Maria McCloy on Freedom Day
President MandelA arrived on a donkey cart and the Premier, Manne Dipico, on a camel. The president insisted on this – after all this is an important animal in Upington, a town of 60 000 in the Northern Cape, near the Kalahari, where the national Freedom Day celebrations were held last Sunday.
Imagine Bill Clinton or Helmut Kohl on a donkey cart? Holding official celebrations in a town whose biggest event is the annual expo and Roseintjiefees? Upington was excited, that’s for sure. The Danie Kuys stadium had been packed with people of all ages since 7am.
Only in South Africa could it happen that the small plane taking us to the event carried in it Minister of Arts and Culture Lionel Mtshali, Minister of Health and Welfare Geraldine Fraser-Moloketi, the Rasta Rebels, the media, Mango Groove, Roger Jardine (director general of the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology) and director thereof, Carol Steinberg.
Hysterical schoolkids lined the streets in their gym kits and uniforms; the brass band were in their white outfits and young drummies in blue, green and red were getting ready to walk into the stadium to the strains of Sarie Marais, in what was surely the biggest performance of their life. The Truth and Recoinciliation Commission’s Piet Meiring was trying to preach but had to compete with the excitement of the crowds who were obviously more interested in the parachutists trailing red smoke.
Sure, there were the standard state celebration routines – like the marching army men and the 21-gun salute, the South African Airforce flypast and, of course, the singing of the national anthem … But there was none of the cold formality one would have expected.
We could sense Mandela had arrived by the buzz in the crowd. The marshals were desperately trying to get people to sit when children started sprinting towards his car. ”ANC! ANC!,” chanted the crowds; then came the wave of toyi-toyi chants.
Unlike in apartheid-era state celebrations, the headlined minister was not of defence or something like that, but of arts and culture. The idea of rotating the official celebration from province to province (instead of keeping it entrenched in Pretoria) is to showcase each province’s culture. It was the Department of Arts and Culture that organised the event nationally.
Upington was surely the right place to do this. There were the Upington 14 freedom fighters who narrowly escaped the death penalty in the 1980s and received copies of the constitution from the president at the celebrations. And talk about cultural diversity: in this province people speak Afrikaans, Xhosa, SeTswana and Nama.
I felt like crying when Mandela insisted on shaking the hands of the schoolchildren who gave him messages from the heads of all the provinces. A 14-year-old girl in a wheelchair had not been wheeled towards him, so when she was wheeled away, Mandela said: ”stop, I want to greet that child.” He came down from the podium to speak to her.
Much of the day was genuinely moving, especially the Nama praise-singer using a language that is not documented and in danger of dying. Mandela made the state of the nation address in the province’s lingua franca: Afrikaans. The small-town courtesy was refreshing after the plastic PR people of the big city.
At a lunch for VIPs Mandela signed a local artist’s painting and walked around among the people. There was a performance by the !Xu and Khwe San Bushman group, made up of children from the Schmidtsdrift Camp for a landless people.
On the stage, especially erected and fitted with great sound equipment, were performers as diverse as the Black Dickies, pantsula dancers from Kimberley, blonde gospel- singer Cornel Kuhn and the Savmelana cultural group children from Upington. Then there was the boeremusiek of Pieter van der Wetshuizen. Some were good, some bad, but that wasn’t the point. The crowd gave them so much love. But it was Dr Victor and Mango Groove that drove the crowd into a frenzy.
As the sun went down the kids, police and officials danced, kids made sand castles in the longjump pit and raced along the athletics track. One child walked by with a balloon made of a condom from the health department stall. It was tied together with red and white plastic police barricade tape.