A Song in the Night (26 page)

Surprised by my interest, she spoke with fairness and respect. As I left her ornate office, I thought to myself, “There really is a hole at the center of the Democratic Party. And maybe someone like me could fill it.”

I visited the Democratic issues convention in October with Bob Colt, a well-known political operative who worked for the attorney general. After seven hours of shaking hands and greeting skeptical people, I felt sorry when they began streaming out of the stadium.

“But I haven’t met everyone!” I complained to Bob.

“Oh, you are hooked,” Bob said with a laugh.

Starting with two graduate students, no money, and no campaigning experience, I began my run. Soon I had raised a few thousand dollars and we opened a tiny office on the Cambridge-Somerville line. The technology could hardly have been more primitive: we had one computer, which we used to keep track of donations. We were a few years away from the explosion of the Internet and the technological revolution that changed American life and politics so dramatically. It took us
months before we could finally afford a single portable telephone that would travel in the car. We had no e-mail and no GPS. But we had volunteers, and we had spirit, and more than anything we were having a great time.

The weather in early 1994 was brutal; I ended up driving to events through sixteen different snowstorms. I visited restaurants, union halls, factories, VFW posts, as well as innumerable living rooms for house parties. I was delighted that I was able to persuade my old friends Peter, Paul, and Mary to come to Massachusetts to hold a concert for me. They arrived in late February to perform in a hall that held 1,200 people. The morning of the concert, twelve inches of snow dropped onto the streets and cut our attendance to about 700, so that even though the trio had offered their services for free, the overall expenses outweighed the revenue. But it produced a huge return in credibility and enthusiasm for the campaign.

In early March, as my campaign was reaching fever pitch, South Africa suddenly popped back into my life. I received a formal invitation to serve as an official international observer at the South African elections, which were going to be held at the end of April. I presented this opportunity to my campaign manager Lynda Wik and the other members of my campaign staff.

“What would this mean?” they asked.

“It would mean I would fly to South Africa for a week.”

My field director, Barbara Opacki, objected strenuously. “The state convention is only six weeks after that!” she protested. “If you don’t get fifteen percent of the vote at that gathering,
you won’t even be on the ballot. You need to use every breathing moment to be calling delegates to introduce yourself to them in the hope that you can round up at least five hundred votes!”

I said I was still inclined to go.

“You also need to talk to about fifty reporters to see if a few more of them will write about you before the convention,” my advisers continued. “How are you going to get any coverage if you’re in another country?”

I felt uncertain. On the one hand, they might well be right. I had set off in pursuit of this unlikely nomination, drawn other people in, organized a strong campaign, and challenged the party establishment. It didn’t seem sensible to pack my bags and leave for a week in the middle of the fray.

At the same time, I had been following the transformation of South African apartheid for nearly twenty years. I had just been there during a key constitutional period. With this invitation I was being offered a front-row seat and a particular way to help.

I went home and thought about it carefully. The next morning I returned. The South African elections were a key moment in world history, I said, and I wanted to participate in them. My team shook their heads with bewilderment but accepted the idea. We prepared as best we could for what seemed like a long absence.

I flew from Boston to New York City and walked through the terminal toward the sixteen-hour flight to Johannesburg. As I was entering the boarding area, I heard an announcement over the intercom.

“Would Robert Massie please pick up any white phone to speak to information?”

Bewildered, I found a phone and picked it up. The operator informed me that my campaign was urgently trying to reach me. I phoned my campaign manager.

“We just got a call from one of the local television stations. They’ve learned that you are going to South Africa and they’re wondering if they could do an on-air telephone interview with you tomorrow when you arrive. They don’t have a reporter on the ground, and they would like to get someone to describe the situation.”

“Sure,” I said, startled.

“Here’s the number,” she said. “And don’t forget!”

I arrived in Johannesburg the next day and made my way to the downtown skyscraper that lodged the offices of the International Electoral Commission, which gave credentials to observers. The security was tight, so the line of people waiting to be admitted snaked across a vast public plaza surrounded by parked cars. The morning’s newspapers were filled with threats from neo-Nazi parties that they intended to disrupt the elections through any means necessary. All around me police were stopping and searching vehicles for bombs. Standing out in the open under a gray sky, staring at rows of unoccupied cars parked closely to the electoral nerve center of the country, I found myself praying for the line to hurry up. When I eventually made it inside, I breathed a sigh of relief.

I received my credentials, including a special blue cap, a photo ID badge to hang around my neck, a large set of stickers for whatever car I was using, and reams of papers and instructions
saying that I was legitimate. I reported to the deployment area and discovered that the region around Johannesburg and Pretoria had been swamped with thousands of observers. I called a friend at the Independent Electoral Commission office in Cape Town.

“How many observers do you have down there?” I asked.

“Not enough,” he said. “Only about three hundred for the entire Western Cape.”

I hung up the phone, went outside, hailed a taxi, and went straight to the airport, where I caught a thousand-mile flight to Cape Town. Four hours later I walked into a new set of offices and received a map of where I was to go during the three-day elections. My territory covered the area north and east of Cape Town, including an incredible array of different voting areas: entrenched white Afrikaner towns, destitute African squatter camps, modest Coloured townships, rural plantations where the majority of voters were likely to be illiterate farmworkers.

On Sunday before the election, I called the television station in Boston and asked what the producer wanted me to talk about. He said he wanted me to describe what I had seen as vividly as possible.

“How long do I have?” I asked.

“Two minutes,” he replied.

When they started to broadcast, I talked about the people, the preparations, the undercurrent of fear, the pervasive sense of disbelief, and the thousands of police and visitors. At the end the producer came back on the line.

“That was
great
,” he said. “Do you think you could do that again?”

“When?”

“How about this time Tuesday and again Thursday?” he said.

“Sure.”

And so, much to the consternation of all my competitors and much of the political establishment in Massachusetts, I reported for the next few nights as a foreign correspondent from South Africa. I relished the irony; sitting inside Massachusetts, I had been ignored. When I went overseas, I ended up on television every other night.

As the election day approached, tension mounted. Parties held tumultuous rallies; volunteers attached pictures and slogans to every vertical surface; reporters speculated endlessly on the outcome. Driving along South Africa’s most modern highways, I marveled to find the once-banned likeness of Nelson Mandela grinning from the top of every lamppost framed by the words “
MANDELA FOR PRESIDENT
”—thousands of these images, passing rhythmically for miles.

Beneath the fervor of a normal presidential campaign lay a universal sense of amazement, even bewilderment, as people watched the lightning transformation of unattainable fantasies into routine realities. The voting began at seven in the morning on Tuesday, April 26, and stretched over three days. I had persuaded Marijke du Toit, one of my best friends, a female graduate student at the University of Cape Town and daughter of André and Maretha, to join me on this adventure as my driver. Her car was an ancient bright yellow VW bug covered with patches of rust, but we turned it into an official observer car by gluing the bright blue
INTERNATIONAL ELECTION
OBSERVER
signs to each of its door panels. As we drove around the Cape Province and came up on police and military roadblocks, those blue signs caused the officers to step aside and wave us through, sometimes with a crisp salute.

On the first day the voting was limited to the elderly and the infirm, in part to give the officials at each voting site a chance to iron out their procedures. At Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, women in labor and patients who were about to go into surgery insisted on casting their ballots at the hospital’s polling site first. At South African consulates and other polling stations around the world, an estimated quarter of a million overseas South Africans began to cast their ballots.

The next morning people began arriving at the polls as early as 4
A.M
. Everywhere the lines grew longer and longer. Black and white, young and old, men and women, stood with eagerness and patience, even when the technical arrangements faltered. The autumn rains opened up, and Marijke and I drove from place to place with the windshield wipers operating at a furious pace. Despite these regular soakings, people refused to give up their places in line. In previous years anti-apartheid activists in the huge townships had taken down the street signs in order to make it harder for the police to navigate. We worried that we would not be able to find the polling places, since we often had only the skimpiest address. It turned out to be easy; we would enter a township and make a wide loop through the streets until we came to the end of an incredibly long line. We would then drive along that line—sometimes for a mile, sometimes for two—passing thousands of standing
people, until we reached the community building or church that had been designated as the place to vote.

As voters reached the entrance to the polling station, they were greeted by a strange assembly of policemen, foreign observers, peace monitors, party representatives, and IEC officials like us. They moved quickly past a succession of tables. Their identity books were examined and marked with invisible ink, their fingernails checked and then sprayed with long-lasting dye that showed up under ultraviolet light. They were then handed a national ballot and escorted to a standing booth where they could mark their ballots in secret. If they had any difficulties, a throng of officials, including me, would surround them to make sure that the advice they were given was impartial. After depositing their ballots in a sealed box, they collected a second ballot, for provincial government, and voted again. Minutes later they were back outside, their faces bearing a range of emotions from sober dignity to tearstained joy.

In most parts of the country the voting unfolded more smoothly than expected, with fewer crowds, more efficient operations, and, most amazingly, no violence. The polls closed at 7
P.M
. on Thursday, April 28. At that very moment I was standing in a small church courtyard in the African township of Langa. Barney Pityana, my lawyer/activist/priest friend, had invited me to go with him to a celebration of the Eucharist at this local church. He had just stepped inside to change into his liturgical robes and I was standing by myself, reliving the magnitude of the last few days. Above me rose the dark and
towering impassivity of Table Mountain, which stretched up nearly three thousand feet high. A brilliant white moon shone in a black and cloudless sky. All around me was silence. At the precise moment the polls closed, I began to hear a strange murmuring washing over the high walls of the churchyard. As I listened, I realized that I was hearing people’s voices as they came rushing out of their houses. All around me I heard a rising blend of excited conversation, laughter, shouts, and songs. From behind my plaster wall I could not see any people, but as I stood there, I felt emotion sweep through me as well. It was the sound of a nation’s soul, rising from the dreams of millions of long-suffering people. A new democracy had been born, and I was hearing the cries of joy at its birth being carried to me on the wind.