Voting ritual sacred and profane

On municipal election day 15 years ago, in March 2006, I was working in a village in Lusikisiki in the old Transkei. I had been visiting periodically for two years by then, and most villagers knew me by name or by sight.

That morning, when I greeted the young man who worked with me, he looked at me askance, the wariness in his eyes unmasked. “Where will you vote?” he asked. “My ward is in Johannesburg,” I replied. “I will not be able to vote.” He said nothing, his disapproval obvious. As we made our way along the village paths, an old woman stopped to greet me. “Where will you vote?” she asked. Then another person stopped me, and then another, each with the same question on their lips. Before long I was feeling horribly uncomfortable.

Until then, my presence had come to mean many things. A rumour had circulated that I was the secret owner of the most successful spaza shop in the village. Another had it that I wished to acquire land from the chief to build holiday cottages. Others insisted that I was who I said I was, a researcher on a thin budget.

But now, on election day, something new and unpleasant divided me from the villagers. I was white and I was not voting. They were black. To be black at that time and place was to vote. And to vote was to vote ANC.

So many things divided the villagers. Young versus old, shopkeeper versus shopkeeper, those east of the river versus those west. So much energy was consumed by talk of who wished to harm whom. But on this day, such differences were suspended. Everyone was black. Everyone stood in a line outside the local school. And everyone crossed the box next to the letters ANC. An aroma of sacredness was in the air. A civic religion was at work.

Fifteen years later, I am thousands of kilometres away and will not bear witness to voting day. But, over the last week, I have made a point of phoning the villagers with whom I am still in touch to canvass their thoughts.

In some ways, nothing has changed. To vote is still to vote ANC: in 2006, the governing party won every ward in the district; a decade later, in 2016, it won 31 out of 32 wards. This year it will almost certainly come close to sweeping the board once more.

But look a little closer and everything has changed. It isn ’ t possible to measure voter turnout yet, but it seems likely that it will have more than halved compared to 2006. Were I to walk the village paths on November 1, I doubt whether anyone would look at me askance and ask where I am voting. The majority will not be voting themselves.

Yet it would be wrong to say that the village is indifferent to the election. The stakes are, in fact, high. “November 1 is irrelevant,” one of the villagers I spoke to on the phone told me.

“The important day was when the ANC drew up its list of candidates. On that day it was decided whether the new road crosses the river and goes up the eastern slope. The businesses on the western side have the candidate in their pocket and so the road will not go up the eastern side.”

Politics still counts for everything; anyone who owns a village business must get involved in the ANC; to fail to do so is to risk losing out to one’s rivals. One wins, not just by cutting profit margins or getting better deals from wholesalers, but by bargaining with those who exercise political power.

In fact, local politics probably matters more now than it did in 2006. But the sacredness of it is long gone. It is a grubby business, its enchantment confined to the memories of those growing old.