Thandi Mahlangu
While most party leaders were ushered to the front of long lines of voters on Wednesday, Northern Cape Premier Manne Dipico steadfastly refused to jump the queue, waiting in line for seven hours before he finally cast his ballot.
“I can’t go to the front – I must wait like everyone else,” Dipico told the Mail & Guardian at about 10am. He stuck to his word, only making his mark (for the African National Congress, naturally) at about 4pm.
Dressed in a trendy black leather jacket, he spent much of the day at the polling station at Mankurwane Primary School, which he once attended, with his cellphone clutched to his ear.
His stubbornness upset the ANC’s election- day programme, said party media officer Mafu Davids. Other candidates who had voted earlier had to be deployed to cover for Dipico, who had been due to appear at various voting stations in the Kimberley area throughout the day.
“He wanted to wait like everybody, in the same way as everybody,” said Davids, a little tiredly, on Wednesday night. Davids, Dipico’s bodyguard and a few other comrades waited out the day with him.
“As a leader, you must do everything the people are doing. You cannot be a leader if you are not prepared to experience what other people experience,” Davids said.
Many of Dipico’s co-voters were appreciative of his effort.
“I think it’s very nice for the premier to stand in the queue with us,” said Boitumelo Selao, who was standing a few people behind the premier in the line. “It’s to show that he lives with the people in the location. We feel very proud to have the premier standing in the queue with us.”
But not everyone who voted with Dipico agreed. Pensioner Adihwang William Segami, who poured the premier a cup of tea from his old yellow flask, complained: “I’m very cross. This man should be standing at the front. He’s our leader. As young as he is, he’s our father.”
Dipico may have been spurred into his long wait by the memory of his mother complaining to the media after the local government elections in 1996 about his queue- hopping. While she had waited patiently in line, her son had gone past her, right up to the front and voted.
She was later quoted in the Diamond Fields Advertiser as saying that the young of today lacked respect.
While Dipico kept journalists waiting impatiently, in Prieska New National Party leader in the Northern Cape Pieter Willem Saaiman did the opposite, waiting for journalists to arrive before making his mark.
He said he cast his ballot at about 9.30am, after a TV crew arrived in a helicopter. He had previously posed for Die Volksblad, in a mock shot of him voting.
“I’m very happy – our supporters turned out well,” he said on Wednesday night. “Luckily it wasn’t the summer and the heat wasn’t too bad.”
@Orania still votes for secession
There wasn’t much doubt which party was going to dominate the election in Orania, but things are changing slowly in this last bastion of apartheid, writes David Beresford
When the rainbow nation went to vote on Wednesday, there was one polling station where the queues were non-existent and the voters all predictably white – in this dusty corner of the Northern Cape where Afrikaners are still dreaming the seemingly impossible dream of their precious volkstaat.
The votes cast in Orania were always likely to have a less than significant impact on the balance of power in Parliament: with only 143 registered voters, they were able to count the ballots within minutes of the polling station closing in the town’s community hall. The tally gave the Freedom Front a local victory.
But even if it was not to be found at the polls, the little town on the banks of the Orange River is offering a message for the rest of South Africa that could be of some significance to the political future of the country.
It was in 1995 that President Nelson Mandela flew in to Orania for that famous cup of tea with Hendrick Verwoerd’s widow, Betsie, which provided probably the most memorable propaganda coup of his administration.
Solemnly inspecting the midget-size bronze statue of the “architect of apartheid” which broods on a hilltop overlooking the town; quietly prompting Betsie Verwoerd in Afrikaans as she struggled to read a speech to him without the glasses she had lost – the president’s visit reduced Orania to a subject for ridicule, its people to bittereinders in a third Boer War they had omitted to fight.
Orania does not look much different nowadays – the little statue is still there, as is Betsie at 98 years of age.
But something has subtly changed. The town is getting a new air of confidence. The sandbags that used to be piled up at the entrance in anticipation of advancing black hordes have disappeared; the scrawled road signs have been replaced with municipal lettering; and the residents seem to have lost the air of defensive hostility with which they used to engage the curious stares of foreign visitors come to inspect the political Neanderthals roaming this last bastion of apartheid.
In fact, the town seems to be undergoing something of a boom, its population nearly doubling since Mandela was here – to about 650. The majority of the adults are university graduates, and with the help of investments from sympathisers outside, the development of Orania is striking.
On the edge of the town, they have sunk more than R10-million into what promises to be the biggest pecan-nut plantation in South Africa. Nearby is what they claim to be the most modern, computerised dairy in the southern hemisphere – a new-tech showcase, “designed, built and run by Afrikaners”, operating 24 hours a day and capable of milking 1 000 cows.
One of the two schools has become a model of progressive teaching and is producing multimedia courses that are sold to Afrikaans schools around South Africa and Namibia. And the town is sprinkled with about 50 family businesses, ranging from a goldsmith to an engineering-instrument maker.
Whether this all brings a volkstaat closer is open to question – a question to which some answers were offered by a young man who could be found wandering around the community hall with an “election agent” sticker prominent on his breast.
With long blond hair and a beard posing as an overdue shave, Carel Boshoff looks more like a Dutch “provo” hanging around the cafs on Amsterdam’s canals than a grandson of the puritanical social engineer that was Verwoerd.
Haunted since a child by his kinship with the Dutchman, Boshoff tends to focus on the other side of his family when he talks about the ancestral tradition of involvement in politics – a line of distinguished forebears ranging from a president of the Orange Free State to Professor Carel Boshoff, his father and one of the founders of Orania.
Whichever side it stems from, it is a political inheritance that a resentful Carel Boshoff Jnr has attempted to flee in the past. Studying theology, philosophy and cultural history for 10 years at Pretoria University, he switched to architecture in the early 1990s, only to find himself swept back into politics as an observer at the Codesa talks.
Now resigned to his “destiny”, Boshoff is chief executive of the Freedom Foundation – the think-tank backing the Orania dream – and is doing a PhD in political philosophy in an attempt to develop a theory to underpin the volkstaat movement.
The philosophical challenge is one Boshoff is only too ready to take up.
He does not deny the history of apartheid and he concedes that many in the Orania community – the older people, in particular, who still carry racial baggage – remain “exclusivist”, but he insists that “mainstream Orania thinking has nothing to do with it”. The population, he argues, only has to reach a critical mass and the issue will fall away.
The community is “intentional”, not exclusive. “We do not have any rules excluding anyone because they are non- Afrikaner or non-white.”
There are already people in the community who would possibly not have been classified as white in the old South Africa. “It is not made an issue because hopefully we are getting past it.”
Nationalist movements, Boshoff explains, move through two phases, before and after they assert themselves. Before achieving power, it has to be an inclusive movement, showing tolerance, for example, towards creative individuals such as artists and poets.
“After you have attained power, it seems you start closing off.”
In the first phase, the question is, “Do you join?” In the second, the question is, “Are you one of us?”
The second phase ended for the Afrikaners in the 1990s. Orania has been mistaken for the last phase of the old movement, but it is in fact the first phase of a new movement.
Orania is already beginning to represent a “reference point” and a “centre point” for Afrikanerdom.
But how will South Africa be persuaded to allow secession?
Boshoff replies by quoting Niccol Machiavelli, who advised his readers, in The Prince, to begin by starting a new town in a part of another principality’s hinterland which was not much use to it. Then, when it has been developed enough to stand on its own, “you just grab it and declare it a new state”, Boshoff explains.
Boshoff recalls how president-elect Thabo Mbeki had said to them: “You are always talking about a volkstaat; why don’t you present us with the facts?”
“That is exactly what we intend doing,” the young political philosopher says with determination. They will develop it economically and create institutions that will enable it to stand on its own. Then, “We will talk to government and say: `It is time now.'”
The polling booth was quiet in Orania’s community hall, waiting for the boere to make their choices known in a democratic South Africa. Down below the children were all at school.
“We had our public holiday on Monday,” explains Boshoff, pointing out it had been “Bittereinderdag” – the centenary of the Boer surrender at Vereeniging.
It was another way of saying Afrikanerdom really never gives up.