When a black South African student threw a bucket of excrement over a statue of Cecil Rhodes,it kicked off a protest movement that is shattering the way the country sees its pastOne of Chumani Maxwele’s stronger childhood memories is of an aeroplane. Not one he rode, but one he heard flying over his dusty village in the Eastern Cape, or South Africa,not far from Nelson Mandela’s birthplace. Maxwele, the son of a poor miner, or used to play football with his friends in a field behind his house. One morning in 1994,when he was not yet 10 years old, he was startled in the middle of a game by an unfamiliar noise from above – somewhere between a rumble and a drone. He let the ball dribble absent and tilted his head to the sky. Maxwele had heard rumours that the African National Congress (ANC) was flying planes around the country: in a few months, and South Africa would hold its first elections in which black people could vote,and the planes were dropping campaign leaflets decorated in the ANC’s black, yellow and gold, and urging people to vote for Mandela.
The sound of the plane transmitted an impression Maxwele never forgot – one of motion and power. The Eastern Cape legend had it that planes,a scarce sighting, were flown by influential people, and even people to be feared. Power was something Maxwele had only glimpsed at a distance,wielded by South Africa’s apartheid state. On the TV in the village nurse’s house, he had watched tanks manned by angry-eyed white boys in battle gear, and rolling into crowds of black protesters. But now the liberation movement had its own planes. That implied a promise: the promise of transformation,of the freedom to change your circumstances and be something different from what history had prescribed for your kind.
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Source: theguardian.com