Apartheid America
I grew up in South Africa during apartheid when only those with white skin like mine were allowed to vote. We were called “Europeans,” and everyone else — the non-voting “other” — was “Non-European.” As a child I didn’t understand about elections and voting, but by the time I entered kindergarten I knew that those with the palest skin ruled over everybody else. All the white adults in my world of school and playdates were called Mrs. This or Mr. That, while the Black people I knew — the ones who cooked and cleaned and made my bed — I was told to call by their first names, as if they were children like me.
In America, if people of color had stayed home during the 2020 election, the white, “European” vote would have made Donald Trump president. Reporter Jane Mayer brought this home in her New Yorker article, “The Big Money Behind the Big Lie,” when she quoted Michael Podhorzer, a senior advisor to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O: “Trump won white America by eight points. He won the non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”
In other words, Donald Trump won white America not by a fraction of a point or even a couple of points; he won by a landslide.
But white America is not a nation, and a “whites-only democracy” is an oxymoron. I know what a whites-only democracy looks like, since that is what I escaped by moving from South Africa to America in 1985. It is the kind of democracy where anyone who disagrees with the government too loudly is silenced. It is a democracy based on the belief that the end justifies the means, and the “end” always ensures the continuation of white rule.
My parents and I held signs protesting apartheid, but it’s hard to say if we made a difference. It was the economic damage of international sanctions, civil unrest, and the growing worldwide uproar against white rule that finally persuaded the apartheid regime to share power. The only option other than a full-blown civil war, was to free Nelson Mandela from prison, declare his African National Congress a legitimate political party, and hold a national election in which people of all races could vote. In 1994, four years after Mandela was set free, the date for the first truly democratic election was finally set.
Conservative whites warned that if the Black people of South Africa voted, they would sweep the white race off the face of the continent. This was blatant fear mongering, but it also highlighted a demographic reality: 80% of the population was Black, while another 10% were Indians, Asians and mixed-race people who are still officially called Coloureds. Whites accounted for a mere 10% of the country.
America is not apartheid South Africa — two thirds of the population here is white — and yet a version of the ominous predictions voiced by right-wing whites in South Africa simmers here today. When Donald Trump lost Georgia in the 2020 election, conservative pundits blamed the people of color who had turned out in unprecedented numbers. Right-wing media voiced suspicions that those new voters included felons, undocumented immigrants, and fraudsters who had voted twice. Whatever they were, surely their votes were illegitimate and should be expunged because they threatened “the American way of life.”
I was living in Boston in 1994 when, at the end of April, South Africa’s first fully democratic election took place over four days. Later, my mother would tell me that she had stood in an endless line on the soccer field of a nearby school in our home town of Pietermaritzburg, waiting to reach a makeshift polling booth with a curtain across its doorway. Phineas, our family’s African cook who had worked in our house since I was seven, accompanied her in a white, button-down shirt and waistcoat. With them was Nancy, my parents’ live-in domestic worker, who, like Phineas, was a Zulu. She had shed her workday cotton uniform in favor of the red-and-blue polyester dress that she usually reserved for going home on Friday afternoons. For two-and-a-half hours the three of them stood under the bright autumn sun, Black and white together. When they reached the voting booth, Nancy and Phineas, both well past middle age, held a ballot in their hands for the first time and planted a cross next to their chosen candidate.
A few weeks before, I learned that South Africans living abroad would be allowed to vote on the first day of the election, April 26th. The South African Embassy had arranged for each of twenty-four American cities to provide a polling station. Boston wasn’t on the list, but I was due to run a conference in Dallas, Texas that day, and Dallas, I discovered, was.
Before the flight out west I checked what proof I needed to vote, and packed in my briefcase my still-valid South African passport and a government-issued booklet called the Book of Life. It contained my national registration number, my race (“white person”), place of birth, childhood residence, driver’s license, and a photograph of 16-year-old me with a Prince Valiant haircut.
The morning of April 26 my job kept me tethered to the hotel all morning. Finally at lunch-time I slipped off to my room, kicked off my pumps, tugged on a pair of sneakers, and hurried out into the warm spring air.
The polling station was in a municipal building no more than ten minutes from my hotel. As I joined the end of a line of some twenty people, the man ahead of me turned and said, “Big day, hey?” I nodded and smiled, while inside me apprehension fizzed. I saw the same tense excitement in the pinched smiles and fleeting frowns of others waiting to vote. I heard it in the murmured greetings harboring hope. After 50 years of apartheid, was South Africa really going to shake free? Or were we all in a state of delusion? On the ballot was Nelson Mandela — terrorist to some, freedom fighter to others — and so was his main Black competitor, Mangosuthu Bhutelezi, the tribal leader of the Zulus. Bhutulezi had initially boycotted the election, complaining of a slanted playing field. But when it became clear that voting would take place without him, he jumped into the race. What if he told his millions of supporters that the election was rigged and commanded them to fight? What if white supremacists, knowing their candidate would lose, planted bombs at the polling stations? These scenarios seemed both improbable and all too possible. At the time I believed such subversion of democracy would never happen in America, that South Africa and America were worlds apart. As far as I was concerned, America’s democracy was rooted and unshakeable, and nobody in Texas or anywhere else in the country would dare upend an election.
I shuffled forward with my anxieties until I entered the concrete and glass building. After a brief glance at my passport, someone handed me a long ballot sheet with the faces of nineteen presidential hopefuls. Feeling the weight of the moment, I stepped into the hush of the voting booth. My gaze skated past the candidate for the Soccer Party, the Keep It Straight and Simple Party, the Women’s Rights Peace Party. Two thirds of the way down I found the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela’s beaming face. I made my mark, and as I released my ballot to join all the others, a sense of euphoria rose in my chest. Whatever the outcome — if Buthelezi pulled off a surprising win, if the white separatist party still in power insisted on a recount, or if swarms of white people left the country in panic — I had voted, and soon millions of other Black, brown and white South Africans would, too, and with that one act of self-assertion, the country would never be the same.
There to congratulate me as I stepped into daylight stood a Black couple dressed in formal black-and-white outfits. A triangle of white poked out of the man’s dark breast pocket, and the woman’s long dress swept to the floor in alternating swirls of charcoal and white. The vast brim of her lacquered black hat shaded me as we shook hands, and in that moment all of the reasons why this election wasn’t yet a sure thing faded. For so long South Africa had been the international symbol of racism and exploitation; now, at last, we were breaking free. We were returning like the prodigal son to the western world, shedding decades of shame, finally admitting that we white people, the colonizers, had for generations robbed indigenous Africans and stripped of their rights the very people who most belonged.
The glow stayed with me all week. Each day I soaked up all the newspaper reports and TV accounts of the election that I could find. I saw footage of Black tribal dwellers, white housewives and office workers of all shades standing for hours in order to vote. Throngs formed a single file that wound around city blocks. In rural districts, lines snaked through the long grass of the veldt. The elderly hobbled with canes and crutches; mothers stood waiting with their babies strapped to their backs. In the chill of morning, voters draped themselves in blankets; by noon, umbrellas poked into the sky to shield their bearers from the sun. Three of every four people in line all over South Africa were Black, each waiting for the first time to have a say in who controlled them and their country.
“A rainbow nation,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu called the new South Africa. Nelson Mandela picked up the image and said, “Each of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld — a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.”
Twenty-seven years have passed since that election — the same amount of time that Nelson Mandela spent in jail. I recognize now that what I wanted as I stood in line on that spring morning in Dallas was for South Africa to become a version of the America that occupied my imagination. I believed that whatever else America might fail at, when it came to democracy it was a beacon for the world. I had witnessed it for myself when I visited New York for the first time in 1980 as an au pair to a family in Scarsdale, New York. On their TV I saw Americans of all races going to the polls to elect a new president. Ronald Reagan won in a landslide that year, and even though my host family gasped and groaned as the results rolled in, there was no talk of a rigged election or fraud. Decency and fairness lived at the core of America, or so I thought. Hadn’t the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act — both passed decades before I settled in America — proved that this country owned up to its wrongs and righted them? Even when the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in Shelby vs. Holder, I still believed that states wouldn’t purposely prevent certain people from voting. That would be un-American.
Passersby had cheered for us South Africans that spring day in Dallas. Along with people all over the state of Texas, they were eager to see the world’s most fledgling democracy stand steady on its fragile legs. On the front page of The Houston Chronicle the following day, a headline proclaimed, “Free at Last: A New Dawn for South Africa.”
Almost 30 years later, South Africa’s dawn has grown into a cloudy day. Time has proved that universal suffrage alone cannot guarantee peace and prosperity. President Mandela inherited massive socio-economic problems along with a huge underclass that for generations had been deprived of good education, decent housing, and opportunities for middle class jobs. Since then, the problems have only deepened and multiplied with successive presidents. Corruption has flourished in the new South Africa — the last president, Jacob Zuma, now faces 16 counts of racketeering, corruption, fraud, tax evasion and money laundering — and the rainbow nation is all but bankrupt. Some white people are quick to argue that the problems began as soon as Black citizens were given the vote. I believe the opposite: that the real problem came from denying Black people and others of color a stake in the system for so long.
Meanwhile, Texas has proved that while it may have cheered democracy abroad back in 1994, it is far less enthusiastic about it flourishing at home in 2022. In the year since the last American election, Texas has tightened its voting laws in a brazen ploy to keep Black and brown people from polling stations. Eighteen other states have done the same. At last, I have to recognize what I should have known all along: Apartheid has always had deep roots in America; they were just buried deeper than I cared to look. Now, the America that successfully pressured my country of birth into giving everyone the vote has itself begun to chip away at that fundamental right, one state at a time.
But something else is afoot. Something not as big as the state of Texas nor as seismic as the end of apartheid. Maybe it is no more than a solitary firefly in a somber landscape, but I see it as a spark ready to spread to parched places across America. It comes in the form of a slight, Asian-American woman. She is the new mayor of Boston, my city, where for generations the choice for mayor was between a white Irish man and a white Italian man. Her victory is nothing short of a sea change. Michelle Wu is the first female, the first progressive, the first person of color, the first millennial, and the first mother to be elected to the position. She rose out of a field of primary candidates that was itself remarkable: all six candidates were people of color, five of them women, and three of those were Black. For a few weeks it seemed that Boston was poised to join other major cities of America and vote into office a Black mayor. Instead, none of the Black candidates survived the primaries. The two women who made it through and went head-to-head in the general election were the ones with the lightest skins. As the results came in, it seemed that the lesson I had learned as a child in kindergarten was as valid here today as it was in South Africa half a century ago: those with the palest skins, rule.
When I chose to immigrate to Boston, I believed that (unlike South Africa) here all men and women really were equal, that character rather than connections was what counted, that hard work was rewarded regardless of one’s lineage, and that here, in this city on the edge of the sea, the tenet, “one person, one vote,” would always hold true. I know now how naïve I was, and yet still I am hopeful. Because if the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants can rise to become mayor of Boston — a city regarded as one of the most segregated in America, more divided than Birmingham, Alabama — surely big steps toward inclusiveness are possible elsewhere across America. I have to believe that the “whites-only democracy” I grew up with, and which I fear will rear up here, will remain buried in history, an ugly system last seen in South Africa, never to take hold anywhere again.
Jean Hey was a journalist in South Africa before immigrating to America. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Plain Dealer, The Chicago Tribune, Solstice Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books and The MacGuffin. She holds a dual-genre MFA in fiction and nonfiction from Bennington College where she won the Sven Birkerts award for nonfiction. She is at work on a collection of memoiristic essays about immigration and race.