Open Writing

April 27th 1994 dawned blue and gold, the trees decked in all their autumn colours and the sky devoid of clouds. Deciding not to take the car as it might be difficult to find parking close enough to the voting station to make it worth the trouble, I slipped on my takkies and walked the invigorating distance down the hill to the Yeoville Primary School to join the ever growing queues. Savouring the sense of tingling excitement in the air, I was prepared for a long wait, and in fact, was even looking forward to holding on to my sense of anticipation a little longer whilst chatting to the casual acquaintances one makes so easily on a day like this.

However, this was not to be. I’d only been standing in the queue for about ten minutes when a rather officious-looking policewoman came up to me and said, “Come with me, the infirm and elderly are allowed to enter through a special door to make it easier for them.”

Taking her at her word, although slightly surprised to be mistaken for one of the “infirm elderly,” I was nevertheless pleased to be able to complete the voting process in record time and was back in my snug flat not far from the Yeoville water towers about an hour later.

As I was boiling the kettle for a nice cup of tea, I was startled by a loud rumbling from the road outside. Always curious, particularly as the whole of South Africa was on the alert in the apprehensive days preceding those momentous elections, I rushed to the balcony to see what was happening. My curiosity was fuelled by a recent large bomb explosion when a big office building in the Joubert Park area had been blown up a few weeks previously, together with an abortive “takeover” at the Kempton Park Trade Centre by Eugene TerreBlanche and his heavily armed merry men using an ex-WWII armoured car a few days earlier.

To my amazement I saw three troop carriers filled with heavily armed soldiers disappearing up the road, and shortly afterwards heard an authoritative voice shouting, “Everyone inside, stay away from the doors and windows. Take cover!”
After these stentorian instructions had been repeated several times, I decided it might be better to do as I was told, and moved into the only room which seemed to offer protection from blast and flying debris. Like the rest of the building, the bathroom was securely built of good strong bricks with one small window high in the wall. After I’d wrapped a thick towel around my head and face in case of flying glass, I took my seat on the loo, and waited in anxious anticipation for the worst to happen. After about an hour, but which was in reality not much longer than ten to fifteen minutes, and without any further noise or activity from outside, my curiosity could not be contained any longer. I dashed up to the flat roof of the building to find out what was happening.

From here I had an excellent view of the surrounding area. To my surprise, I saw a small group of armed soldiers guiding and directing a caterpillar tracked radio-controlled robot towards a car parked under a tree.

A few delicate manoeuvres and the robot was in position. It poked its nose under the vehicle using its mirrored arm as it searched for lethal objects; there was the sound of a muffled whump and a spout of leaves and debris rose into the air; and it was all over.

A day or two later local wisdom said that sniffer dogs had indicated something suspicious in the car after an alarm call had alerted the bomb squad, and to be on the safe side on this day of all days, the car had been imploded as a precaution. Now minus its innards and looking decidedly the worse for wear under the leafless and brutally pruned street tree, the little car seemed very innocuous to be the object of so much careful security, especially as everything indicated it was all a false alarm.

But you can never be too careful when a whole country is voting – for the first time in its history - for freedom and democracy, can you?