An icy April 27 morning in Johannesburg, with President Jacob Zuma talking reconciliation on the radio and power failures rippling across the northern suburbs.
In my inbox and threaded through my Twitter stream are the inevitable unsolicited op-eds and 140-character jeremiads, so many of them saying the same thing: Freedom Day — why celebrate?
Despite the weather, I am not reminded of 1994 and the long, happy queue in the drizzle outside Gordon’s gym in Mowbray, or of the slow, thick cross I made in pencil beside Nelson Mandela’s face, but of a much earlier moment.
It would have been May 30 1978 — my first year at school — and the teachers were handing out stiff little cotton flags ahead of the May 31 Republic Day holiday. The rationale, vaguely outlined as a celebration of “independence”, wasn’t completely clear to me, but it sounded important, and I liked that little flag because it brought real signifying power down from the end of the pole in the schoolyard and put it in my six-year-old hand. Oranje was for a Dutch prince of uncertain relevance, blou was for the clear heavens that were our destination and blanje was for “purity”, of course.
I liked being able to explain the silly arrangement of three other flags in the middle — the Transvaal Vierkleur, with its green bar for “youth”, the football-strip arrangement of the Orange Free State, and “our” Union Jack. It was an early lesson in how countries storytell their way into existence.
To wield all this heraldic significance at the end of a wooden dowel felt terribly exciting. At home I planted the ensign in its paper stand, until my father returned from his lecturing job and explained his own souvenir of the day — I can’t recall whether it was a button or a red sticker, but it definitely said: “Republic Day — No Cause to Celebrate.”
May 31 was a holiday, he explained, for the racists who were proud to have removed themselves from the community of civilised nations, and it was nothing to be proud of. I think I muddled that argument with my grandfather’s rather different complaint that the day celebrated the final victory of Boer over Brit and the severing of ties with England and the queen. Losing the queen, we agreed in a room stuffed with colonial memorabilia, could not be good.
I was allowed to keep the flag, but it no longer thrilled me. Instead, it stood for the confusion that came from being inside and outside the system, singing Die Stem at morning assembly and obscurely understanding its iniquity. A bad thing was celebrated at each flag-raising by men who were, and were not, us.
Thirty-two years later the flag is the one thing we aren’t confused about — it is everywhere, wrapped around wing mirrors and fluttering from car windows in uncomplicated affirmation. How does that square with the intense anxiety that seems to have overwhelmed us? We are a nation of trauma victims at present, jumpy and hyper-vigilant, scanning the news — and the potholed road ahead — for signs of apocalypse.
There is no doubt that we are experiencing a difficult adolescence, poised between juvenile delinquency and a brilliant career, but increasingly leaning towards the former.
If, however, we are at once excited by the inchoate idea of nationhood (all those flags) and terrified by the demagoguery, racial animus and corruption that are eating the promise of 1994, perhaps it is because we are not very good at freedom.
It is easy to blame the ANC, to which we handed over the copyright on liberation. The governing party certainly must bear plenty of responsibility — it has battled to invest that legacy in the development of democracy. Despite the courage its leaders displayed during the struggle years, none has been brave enough to ensure that it becomes an enduring force for liberation, rather than a vehicle for enrichment. Nor has the liberation movement given birth to a viable democratic alternative to the ANC.
Opposition politics is not much better. Inkatha is crumbling into irrelevance, unable to convince voters that it stands for anything substantive that isn’t offered by the nationalist wing of the ANC.
The PAC and Azapo were already fatally weakened by the time Thabo Mbeki co-opted their best ideas, and Patricia de Lille’s Independent Democrats are just that — De Lille’s.
That leaves Cope with its powerful and underutilised platform in Parliament and the crippling genetic defects of the party that gave birth to it, and the Democratic Alliance. The DA is by a country mile the most effective alternative to the ANC and in the Western Cape it has a chance to demonstrate the proposition that a liberal meritocracy can deliver a better life for the poor. But the DA’s electoral strategy and, frankly, its lack of faith in minority voters to support a more nonracial leadership slate, continue to limit its appeal.
That leaves the vast swath of political space opened up by the ANC’s failures largely unoccupied.
Helen Zille may have learned the lesson provided by Cope’s first, heady days — that many white voters desperately want to vote for the South Africa of promise, rather than of fear — but too few of her colleagues are with her. When the party looks more like its young national spokesperson, Lindiwe Mazibuko, and less like its Western Cape leader, Theuns Botha, when it stops pandering to narrow ethnic constituencies with representatives like Lennit Max, and when it does more political work in poor constituencies, it may begin to fill up that space more meaningfully.
And so we wait, for a nonracial opposition coalition, for the good men and women in the ANC to rise up against the venal and the craven, for the next public holiday when we can drown the hum of anxiety in consumption. That, frankly, is our failure.
Freedom is not a six-year-old with a flag, or a passive recipient of “delivery”. It is a joyous, anxious, endless battle and it is time South Africans took up arms. In their neighbourhoods and businesses, in schools and, yes, at the ballot. It’s a fighting song, but you can dance to it.