Birth
The conspiracy to stop the ’94 election
by Peter Harris
(Umuzi, R200)
THE GOVERNMENT has declared May 18 the date on which the citizens will go to the polls to elect their local representatives.
This will be the third time South Africans are able to choose their local councillors under the democratic dispensation. And the election is expected to run as smoothly as the previous two, as well as all the national elections – bar the historic 1994 first democratic poll.
Many South Africans would by now have forgotten that the 1994 election was “nearly stolen”. This is according to a book by writer and attorney, Peter Harris, Birth – The Conspiracy to Stop The ’94 Election.
Harris has already written In a Different Time – a brilliant work that won him the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award.
And his latest offering is not disappointing either. As he says, he saw it all from within.
The country was ablaze. There were bomb blasts, massacres and assassinations. The right wing wanted a Volkstaat. The Inkatha Freedom Party wanted secession for KwaZulu and was prepared to fight for it. It was a time fraught with danger. It was a time loaded with possibility.
Harris had earlier been seconded from his law firm Cheadle Thompson & Haysom to head up the Witwatersrand-Vaal region of the National Peace Accord (remember that?). But, with the election a few months away, he accepted another challenge – as head of the monitoring division of the Independent Electoral Commission.
Harris was seconded to the newly formed commission in January 1994 – with South Africa’s first democratic elections only three months away.
If he had known what was to come, he probably would have skipped the high-pressure job.
The logistics were staggering: three times as much time was needed to successfully execute such an election, involving vastly more voters than in previous ballots, and with no voters’ roll.
This book tells of the forces at work behind the scenes: those intent on destruction, those committed to delivering an election against the odds, and a conspiracy to strike at the heart of the elections.
Written in what is now becoming Harris’s two-stream format, the book is pacy, thrilling and chilling and remains a reminder of how close we came as a country to staring into the abyss; with the right-wingers bent on making sure the election was derailed and that as many black people as possible were killed.
That the election was a success was only because of the hard work and dedication of a number of South Africans, who worked day and night to ensure the birth of our democracy. – Jos Charle