Yesterday, 32 years ago, Nelson Mandela and millions of his countrymen and women cast their vote for the first time in their lives, bringing an end to hundreds of years of racial discrimination and minority rule.
There’s plenty to moan about in this country: unemployment, inflation, crime, all the hardy annuals before you get into the failure of service delivery.
In Joburg, we’ve got potholes that will shake the dentures out of an 80 year old, precious fresh water pouring out of cracks in the roads into storm drains that flood the moment there’s a cloud burst.
We’ve got traffic robots that don’t work, but vagrants who direct the traffic.
We’ve got hundreds of metres of street lights that don’t work, but illegal connections sprouting from the cables that feed them.
But the one thing we don’t have is a civil war.
Freedom, memory and what is often taken for granted
Yesterday, 32 years ago, Nelson Mandela and millions of his countrymen and women cast their vote for the first time in their lives, bringing an end to hundreds of years of racial discrimination and minority rule.
Today’s generation tends to ignore that, which is understandable because they never lived through it.
In fact, precisely of because of that it’s fashionable for them to deride the “rainbowism” of the late Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu that followed.
What isn’t understandable is the malign nostalgia of increasing numbers of their parents and grandparents who hanker back to those dark days – being on the receiving end of inhumane and thoroughly unfair laws in an era of rule by law rather than the rule of law that replaced it.
The past 30 years have been a roller-coaster by any measure: triumph and disaster, honour and disgrace, state capture and state impotence, but we are free, free at last, as Tutu said.
This is a country where, even if the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slowly, the guilty get their day in court and end up in prison (even if it’s only a bed in the jail’s hospital wing for a short while).
We have incredible freedom to express ourselves, to be ourselves, to love whom we want, associate with whom we like, do the jobs that we are qualified to do (if there are ever vacancies) and vote for the people we want to govern us.
Sometimes, all of that seems insignificant in the battle to survive every day in South Africa, until you realise how rare those freedoms are, not just in Africa, but in the world.
Let’s not wait till we lose it to appreciate what we had.
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