the corner office

Thanks to the BBC, I was reminded that yesterday (the 18th) was the 12th anniversary of the Referendum which saw white South Africa agree to share the goodies with everyone else.

A bit of history follows.

I was 19, and it was the first time I'd had an opportunity to vote. We were at varsity and myself and my friend M went to a local school in Parktown to vote. I can't remember much about the ballot but it basically had a huge long-winded paragraph which you could paraphrase into "End Apartheid? Yes | No". You made your cross in one of two big blocks. Silly, but I remember that making that cross was as nerve-wracking as writing out a cheque is. Not fundamentally difficult: you know exactly what you want to write but part of your mind is saying "What if I fsck up and make a cross in the wrong box?", and experience (and many cancelled cheques) has proven to me that as soon as you start thinking about fscking up there's a good chance you will. Thankfully I proof-read my cross a few times, and was reasonably satisfied that I'd done my bit for humanity and not voted for the wrong side. Walking out of the school hall, I think, was one of the first times I really felt like a grown-up.

I remember that the referendum was a really big thing - in many ways more than the elections which followed two years later. There was a lot of controversy because it was after all a whites-only referendum. Us whiteys got to decide whether to dismantle apartheid, as if it was really up to us to be magnanimous or not. Back in my home town I knew enough people who voted No. At the time, a common way to describe a racist white person was to use the forceful phrase "Ek Stem Nee!" (I vote No).

There was a lot of heated discussion - back then, many people believed that voting Yes would be inviting decay and mayhem a la Zimbabwe and our other neighbours. On the flipside, many people suspected that if the Yes vote didn't win, and the negotiations that were happening at the Codesa talks et al were halted, we would almost certainly descend into civil war.

In the end, the Yes vote won 2:1, which was a fairly decisive considering that nobody was really sure how it would go. Regardless of its legitimacy as a 'democratic' referendum, I think that the psychological effect of proving that the majority of white folks were open to change and didn't want the status quo to continue, defused a lot of tension, gave people faith that things could turn out positively, and prepared everybody for what was to come.

12 years ago. Fsck, I'm getting old...