorny legacy of apartheid brutality and inequities survives. Even Mandela noted in the final words of his lengthy book, “I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.”

Zuma is a charismatic if controversial president, popular among many groups (excluding the educated elite). He used his address marking 16 years of freedom to remind outsiders (those still living on the economic margins do not need reminding) that the effects of the Group Areas Act, two decades after its repeal, are still obvious: "Many still live in areas once designated for black people... away from economic opportunities and civic services."

The president is being attacked politically from many sides, predictably by Helen Zille, leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance, and most strikingly from the South Africa Students Congress, which decried severe economic disparaties:

“We have secured a democracy that gives the rich the right to rule the roost in our political and economic terrain,” according to one news report on today’s commemoration. An article posted on afrik.com drew many comments, including those claiming the ANC engages in “reverse racism” because of efforts aimed at empowering black entrepreneurs and another wondering why, if the society is nonracial, every official form requires people to state their race.

Time magazine managing editor Richard Stengel collaborated with Mandela on his autobiography and is the author of Mandela’s Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage. In its brief preface, dated November 2008, Mandela writes:

“In Africa there is a concept known as ubuntu—the profound sense that we are human only through the humanity of others; that if we are to accomplish anything in this world, it will in equal measure be due to the work and achievements of others. Richard Stengel is one of those people who readily grasps this idea."

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I don’t presume to know what is really happening or should be happening in South Africa after my single four-week visit, but I did see these things with my own eyes, illustrated in the photos above:

Parliament celebrates soccer.

A little girl at a playground outside the Cape Town Waterfront’s largest shopping mall on Easter weekend.

A little boy at dusk the Saturday before Easter on Robben Island with Cape Town and mainland mountains across the choppy sea.

Men in a township off the scenic Garden Route, mid-week in the middle of another beautiful sunny day.

A private garden belonging to a member of the black elite.

Township women offering roasted goat heads for sale.

A woman making crafts by the seaside (the Atlantic Coast south of Cape Town) to sell to tourists.

Albie Sachs, one of the authors of South Africa's constitution, a lawyer, scholar and activist, happy with his son Oliver (named after Oliver Tambo) and his wife Vanessa, an architect, at the Durban Art Gallery on Human Rights Day, March 21, 2010