Dear Madiba
April 27, 1994. It seems like yesterday. I held my daughter Aura, then just one week away from her first birthday, close to me as I carefully placed my "X" on the national ballot paper. Then, placing the pencil between her tiny fingers, I drew my "X" on the provincial list.
I must confess... I cried. I was overwhelmed by the emotion of the moment. When I left the land of my birth in 1986 at the height of the state of emergency, I did so with an overwhelming sense of dejection, of frustration, of despair. To be standing in that polling booth at that moment eight years later, finally a citizen of my country, able to look around me and see neither friends nor enemies but only fellow South Africans... it was a miracle.
Unlike most of my fellow South Africans, I have been fortunate enough to have travelled quite widely after our re-entry into the family of nations. I'm going to share with you a few mental snapshots of those visits.
1994, London, England: Journalists at the Mirror point out that South Africa now has a freer press than the UK.
1994, Stockholm, Sweden: My hosts sing our praises for being the first country to work towards enshrining gay rights in our constitution.
1994, Denver, Colorado, US: Printing software giants Quark donate 10% of their South African revenues to the Independent Newspapers School of Journalism.
1995, London, England: Following our Rugby World Cup win, our trouncing of England at cricket and our taking of the African Nations Cup in soccer, my UK colleagues ask whether there is anything that we cannot do well.
1996, Washington DC, US: Don Graham, publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, notes (somewhat wistfully) that Nelson Mandela is the only truly impressive leader left in today's world. "We haven't had someone of that stature since Franklin Roosevelt," he tells me. Later on in the day, we meet senior officials of the International Monetary Fund. "What," I ask them, "could South Africa be doing better in terms of fiscal or monetary policy?" "Nothing," comes the reply. This is followed by an outpouring of praise for our finance ministry's attempts to balance the demands of redistribution with fiscal discipline.
1997, Nairobi, Kenya: Babafemi Ojudo, managing editor of The News, Nigeria, tells me, "If Mr Mandela were to stand for election in my country, he would win hands down." A colleague from Ghana concurs, as does another from Kenya. "Why?" I ask. "Because you have given us hope," comes the reply.
1998, Dusseldorf, Germany: I stand with an international group of journalists watching President Nelson Mandela tell the American people on CNN how he would not dream of interfering in US politics — and then proceeds to do just that with tact and style. "That," says a colleague from Korea, "is true statesmanship."
1998, San Francisco, California, US: I stand outside the port where a group of African Americans study the statue of Gandhi overlooking the Bay Bridge. They are talking about his influence on Martin Luther King Jr. I tell them clumsily what Sbu Ndebele has since told me gracefully: "India gave us a Gandhi, we gave India a Mahatma."
1999, Jaffna, Sri Lanka: I stand amid the devastation on the northern tip of this island where thousands of years of culture have been bombed to the brink of extinction by a war the world has forgotten. One of the first places to be rebuilt after the bombing stopped is the bookstore. It is named for Nelson Mandela.
There's a thread running through all of this that I'm having difficulty articulating. You've had lots of people telling you what's gone wrong in the five years that have passed since that day. You've heard about the crime, you've heard about the loss of jobs, you've heard about the fall of the rand, you've heard about people fleeing the country. Those things affect me, too.
But I also know I've travelled the world these past five years carrying my South African passport as a badge of honour. There are things that we have done well, and the world recognises this. And these things have come about largely because of one man.
Like you, I will be voting this Wednesday. I do so with optimism. You have defined the standard by which a new generation of leaders across the continent will be judged — a standard that puts South Africa and Africa before party politics. If they live up to it, we will do well.