LAST YEAR, while acting as an international election observer in Lesotho, I found myself in the company of American colleagues who were, I realized, members of what has become virtually the new international profession of election-observer and democracy-installer: they’d just “done” Kenya, following Namibia, Zambia, Angola, and Pakistan, and they had half a dozen Latin American elections under their belts too. I asked the leader of the U. S. team what preparations he was making to monitor the coming South African election. “Oh boy,” he groaned. “That’s the eight hundred-pound gorilla.”
This has, so far, proved an accurate assessment. At times it seems as if the election is a vast three-ring violent circus. Certainly, the country is awash with celebrities: film stars like Danny Glover, come to do “voter education” and pretending to a momentary neutrality prior to their photo-opportunity with Nelson Mandela; politicians whose ability to be neutral is even more suspect (Neil Kinnock heads a Labour Party team, for example); rock stars come to clean up on the South African circuit so long off-limits to them; and legions of old South African exiles who can’t bear not to be here for the crunch.
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