Mandela’s message a universal one

Arlene Getz for Reuters @ IOL (Africa) - On the day that Nelson Mandela was elected as South Africa's first black president, I drove across the fault lines of segregated suburbia to watch his fellow citizens vote him into office.

In the mixed-race “Malay Quarter” in central Cape Town - named for the residents descended from the Malaysian and Indonesian slaves brought to the city in the 17th and 18th centuries - joyous residents thronged the streets outside the polling stations.  

In the affluent Atlantic seaboard suburb of Camps Bay, uniformed maids cheerfully made space so their white “madams” could wait with them in the long lines. And in a white blue-collar, mostly Afrikaner suburb on the edge of Table Bay, the queues moved quickest of all as the white group that implemented apartheid voted itself out of power with a grim - and ironic - efficiency.  Read more.