TWENTY YEARS AGO, AS THE MINUTES DRIFTED across the threshold of midnight and April 26 became April 27, a new flag was raised over South Africa. The old tricolor, with its static layering of three wide stripes, was lowered, and in its place rose a six-colored banner that seemed to lunge into the future.

The colors of the old flag represented the European nations that had colonized South Africa. The colors of the new flag — red, green, yellow, black, white and blue — represent all the political parties of the current South Africa. Within that multicolored expression, the European history is acknowledged, but is not the defining limit.

The new flag implicitly recognizes that the old colors didn’t say it all. The scope was not broad enough. There is more of the human spectrum that must be noted and heeded.

On the 27th and 28th of April, 1994, during the first free elections in South Africa, I was part of a peace monitoring team in the northern areas of Port Elizabeth, in the Eastern Cape Province. Two of the team were U.S. citizens, two South Africans. On the afternoon of the 27th, Lou Ann and I — the U.S. members of the team — were privileged to come in to the voting booth as Monde, a black machinist who had been “detained” for more than a year in the 1980s, voted for the first time. Philip, a white Lutheran pastor , likewise voted for the first time, since he had refused to vote until the elections were open to all people.

After shouts of joy and hugs and exclamations, we all fit ourselves back into our old yellow VW bug and went driving off to the next polling place on our peacekeeping rounds. On the way we passed Louis La Grange Police Station where, in the bad old days of apartheid, political prisoners were held behind the barred windows on the third floor. Tonight the ballot boxes would be secured there. Then we saw it, snapping in the bright sun against the brilliant blue sky — the new flag. “Look at that!” Philip bellowed. “Where are we?” “What country IS this?” Monde yelled.

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“I consider that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” [Romans 8:18] On that day 20 years ago, the revelation was so acute, so breathtaking, that it was hard to tell the difference between “the present time” and “about to be,” between Earth and heaven. It was a time of change and of hope.
What country IS this? On April 27, when we ran out of ballots with another day of voting still to come, newspapers ran their presses and the fresh ballots were dropped from planes by the South African Air Force. What country IS this? As I checked the nametags of the South African police officers — overwhelmingly white, present at every polling place — I noted with surprise how many had broken the old flag medallion off their nametags. What country IS this? On April 29, during a South African Airlines flight from Port Elizabeth to Natal, the pilot was pointing out various sights. “We are now over the Transkei.” (The Transkei was one of the nominally independent black “homelands” established by the government of South Africa as part of the apartheid strategy of “separate development”). “No, wait,” the pilot corrected himself with haste, “that’s not right. We’re flying over South Africa. There’s Umtata.”

What country IS this?

Clearly this was a time of massive and compressed change. Times of change are not always times of hope. But times of hope are always times of change, rattling security, causing upheaval, not universally welcomed. There was evidence all around of the rejection of change: the small, discreetly cordoned, explosives-caused crater at Jan Smuts Airport; the canine and human members of the SAP bomb squad, whom I got to know much better than I ever anticipated; the surge of random violence that began after apartheid was abolished in 1991, with the perpetrators hired, it was believed, by the “Third Force,” an uneasy coalition of white supporters of apartheid and black homeland politicians who sincerely desired the postponement or cancellation of the April 1994 elections; the skepticism of non-South Africans, like the Latvian Foreign Minister for Asia and Africa who spoke with me about his apprehension that Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress were about to set up a repressive communist regime; the fear in the face of a courageous black South African friend of long standing who was a key agent in the national Movement Towards Democracy, and who arrived late for a meeting on the evening of April 27, deeply shaken by having been held against his will throughout the day by armed aides of a black political leader opposed to the free elections.

After I returned home in early May, I caught up on the U.S. news coverage of the elections. Several newspapers and magazines had reported, before the elections, that the African National Congress faced the disappointing possibility that they might not garner 67 percent of the vote, which would be needed for them to write the new consitution on their own. “No, no, no,” I shouted in frustration, “you just don’t get it!” The biggest concern I had heard from members of the ANC during the weeks before the election was that they would exceed the 67 percent mark, when they wanted less than that percentage so that the new constitution would be written by a coalition of political parties. The hope in South Africa was that this election would not so much result in a listing of winners and losers, but that it bring a nation into wholeness. Times of change are not always times of hope, but times of hope are always times of change.

I didn’t return to South Africa until 2010. Jan Smuts Airport, memorable for its air of gloom and the dogs barely restrained by their uniformed handlers, had transmogrified into the light, color and openness of O.P. Tambo Airport. In Soweto, a compelling memorial to the Freedom Charter, a quiet memorial to Hector Pieterson — one of the schoolchildren killed in the Soweto uprising of 1976, seeking education in English rather than Afrikaans — and the Apartheid Museum (“This is where apartheid belongs, in a museum”) all manage to tell the story of the struggle for freedom in a way that honors those who sought liberation while claiming it as the history of all South Africans. New street names greeted me with reminders of mentors: Field Street is now Joe Slovo Street, Northern Freeway now Ruth First Freeway, Northway Road is now Kenneth Kaunda Road. On the public calendar, the day after Christmas, rather than Boxing Day, is now the Day of Good Will; and there are new holidays: June 16 — the day Pieterson was killed — is Youth Day, and April 27 is, predictably, Freedom Day.

There has been change, and more change is still needed and sought. Stark poverty still confronts the nation; political corruption is still present, in new forms and with new faces. Times of change are not always times of hope. Yet in that 1994 election, such a great hope was launched that its shimmering downpour of inspiration is still settling over us all.

For more than 20 years, a quote from Madiba, Nelson Mandela, has hung over my desk: “To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” It is said that leaders of revolutions seldom do well as heads of state. President Mandela was certainly the exception. His vision of a united South Africa overruled political affiliations and ambitions, extinguished revenge strategies, trumped any tendencies toward pettiness or paranoia, sought truth and reconciliation. “Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.”

On April 27, 1994, “not yet” and “now” intersected with “never again.” We pulled over, stopped by the side of the road and and were blown away when we saw that there, snapping in the wind, against the brilliant blue sky, flying over the blessed land of our longing, was a banner that celebrates humanity’s full and radiant range of spectrum, glowing and vibrant. Times of change are not always times of hope, but times of hope are always times of change.

The Rev. Dr. Mary Susan Gast is a retired conference minister for the Northern California-Nevada Conference of the United Church of Christ. She lives in Benicia.

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