1994

1994 was a watershed. Not only was it the year of the first truly democratic election in South Africa but it was the date we left our home of 25 years and return to the UK.
Often when I see a date mentioning a date in recent history I reflect, was it before or after 1994.
What is the significance of this. Well in fact the dates before 1994, in so far as they signal some event in the world do not ring a bell for one simple fact. Apartheid had segregated us as a nation and as a family from what was really happening in the outside world. As we turned in on ourselves obsessed with what was happening to the country we became marginalised and myopic.
In the early days the Nationalist Government sought to isolate us from the disharmony of world opinion and of course television was very late in starting up in South Africa for that very reason. Like the dreadful foe the USSR and Communism, the news was manipulated and propaganda used as a tool for keeping the people sweet in a constant war of words, of part truths and lies to convince us of the morality and efficacy of the States control over the bulk of the people living in South Africa.
We lived in a bubble, a convenient bubble, a supportive bubble if you were white and life for us "whities" was marvellous. We had an abundance of everything, we had the camaraderie  of of the tribe and the instinct for self-preservation. The Rand was reinvested within the country, since no one in the outside world wanted to know us, and the innovations in business and home made us a leader in the way corporate and national capital was used to protect and favour a section of society.
Whilst it was the opposite of being inclusive, the benefits of the capitalistic system did reach further than in the world at large and was used  as a sop to distract from the distortions all around. We willingly believed the propaganda because we were kept comfortable. Like children in a sweet factory we became sick on our own sycophantic avoidance of the truth by leaving the decisions to others who we knew were wrong but hadn't the heart to say so.
So 1994 was the date when we awoke from the dream and reality streamed in from every side. I was no longer a member of the tribe.
The world, which had been travelling along in a parallel universe and was full of dates and events I had only been vaguely aware of . The State propaganda was now singing a different tune, sung by a different master but it was propaganda none the less. Our ears, coming from a society which had survived on it, recognised the use of the metaphor, knew when to disentangle the wordplay coming from an official, was highly sceptical of government and only believed what we could see in front of our eyes.
1994 like the Orwellian date 1984, was a construct of The State.  On the one hand it signified a turning point in an experiment, removing one kind of Totalitarianism which the world rightly abhorred but replacing it with a different kind of Totalitarianism, an African offshoot.  
It's successor has left 'The State' in an egalitarian black hole (no pun intended) in which the race to the bottom is well under way.