Thirty years ago, black South Africans voted for the first time as the country celebrated the monumental birth of democracy. As I write this, South Africa is bathed in warm winter sunlight and South Africans are free.
That day, April 27, 1994, changed the lives of everyone in the country. I was there. But I can only vaguely remember it.
However, I vividly remember the cost in lives that led to that victorious day, when what amounted to a proxy war, fueled by elements of the apartheid state, pitted ethnic groups against each other. Those who hoped the bloodshed would derail democratic negotiations conveniently called it Black-on-Black violence.
Four years passed between Nelson Mandela's release from prison and the first real elections. At that time, as the apartheid government slowly settled the terms of its dissolution with the political leaders it had long sought to suppress, 14,000 people died violently.
Many South Africans may have chosen to forget. Young people may just not know. But this is what I saw in the months before the vote.
Entire neighborhoods were abandoned as people fled their homes. Nameless corpses lay in the empty streets for hours before the morgue trucks would pick them up, displayed on dirt roads as a warning to all.
Nine days before the elections, the country was on fire. It was a final push between warring factions. The Inkatha Freedom Party – a powerful Zulus political and cultural movement – was preparing to boycott the elections, saying the new arrangement would give too little power to areas like KwaZulu, where it had ruled for a long time. The bodies piled up.
On that day, April 18, 1994, I was on Khumalo Street in Thokoza, a black township east of Johannesburg.
To my left lay Ken Oosterbroek, mortally wounded, while to my right Greg Marinovich clutched his chest and held on for dear life. Friends and fellow photographers who had devoted their careers to documenting the violent, dying consequences of apartheid lay dead and injured.
From 1990 to 1994, almost 700 people died in Thokoza, and hundreds on the same street. It was one of many. Today, a memorial on Khumalo Street bears the names of the dead, including Ken's.
When I visited the monument in late 2016, it served as a shelter for homeless people, who slept next to the inscribed marble wall. It has since been rehabilitated by former members of the Self-Defense Units, residents – mainly supporters of Mandela's African National Congress – who defended their communities against supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party.
Macdonald Mabizela, 48, who was then a teenage fighter and is now a caretaker, explained how they chased away the vagabonds, cleared the monument and rebuilt part of the perimeter wall that collapsed after someone crashed into it.
Nelson Mandela addressed the nation that evening, calling for calm and an end to the bloodshed – a presidential act before he became president. Shortly afterwards, the Inkatha Freedom Party announced that it would participate in the elections. The ballots were printed without a box for the party. Stickers were quickly added. It was clear evidence of how close South Africa had come to civil war.
South Africans voted, and it was a peaceful day, that much I remember. I documented it, and what should have been a life-changing experience was lost on me. I had just buried a friend, and another was recovering from three gunshot wounds. I tuned in at Katlehong, just a six-minute drive from where Ken was killed, sent my film back to the Associated Press office and sat next to Greg. Two days of voting passed in a blur, with me barely present.
South Africans will vote again this week, in a national election that is less predictable than any other since 1994. It is important in times like these to remember the past and honor those who paid the ultimate price when political figures made their way to power and democracy negotiated. .