Remember buzz of Mandela-era Parly

The parliament of the Mandela era, from 1994 to 1999, was a markedly different space from the Parliament of today. Fresh air was being let into musty chambers where, for decades, laws had been hatched to enforce the grand scale theft of resources, justified in the name of white supremacism. With Mandela, a sense of expectation, newness and creativity infused the atmosphere.

Parliamentarians who served during Nelson Mandela’s single presidential term speak of a vivid sense of possibility. Mandela himself described it in his last address to Parliament as president on March 26 1999: “Personally I dare to say that moments in my life have been few and far between when I have sensed the excitement of change as in this august chamber.”

Change was the operative word. It started with simple things, like creating washrooms for female members of Parliament. Previously, the few toilets for women were marked “for wives of members”. Apart from race, the change in women’s representation in Parliament is the most compelling: it shot up from 2.7 percent to 25 percent after the 1994 election.

Today’s 42 percent representation was unthinkable before 1994, as was the possibility that the leader of the official opposition party could be young, black and a woman. But women like DA parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko who demand their autonomy, find themselves increasingly in the cross-hairs 19 years into democracy.

We see this in the moral panic about teen pregnancy and the so-called abuse of child support grants that has now been proved false.

We see it in the chants of “burn the bitch”, in the aspersions cast over rape victims and in the Sexual Offences Act that dissuades girls from bringing rape charges.

We see it in the physical assault of women for choosing their own clothes.

We see it in the way ANC MPs have used “body blows” against Mazibuko for not conforming to their prescripts for female bodies.

Professor of political science Amanda Gouws says the fact that women MPs no longer see themselves as activists but as professionals pursuing a career in Parliament has facilitated this shift towards attacking political opponents on the basis of their sex and gender.

In the mid-1990s, Parliament was abuzz because MPs still felt they were activists in moving the country away from apartheid and into democracy.

The Mandela-era Parliament was a construction site building the scaffolding of democracy. It passed about 500 laws and, doubling as the constitutional assembly, hammered out our 1996 constitution.

Today there is much cynicism about the “naivety” of that “honeymoon” period. As we come to understand the extent of the task, we berate ourselves for thinking we could be a “rainbow nation”, as the other father of our nation, Desmond Tutu, willed us to be.

Mandela is criticised for having been too hands-off as president, with Thabo Mbeki as deputy president doing most of the day-to-day running of state affairs.

It was also the time of the arms deal, our young democracy’s nemesis. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission conducted its hearings at the time, just to have its recommendations discarded, and with them the elusive task of remembering in order to forge a different future.

While “rainbowism” deserves criticism for being long on feel-good value and short on redress, our newfound “realism” has sapped our country of the energy and the courage the Mandela era overflowed with.

Let’s allow ourselves to remember what Mandela imagined for us.

He is the symbol of that collective hope in the afterglow of the first democratic election when we voted for a “new South Africa” (another term that has since fallen into disuse).

In Mandela’s first address to Parliament as president, on May 24, 1994, he referred to the “glorious vision” of Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker, saying “she instructs that our endeavours must be about the liberation of the woman, the emancipation of the man and the liberty of the child.

“It is these things that we must achieve to give meaning to our presence in this chamber and to give purpose to our occupancy of the seat of government. And so we must, constrained by and yet regardless of the accumulated effect of our historical burdens, seize the time to define for ourselves what we want to make of our shared destiny.”

As the end of Mandela’s life looms, we should recall his last address to Parliament in which he cautioned against developing a cult of personality around him instead of accepting responsibility as citizens.

“I have noted, with deep gratitude, the generous praise that has often been given to me as an individual. But let me state this: To the extent that I have been able to achieve anything, I know that this is because I am the product of the people of South Africa.”

He emphasised three aspects that form a leitmotif in his leadership: the accountability of leaders to citizens, the fact that we are all leaders in our own right, and the primacy of unity.

Leaders “are the voices of the good men and women who exist in all communities and all parties, and who define themselves as leaders by their capacity to identify the issues that unite us as a nation”.

He reminded us that, “together, we must continue our efforts to turn our hopes into reality. The long walk continues”.

* Christi van der Westhuizen is a journalist and an author. This monthly column series is made available by the Open Society Foundation for South Africa to monitor the health of our democracy.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.

The Star