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By Newsweek Editors
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WHAT PERVERSITY DRIVES ONE TO travel 10,000 kilometers to cast a vote? I was wondering this during the long day of April 27, as I stood in a queue in pouring rain, for six hours, to enter the polling booth. The ranks of the waiting had been swollen by busloads of people from the black township of Khayelitsha, where no ballot papers had arrived-part of the confusion that characterized South Africa's first democratic elections. There were, indeed, moments when the whole enterprise seemed mad.
I had been teaching in France before the elections. It was perfectly possible to vote in Paris. But that would not have been the same. Many years before, at the end of 1968, I had given up the dream of settling in France to return to my troubled country in the belief that I could assume my full responsibility as a writer only by being on the spot. Other writers in exile were not, at the time, allowed this choice; the fact that I could choose made it imperative for me to come back-even if it involved the absurdity of an escaped prisoner choosing to return to his prison. This time the choice was of course less dramatic; but it was still linked to that original decision: to return, to be here. How could I not be present at the decisive turn from the nightmare of the past to a future with a range of more human possibilities?
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Possibilities; not certainties. One's only certainty lies in knowing that being there is better than being absent. The interaction of innumerable presences is the condition of history. And certainly April 27 was one of those occasions when one is aware of history, not as a great impersonal force sweeping past but as a collective expression of the wills, hopes, urgencies, fears and wishes of individual women, men and children.
On the morning of the 27th we woke up to the news of a bomb attack; it was followed by several more. Was this to be the outcome of all the years of waiting and hoping? Then came that six-hour queue in the rain-one of the most moving and exhilarating experiences of my life. There we were, thousands upon thousands of us, representing every race and group and section of South Africa: rich and poor, powerful and socially insignificant, galvanized by the knowledge that each one was of equal importance, every vote of equal weight in deciding our shared future. Everybody was talking to everybody else not about politics, but about our daily lives, our jobs, our friends, our children.
It had all been worthwhile; that much one could read on the beaming faces of the people emerging from the hall after they had cast their votes-exhausted, aching in every limb, but ecstatic that at last their human worth had been recognized. We were there, said the faces, and our being there together has made a difference. For six hours whole lifetimes of separateness had been suspended. We had discovered, in the simplest and most basic way imaginable, and in the smallest of everyday actions-a shared umbrella, a mug of coffee passed from hand to hand, communal laughter, hands touching in the throng-the grounds of our common South Africanness and our common humanity. That brief experience has marked us for life. In achieving, for a few hours, what had seemed for so long impossible, we had caught a glimpse of the possible.
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