Democracy Scenes

I STOOD in a queue that was much shorter than I expected. It was a late afternoon in the Autumn of 2006 and the musty smell from the dust of learners shoes filled the school hall filled with sleepy, blue shirt-wearing officials idling after a long dull day.
After much nagging and soap box preaching, I had managed to drag a total of one family member, my older brother, along with me to exercise my democratic right to vote for the first time.

It was a municipal election, which for some reason translates into much fewer votes. It seems that many people don’t value participating in democracy in their immediate environment as much as at a provincial or national level.
When looking back at that moment, which was barely a month after I turned 18, I still wonder why I really voted. Was it out of novelty or did I really want to make a change? I’d like to think the latter.

Fast-forward three years and I am running around like a headless chicken at a polling station at 6am looking for the infamous and now late Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. It’s the nation’s fourth national democratic elections. This time, I’m on the other end of a stick… I am attempting to cover the elections for a newspaper. It’s a very different picture to the sleepy scene of three years prior with its early morning queue that snaked across a brown, mowed field in one of Durban’s dodgiest neighbourhoods, Albert Park.
As Tshabalala-Msimang cuts across the queue, the crowd ululates and give her way to the front of the queue. Journalists crowd her, jostling for quotes and pictures. Minutes later, the same voters tell me they feel left behind and forgotten by politicians. I’m immediately struck by my failure to fathom the contradiction of voters’ behaviour. The conservative nature of Durban citizens rears its ugly head as they fail to question their leaders at the most poignant of times.

And now I stand at my own turning point. I’m back at school, well cadet school, and I am learning that I need to unlearn many bad habits picked up while previously reporting. I am standing in the middle of a very different scene, upon the instructions of my Training Editor. I am at a bookshop launch at the offices of IDASA (Institution for Democracy in South Africa) in Cape Town. It feels like a rather high-browed event; filled with society’s suit-wearing, cream of the crop; hobnobbing around glasses of wine and plates of cheese puffs and sausage rolls; discussing politics and books in an English I don’t understand. I am struck by the contrasting pictures of my experiences of democracy. Where are the bergies who should be eating this food? Where are the people that need to be reminded about practicing democracy at awareness campaigns like these? Will they be willing to pay for a thick new book filled with more statistics and complicated academic language? I highly doubt it.

Through the scenes of democracy in my life; seeing empty polling stations in the suburbs, the effects of party propaganda, confused voters, mixed messages and the elite nature of democracy awareness initiatives; all lead me to believe that this is just not working. For democracy awareness to work, I believe that it shouldn’t only happen every five years. It needs to be more accessible and easier to understand.