Funny how one date on the calendar can carry both a crown and a ballot box.
1953: On 2 June 1953, Queen Elizabeth II was crowned at Westminster Abbey, and back then South Africa was very much caught up in it all. We were still a dominion in the Commonwealth, with the Queen as our head of state, so there were coronation medals handed out, church services and street parties from Cape Town to Pietersburg. It feels almost unimaginable now, picturing schoolchildren in Pretoria waving little flags for a queen across the sea. What gets me is the timing, because within just eight years we’d vote to become a republic and walk out of the Commonwealth, so this was really the closing scene of an old chapter most of us have half forgotten.
1999: Spin forward to 2 June 1999, and the country is at the polls for its second democratic election. Only five years after the wonder of 1994, the long queues formed all over again, and Thabo Mbeki stepped up to take the reins from Nelson Mandela. What strikes me most is how ordinary it had already become, that quiet, peaceful handover of power that so many nations never manage to pull off even once. People grumbled about the slow lines and the cold winter morning, and honestly that everyday moaning is the surest sign a democracy is bedding down. Mandela himself cast his vote and then stepped back, content to let the next man lead.
From a borrowed crown in 1953 to a free vote of our own in 1999, the very same date quietly traces the whole long road of how we learned to govern ourselves.
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