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I walked up the long wide concrete driveway in the pale morning sun, stood in line and showed my ID to the lady at the table with the massive voter roll book in which my name had recently been inscribed. My dad drove me to the polls that day. I had said I wasn't going to bother. I just turned 18 and was now part of the roughly 15% of the population who under apartheid was legally permitted to vote. The election is a sham, I said. Why would I legitimize it when it is only for white people? My father sat down and looked me right in the eye. You really must vote, my boy, because you're actually voting for 10 black people. You're voting to tell the racist government that you are part of the growing number of whites who don't accept their regime. I'm Julian Walker and this is a conspirituality bonus episode dropping the day before our own gut wrenching election. I'm going to share my personal reflections on witnessing elections in three different countries between the ages of 18 and 22 and how that has in some ways shaped my worldview. I grew up under apartheid in South Africa and have lived in England and in the United States since fleeing that regime. The year I first got to vote was 1989. The ruling National Party had been in power in South Africa since 1948. The National Party was the architect and the enforcer of the political and legal framework that institutionalized the racist apartheid regime in South Africa. Under this system, non whites had less civil and human rights than white people did. It was a caste system with whites at the top having all the rights and all the freedoms and all the power and all the wealth. Second came the Indians, descendants of indentured servants brought over from the country of India starting in 1860 to work as slave labor. That's one of the reasons why Gandhi got his start as a lawyer in South Africa. By the time I was growing up, Indians had become a merchant underclass because, unlike the groups beneath them, Indians were allowed to own land and businesses, but only within specific designated areas. Next came the coloreds. This was the official name for the mixed race descendants of raped African slaves in the Cape region where Europeans had first started colonizing in the 1600s. Coloreds had lost contact with their African culture and language. It had been taken from them. They spoke Afrikaans, the Dutch dialect of their oppressors, but with their own unique accent and slang. Some activists amongst them identified with the Creole people of the Caribbean and Louisiana due to their similar cultural and racial displacement and mixed heritage. Many were subject to brutal forced relocation because they inhabited prime beachside real estate coveted by white developers due to their partial white blood, coloreds were given some piecemeal participation in the electoral system. They had a separate voter roll and the ability to elect a small number of white representatives to speak on their behalf in parliament. And dead last in this racial hierarchy were black South Africans. No vote, no property rights, no ownership of businesses. Blacks were also required to carry a passbook. It's like show me your papers on demand that gave them permission to be in certain whites only areas only for the purpose of work. They were routinely stopped, arrested, brutalized by police who roamed white neighborhoods in yellow covered pickup trucks with room in the back for multiple detainees. Brave young black men wearing their most stylish clothing would be in white neighborhoods to visit their wives and girlfriends who worked as housekeepers and lived in the no frills concrete servants quarters that were built behind every house, even in the lower class white suburbs.
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