Peter Dickson
A single rusted road sign at Nqadu near Willowvale indicates that these are the 20th-century lands of King Xolilizwe Sigcawu, paramount chief of all the Xhosa. But his majesty is not here on election day, preferring to escape to his farm at Kentani and vote there.
By midday, at the voting station just metres away from the king’s modern home, the election has become a mysterious event. The local United Democratic Movement agent clutches an African National Congress pamphlet he was given minutes ago, muttering that the invisible ANC is canvassing support among the largely old men and women who make up the presentable queue.
Prince Xhanti Sigcawu, a Willowvale prosecutor who is the driving force behind the new young bloods making up the Xhosa Royal Council, looks concerned after Queen Sigcawu has cast the first vote.
There should be many more voters in the area, which is home to several thousand impoverished people, but at Nqadu’s two voting stations on this public holiday only a few hundred have made their mark since 7am. Throughout the day across the rural Transkei – at Qumbu, Sidwadweni, Nqamakwe, Ngcingwane, Lusikisiki, Majola, Gwadana – it was a pattern the Mail & Guardian team repeatedly found.
Outside of major towns like Umtata and Butterworth, it was like any other event- free day in the country. With not a poster in sight for kilometre after gravel kilometre and from one village-clad hilltop to another, there was hardly an election going on at all.
Rural polling stations, few and far between and in the areas with the greatest concentration of people, were almost deserted at the expected peak hours of the day and Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) officials ascribed the phenomenon to low registration figures. At Nqamakwe, a major centre deep in the populous backwoods of the western Transkei, only 771 eligible voters had registered. Of these, 500 had voted by 3pm.
At the Nqadu Great Place, even though the turnout was way below IEC expectations, there was consternation among the pipe- smoking traditionalists, still wondering who to vote for. They wanted jobs, water and electricity, they said, but who was going to give it to them? President Nelson Mandela, they had only just learned, was retiring. That left president-elect Thabo Mbeki and “General” Bantu Holomisa.
These men were both ANC, they said. They “knew” Holomisa, but were not so sure of Mbeki. When the advent of Holomisa’s UDM was explained to them, the king’s subjects were more confused than ever. News, thanks to no development, no communications and widespread illiteracy, still travels slowly in Nqadu.
Mbeki told Umtata businessmen and academics on the campaign trail that areas such as these would be his government’s top priority. In the Transkei, there may yet be too many.
ENDS
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