1994 election of Mandela remembered

As world leaders mourn the passing of Nelson Mandela, international media are replete with recollections of that historic moment in history, on May 2, 1994, when in an all-race democratic election, South Africa voted Mandela as its first black president, dismantling its globally loathed apartheid policy of racial segregation of blacks, coloreds and whites in a society dominated by the Afrikaner white minority who were descended from Dutch-based European settlers.

The watershed election is widely credited for ending years of oppression under apartheid but more so ushered in an era of reconciliation initiated by Mandela after his election, despite his incarceration for 27 years as a leader of the antiaparthied movement.

Obituaries on Mandela, who was elected president at the late age of 75 after the prime of his life was stolen by nearly three decades in prison, have claimed, according to a report in London’s Financial Times, that “one of Mandela’s greatest successes was reconciling the Afrikaner community that controlled the military, government and much of the economy, realizing it would be crucial if the country was to make the transition to democracy and avoid civil war.”

The report went on: Once Mandela took office, “he made reconciliation his key priority … he was willing to reach out to the oppressors that jailed him for 27 years, with no signs of bitterness, helped him to attain his iconic status.”

As president, he retained the services of the white heads of the police and the central bank. “He knew that South Africa could ill-afford a mass exodus of those who in 1994 had the monopoly on skills and capital, according to this assessment,” the report said.

“Mandela’s efforts, including his support of traditionally Afrikaner sports such as rugby, helped overcome the mistrust many white Africans intrinsically felt toward black people. But today, with his death coming at a time of mounting economic and social pressures in South Africa since the end of apartheid almost 20 years ago, many Afrikaners worry about the future without its trusted moral compass,” the report added.

The significance of the May 1994 election of Mandela remains vivid to international journalists. Among those who covered the transcendental event was the Philippine observer team, which was sent by the United Nations to South Africa, along with teams from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Canada and the United States.

The elections were one of the most widely covered in the world after the 1986 Edsa People Power Revolution.

Alexandra

I was posted at a polling station at Alexandra in the Soweto township, a slum suburb of Johannesburg where Mandela lived in his early 20s, as a lawyer campaigning against apartheid.

At the break of day on May 2, 1994, my team was roused from bed to be driven to our assigned polling station in Alexandra, a dusty and crime-ridden black community.

Alexandra stood in dramatic contrast to the wealthy, mostly white Sandton suburb of Johannesburg, with its high-rise towers dominating the landscape. Mandela moved to Alexandra in 1941 when he was 23, when the township’s residents were challenging white-minority rule.

Mandela is reported to have participated in bus boycotts there. He stayed in Alexandra until 1943, describing the house in his autobiography as “no more than a shack, with a dirt floor, no heat, no electricity, no running water,” but it “was a place of my own and I was happy to have it,” the Associated Press reported.

Noor Nieftagodien was a coauthor of a book on the history of Alexandra and a teacher at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. “There’s a sense among (Alexandra) residents, that they played such an important role. And people there will say they gave birth to Mandela, the radical politician. It completely transformed him. The lack of development of the old Alexandra is an indictment of the new South Africa,” he wrote.

Procession of people

I was started to see a procession of people shuffling across the horizon on their way to the polling stations. These were black people, poor and with very little education, who had never voted in their lives, taking their new right to suffrage seriously, without any mentorship on democracy from the apartheid regime.

The sight struck me deeply, when I recalled that here was a politically illiterate people who didn’t have to be carted to the polling stations to vote. I was disgusted to realize that in contrast to our system in the Philippines, a free election was taking place where there was no report of tampering of the process or irregularities even coming from the apartheid regime, the independent Electoral Commission, or the dominant antiaparthied black African National Congress (ANC) that fielded Mandela against the regime’s candidate.

We, foreign observers, were briefed by the Electoral Commission to be strictly neutral. At the polling station, inside the precinct, a black woman voter asked my assistance to write her vote on her behalf. I told her that I was forbidden to do so, so I referred her to the Electoral Commission official. The woman voted and left.

The ballot was simple. It carried only two sets of symbols, one for the ANC and the other for the regime’s candidate. The voter had only to tick party symbols, not write names. It was block voting at its simplest form.

By contrast, after democratic tutelage since our first election in 1902, Filipinos have to write scores of names on the ballot up until today. Every election since has been marked by charges of election cheating.

It shamed me to see the outcome of South Africa’s first all-race election as a clean and free election.

It not only elected Mandela. It was more than that. It marked a promising start for its democratic transition from apartheid.