African paythos

I suppose you are all trembling with excitement at the prospect of voting tomorrow ?
Can it be 20 years since the Wood family struggled on board the aircraft, destined for our future in the UK. Like the homeless and dispossessed we carried the overflow that couldn't fit in the suitcase in an assortment of bags to find what ever space we could in so called hand luggage. It was a period when the authorities were much more relaxed, no security check, no handing over of loose change or hoping your trousers wouldn't fall down as one is now required to take off ones belt and remove shoes to add to the indignity of air travel these days.
We had dallied in our farewells in the departure lounge and, slightly the worse for that final drink we mounted the aircraft steps to a waiting aircraft that had been delayed by this wide eyed and slightly disorganised family. Gushing our apologies we settled into our seats and gazed forlornly out of the port hole at the airport building and the slowly receding landscape of our home. We often are invoked these days to embrace our kids in what is going on but if truth be told we were as vague as to the why and the wherefore as they were.For them it was a journey, like many journeys held in cocoon of blind trust in 'parent knows best' but did we, we were gambling on an outcome which we thought we could control but which, in the immediate months ahead became a roller coaster of highs and lows. 
You also have been on a roller coaster. From the heady days of the first election in 94, the optimism generated
by dialogue, a dialogue which was new to South Africans but seemed so much more civilised than the brandishing of a gun.  Mandela had the charisma to win both sides over and one wonders what would have happened if he had been a younger man with plenty of energy to guide the country to a balanced democracy.
So tomorrow can only be a protest vote, a shot across the bows of the juggernaut that is the ANC. The view through the porthole will look much like before as the plane banks across the sky. The veldt stretching away into the distance, the country merging into the huge African landscape which from 30.000ft looses any sense of the human pathos that is played out each day.            

http://twocents2012.blogspot.com.au/