It all depends on one’s view of the miraculous. There was nothing supernatural about the elections of 1994. They were the outcome of a very long period of very hard work. And yet, the experience was miraculous. For the first time in our history, our common experience as South Africans became more important than the rifts and divisions in our society, as we discovered that an ordinary, everyday life was indeed possible in a community that had never known the meaning of normality.
In the interminable hours of those queues on Election Day, what we all talked about as we waited – businessmen and street sweepers, academics and municipal laborers, glitterati and farmhands, tycoons and homeless beggars – was not great issues, but the ordinary trivia that mark our human affairs: our children and families, our daily routine, our ailments and our hopes, the rain that falls, the sun that shines. In that one day the notion of the Other lost its strangeness and became indispensable to our understanding of ourselves.
And this Miracle of the Ordinary has persisted in the dream of arriving at a final constitution. There have been huge obstacles: a new escalation of violence; increasing corruption and exploitation; a dismal inability of those in authority to deliver on all the promises. But so far the miracle has held, if only just. And there was enough hard evidence of its gradual translation into real terms: the provision of electricity and running water to hundreds of thousands of households; a new education system which has changed the face of the country. And when at some moments the euphoria threatened to dissipate, there have been occasions on the sports field which unexpectedly turned into national jubilation, reaffirming the recently discovered magic of unity and solidarity: winning the Rugby World Cup, beating England in a cricket series, winning the Africa cup in soccer.
Now the new Constitution has been accepted, confirming again the nature of our miracle: the coexistence of the dream and the real, the vision and the practical – and the energy and imagination to deal with both. But the withdrawal of the National Party came, for many, as a disillusionment. Can President Nelson Mandela’s ANC go it alone without moving toward one-party rule? Will black nationalism now begin to to replace the white nationalism of the past?
I don’t think so. After the initial shock, the move may yet turn out to be salutary for what it reveals: that, as many have suspected, de Klerk’s heart has never been in the great changes that have swept the country from the misery of apartheid to the dawn of democracy, and that his primary allegiance is to his dwindling party, rather than to the new South Africa. Knowing the truth is healthier than trying to accommodate the hypocritical games of the last few years. It should allow politics to evolve more naturally and normally. The very challenge it poses to the ANC is immensely significant: the onus to demonstrate, well before the elections of 1999, that it can live up to its history of nonracialism, its pledges toward the democracy it has helped enshrine in the new Constitution, and its concerns for the population as a whole (the black majority, those whites who feel uncertain about their future, and the so-called Coloreds poised between these power blocs, who have so far been the stepchildren of the new dispensation as much as they once were of the old).
The government of national unity has been of great im-portance to the country and the world over the past two years – as much in real as in symbolic terms. Now, with a new Constitution in place, politicians should be equipped to deal with the kind of situation that comes naturally to democracy: a party in power, and others (weaker, but not negligible) to challenge it in opposition.
Will this make South Africa a more boring place? I strongly doubt it – and not only because so many vast problems remain to be solved. In recent years writers have had to deal with much the same kind of challenge. Previously we had to contend with a repressive society where the threats of state power were offset by a wonderful sense of solidarity among all creative minds; now, cut down to size, writers are no longer judged in terms of the noble causes they espouse but solely in terms of the quality of their writing. And the quality of their imagination.
And it seems to me that South Africans have already demonstrated that they possess this kind of imagination: it thrives on crises but can deal with the ordinary, because it is able to turn the banal itself into a site of magic, the everyday into the miraculous.
BRINK’S new novel ““Imaginings of Sand’’ will be published by Harcourt Brace later this year.
