A Painless Past, A Confusing Present
My earliest memories of political happenings are filled with abject terror. “The Communists are coming!” the adults screamed. Who these Communists were, and why exactly we needed to fear them was a mystery to me. But I was terrified nonetheless. I remember a couple of friends and I built a shack in a nearby forest and hoarding bread crusts, biltong and peanuts for weeks. We eventually grew bored of waiting for the Communists, and scoffed our provisions.
Sixteen years and a bit of education later, those years seem so preposterous. The feared Communists, for whom we waited in vain, were the African National Congress. They were making door-to-door visits in our area, which was an IFP bastion, and so in an effort to secure our votes, the IFP ran a very successful propaganda campaign against the ANC. So successful was their propaganda, that they have never lost the majority vote in that part of KZN.
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