COMMENT: Young people must return to electoral politics, because the folks who vote now will determine their chances against problems created in this time, here and now. We don’t have another 25 years.
A quarter of a century is a long time — the face in the mirror is so markedly different from the ones in the photographs that attest to the way we were. Looking back across those 25 years, into another century and from another millennium, many of us are tempted to become nostalgic. We also realise that we are looking into another country, a place where the habits of being, even our own, may seem strange, probably misremembered.
Our imaginations have not yet been unfettered from the terms of our own dehumanisation, whether as victims of that crime against humanity, or as beneficiaries of the half-century of contradictions so poorly summarised in the word “apartheid”. The days following April 27 1994, when we queued to cast our votes in South Africa’s first democratic elections, were ones of elation. Mandela, whose face appeared on the posters for the ANC, was destined to complete a chapter as one of the last great men of history, as JM Coetzee would describe him later, after his death.
The footage is available on YouTube. It remains a poignant moment in the history of this country, not least because many of those in the film footage are no longer alive. The past is also the country of the dead. We have urgent business from the more recent past, the foetid pollution of corruption, maladministration, theft of state resources and non-delivery of services.
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