The Last Days of Apartheid
Carlson, Richard W.
Richard W. Carlson The Last Days of Apartheid A diary of the 1994 South African elections. T he night before I arrived in South Africa, Nelson Mandela addressed African National Congress (ANC)...
...country's first all-inclusive one...
...Mandela was furious...
...Also don't get a blood transfusion in the country...
...Water is good in all major cities, dangerous elsewhere...
...He said, "I am a Christian...
...Down the street, a dead man was lying on his side upagainst the front wheels of a blistered car...
...The Workers Rights Party is led by Nina Romm and champions feminist and socialist causes...
...These larvae can penetrate unbroken skin...
...One boy came up to the window with three shotgun shells, one in each gap between his fingers, and waved them at us...
...Sitting on the small stage, he rummaged through his medical kit, talking about what was in it...
...If you plan on fooling around sexually," he said, "you're probably going to get into AIDS trouble...
...Johannesburg life was continuing as usual, of course, and it looked nothing at all like Beirut...
...There was a large hole in the street, eight feet in diameter, five feet deep, where the bomb had detonated...
...I had traipsed around the building with a colleague the day before...
...The police who took the body down found this note 34 The American Spectator April 1995 attached: "Please don't untie this thug...
...He had on cheap black plastic shoes and no socks...
...A very large crowd of angry blacks stood at the taxi stand on the corner of Plein Street and began shouting and chanting about the blast, blaming it on whites...
...Now the parishioners laughed, too...
...The occasional administration of justice in today's South Africa is like that of the American West one hundred years ago...
...Sirens were coming from different directions as more police arrived...
...Many parties listed on the ballot are fringe, a dozen or so of them formed since the election was announced a few months ago...
...In the daytime...
...No," she replied...
...Four hundred people an hour were voting in fast-moving, orderly lines...
...A 6year-old boy, a 40-year-old woman, and a 17-year-old boy were crushed to death beneath the feet of enthusiastic supporters...
...And do...
...The polling station was efficient and well-run...
...A half dozen cars were on fire, some of them tipped over...
...Her dress was up to her waist...
...Embassy doctor...
...The devil, of course, was in the details...
...The polling station there was at a school on the corner of Braampretorious Street and Jan Booysen Street in a pleasant residential area...
...At night, the surrounding streets are barren of people, save small knots of young black men, barefoot, wrapped in blankets, huddled in doorways, looking very menacing...
...I was drinking coffee on the couch in my hotel room when an enormous explosion rattled the glass on the sliding door to the balcony...
...Flights to many destinations outside the country are fully booked for the election period...
...The rutted, dusty roads leading into various squatter camps north of Johannesburg were lined with expensive vehicles...
...I never cease to be surprised by how motley some of the international press look, and how loud and aggressive they are, particularly the Dutch and the Germans...
...Make sure if you're injured, it's in the city, not the boondocks...
...The men all have ponytails or dork-nobs and wear stone-washed jeans and tie-dyed T-shirts...
...6 6 f it bleeds, it leads...
...When inhabitants of Tembisa township caught a burglar stealing a television and video recorder, they held a kangaroo court—and then tied the man to a soccer post and beat him to death...
...went to the last ANC rally before the election with the writer Nadine Gordimer...
...The line, which was multi-ethnic, probably 75 percent white and 25 percent black and "colored," ran a long way down the side36 The American Spectator April 1995 walk...
...cabbage" or "tiger," the green ten Rand note...
...Many were frail or ill...
...I assumed the blast was a few blocks away at ANC headquarters...
...Flames were coming from them and from the roofs of two buildings...
...There was a clear and determined willingness by almost all South Africans to do everything possible to make this election work...
...He was fat, and he was very funny...
...They were done up like African doughnuts in The hotel insists that guests take a plainclothes bodyguard with them if they plan to walk more than a block from the hotel...
...There is also the "de Klerk," a two-Rand coin...
...There were three or four camera crews running through the rubble...
...He immediately condemned those who brought guns into the rally...
...When I ran out of the hotel, I could see smoke rising over buildings to my right...
...The entire front of the Monte Carlo Hotel was buckled down towards the sidewalk...
...So I will be a kaffir no longer, only today.'" The friend had laughed...
...We have disciplined him...
...plan to walk more than a block from the hotel...
...Witchcraft is a way of life for many South Africans, and nobody fools with the sangomos, not even Nelson Mandela...
...He described a recent visit to a white friend...
...He then went on to criticize de Klerk for recently saying that South Africa was a "Christian" nation, Mandela's point being that there were many other religions that should be treated equally in the country...
...I told you not to do this," he said...
...R ev...
...Now Mandela was sitting on the ground with them as they performed a ceremony around him...
...As we drove to the rally, our car was engulfed by a sea of young Zulus, about a thousand of them, who were dancing and brandishing spears and knobkerries...
...B efore a Mandela speech, some "sangomos," native witch doctors, had begun a parade around the stadium's inner track waving ceremonial staffs...
...Generally considered to be the best hotel in Johannesburg, the Carlton has armed guards stationed throughout the building and at every door and entrance...
...They always ask that stupid question...
...The price of a nice home in a middle-class suburb here wouldn't buy a basement apartment in Sydney or London...
...As soon as he'd describe something, he'd pull it out and throw it over his shoulder...
...Mvumedandala was addressing his flock in a Johannesburg church...
...The sangomos were paying rapt attention to this...
...The Africa Muslim Party's slogan is, "Enjoining good and prohibiting evil...
...A majita can spot a "snoorie," a country rube or foreign tourist, from two blocks away...
...Susan Keane, who was 41, was hit in the neck by a large piece of glass and died from arterial bleeding...
...Just past it on Jeppe Street, I could see flames coming from the street in front of me...
...The African Christian Democratic Party says, "It's time to do it God's way...
...The Minority Front Party is led by a charismatic politician named Amichand Rajbansi...
...Arnett's reports have been the subject of levity among other reporters for their overheated quality...
...Many folks would like to leave but cannot...
...Whites were in charge, though at least 70 per cent of the people voting there were black...
...A half dozen men had pulled out pistols and began firing into the air...
...At least four people were wounded at the rally...
...The shop across the street was engulfed in fire...
...The final toll was nine people killed, a hundred injured...
...The Soccer Party—"sports organization for collective contribution to equal rights"—is run by a Rastafarian named James Mange with two-foot-long dreadlocks...
...0 The American Spectator April 1995 37...
...This is what a CNN producer supposedly once told Peter Arnett...
...Choose your party carefully," read the election posters of Radio 401 "The last one went on for more than 40 years...
...W e drove to Mamelodi to visit the polling place at a migrant male hostel in an area called Shirinda...
...rubber masks and elaborate headgear...
...Mandela later visited the injured in the hospital...
...Watch out for ticks in the country because you'll get tick-bite fever from them...
...After Mandela finished berating "agents provocateurs" for bringing guns into the stadium, he said, "In twenty-seven years in prison I never missed a church service except once...
...A sure sign of problems, if not panic, is that the price of Krugerrands has shot up as emigres converted their assets to gold coins to be smuggled abroad...
...Bernard Shaw, the CNN anchor, was also the subject of a lot of jokes after he asked Nelson Mandela silly, Barbara Walters–style questions, such as whether Mandela "liked" F. W. de Klerk...
...Anyone who swims in contaminated water is at risk...
...I pulled on my clothes and ran from the room...
...Election officials said they'd been "swamped" in the morning...
...A boy selling bananas along the road said, "Next thing you know they'll be wanting to come and live here...
...This is the kind of stuff I don't need to be told twice...
...Thanks...
...The general understanding is they are robbers...
...One evening at our hotel a Chinese man ran shouting and shaking into the lobby with his clothes ripped up...
...Tomorrow I will vote for the first time in my life...
...They call it "the chicken run," folks who leave the country and cheat the currency laws to get their money out...
...A white man about 30, tall and thin, was wandering around with a bloody shirt tied on his head and blood on his face...
...I walked into his room and said, `Surprise, I'm back again for the second day...
...I'm staying at the Carlton, a five-star hotel downtown in the financial district...
...Then she turned to me and said, "If I had a gun under my dress, why would I admit it to them...
...His legs and feet were sticking out from under a blue plastic tarpaulin that someone had thrown over him...
...When we entered the stadium, two black security guards asked Gordimer if she were carrying any guns...
...Interest had been notoriously low at these hostels, and at five o'clock there was no line and no waiting voters...
...Pull together enough clippers and you might get yourself an "envelope," a Mercedes Benz, or a "dolphin," a BMW...
...The way to avoid it is to stay out of streams and ponds and rivers...
...I could see smoke swirling around the side of the hotel and down the street...
...An ANC spokesman, a white man named Niehaus, appeared, talked to reporters, and went over and talked the crowd into dispersing...
...He didn't seem to be badly injured, but looked thoroughly confused...
...We also went to Wonderboom...
...A lot of nervous whites have fled South Africa, many of them successful, many with deep roots...
...This is an agricultural area...
...To my left, a South, African policeman was kneeling next to a woman who was on her back...
...The government will comprise any or all of the nineteen parties registered for the election, and they will draft a constitution to be ready for the general election of 1999...
...it is for a government of national unity as opposed to a winner-take-all vote, though the U.S...
...I saw an old woman being pushed in a wheelbarrow, other old folks being carried in chairs or in blankets...
...A clipper is a hundred-Rand note...
...The point of being a majita, of course, is to get "clippers...
...Vehemently opposed to de Klerk's National Party, the Minority Front Party's main theme is the protection of the rights of all minorities, particularly Indians in the Natal...
...I'm part of a delegation of five thousand observers, from almost every country in the world, come to monitor the elections that would put an end to forty-six years of apartheid...
...This has been a continuing problem with ANC public meetings...
...they had run through three thousand people...
...and a "guava" or "pinkie," the pink fifty-Rand note...
...Hundreds of them swarmed past the car, chanting "Ummmm ummmm" in time to their dogtrot...
...Even though residents, both black and white, have considerable animosity towards the squatters—they are the source of much of the crime problem—people from the suburbs nonetheless trudged through the dust to join the line of squatters waiting to vote...
...As Mandela walked onto the platform, there were sudden gunshots...
...For instance, he said, holding up a package of smelling salts, "We don't need this junk," and hurled it backwards to the floor...
...The well-turned-out black South Africans watch these crews with fascination and revulsion...
...the twenty-Rand "chocolate...
...After a downtown car-bombing, Arnett went live and described the area—where many reporters are staying—as "looking like Beirut...
...Many needed special help to vote, which took a great deal of time...
...Or perhaps it blew over him...
...Many of the voters were functionally illiterate...
...press has generally not made this clear...
...W e drove through the northern Transvaal countryside to the town of Ondorspoort, ten kilometers northwest of Pretoria...
...The sangomos, all from Soweto, are predicting that Mandela will be the next president, a pretty safe prognostication...
...They had opened on time at 7:00 a.m., and by 4:00 p.m...
...T he night before I arrived in South Africa, Nelson Mandela addressed African National Congress (ANC) supporters at Athlone Stadium in Johannesburg...
...Her underpants were soaked with blood...
...I was too sick...
...The road was filled with glass and long strips of aluminum had peeled off of the fronts of buildings...
...A company called Studdafords moves about 250 white South African families to New Zealand every month...
...They, and presumably he, are in favor of smoking a lot of dope...
...She had driven up and parked across the street from the car containing the bomb moments before it exploded...
...I say that because tomorrow I'm going to be a person...
...all of the surrounding windows were blown out...
...You might also get yourself some trouble...
...I jogged up alongside the Holiday Inn Garden Court...
...In the daytime...
...The New Zealand government relaxed immigration rules to accommodate them...
...The election is theB efore we were sent into the field we were briefed by a U.S...
...One of the dead people nearby was a white woman named Susan Keane, an ANC regional candidate...
...Word had gotten around the northern suburbs that the lines at the squatter camps were much shorter...
...The hotel insists that guests take a plainclothes bodyguard with them if they Richard W. Carlson is president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting...
...The reason I came is that I realized that this is probably your last chance to see a kaffir...
...No one walks around downtown Johannesburg at night, bodyguard or not...
...Majitas call their stolen booty "coal," and the knives they use to rob people are "sevens," named for the number of years you can spend in jail for wielding one...
...At least three people were killed and twenty-one injured, four of them severely, when the crowd tried to run towards Mandela as he approached the podium...
...Schistosomiasis is a problem...
...The The American Spectator April 1995 35 present limit is 200,000 Rand—not much to live on...
...It is an infection that develops after the larva of a flatworm penetrates the skin...
...he'd been cut with a knife, beaten, and robbed—a victim of the street robbers known as "majitas...
...He had eyes like a spooked horse...
...Put your vote by the cross...
...At the final ANC rally, forty TV crews lined up to shoot Mandela...
...ABC News has sent eighty-five people, including Peter Jennings...
...They don't appear to brush their teeth or bathe much...
...She died in one of the cars that was burning...
Vol. 28 • April 1995 • No. 4
