Marion Edmunds
THE most coveted documentation at Parliament this week was not the latest draft of the Constitution, but an invitation to the party to end all parties, the big bash to end it all held on Wednesday night at Fernwood, the Parliamentary Estate in Bishops Court.
In the last late nights of the constitution- making process, Constitutional Assembly media liaison Katherine Mackenzie was jostled and set upon by media, functionaries and observers who felt they had become part of the “Process”, and thus deserved to go to the “Party”. But Mackenzie, sometimes abrupt and irritated from lack of sleep, refused to issue invitations to any but those on her list, making some hefty enemies in the small hours of Wednesday morning.
Mackenzie had forgotten all about this by the small hours of Thursday morning, as she and other members of the CA administration hopped, bopped and boogied in the gigantic Marquee at Fernwood, relieved that two years of late nights and long meetings were at last over, and that normal life could start again.
By that time the diplomats, the dignitaries, the eminent guests, the politicians and President Nelson Mandela had all gone home. After a three course sit-down meal, wine and speeches, the party was taken over by the CA administration people and journalists who have bonded deeply through the two-year-long Constitutional Process — which has imprinted itself on their psyches like the intellectual version of a veld and vlei course.
The administration people have borne the brunt of the politicians wranglings for two years — they have worked day, night, weeks and weekends to streamline the Process and smooth out the wrinkles to keep it sweet-smelling for the public.
It was disappointing that the politicians went home comparatively early on Wednesday night, given that the adoption of the Constitution was culmination of more than five years of work stretching back to Codesa, in which ideologies softened, friendships blossomed and the sense of a common South Africa was born. Given, too, that many politicians have founded their careers on constitutional negotiations, developed their personalities through the verbal and legal exchanges and defined their political future through the decisions they made. It would have been nice to have seen them, for once, throw their political selves to the wind, and let their hair down.
But no doubt they were exhausted after a month of long nights and years of intense political tension. I am too.