It's a hot day in Johannesburg, and Gay McDougall's thoughts turn to Sumter County, S.C., where she spent the summer of 1964 as a civil rights worker convincing rural blacks that the law was changing and they should register to vote. Now a Washington human- rights lawyer, McDougall is experiencing the same phenomenon a world away as South Africa's 31 million blacks prepare to cast ballots for the first time.
In dusty townships, remote villages and crowded shack settlements, hundreds ofAfrican-Americans -- many of them veterans of America's civil rights movement are helping black South Africans learn to vote. McDougall is one of five international members of the Independent Electoral Commission overseeing the election; others are advisers, election monitors or aid workers.
White Americans are helping, too, but South Africa, the last bastion of state sponsored racism against blacks and the last African country ruled by a small white minority, has attracted more black American interest, money and direct participation than any other foreign-policy issue. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People donated $50,000 to the African National Congress for election assistance; the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change is conducting voter- education seminars; traditionally black Howard University and Clark Atlanta University are among institutions sending observers.
Similar struggles. The antiapartheid fight in South Africa has paralleled America's civil rights movement for more than 80 years. The ANC was founded in 1912, three years after the NAACP. In the 1950s, both organizations drew on Mahatma Gandhi's teachings of nonviolent resistance. In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. said the U.S. civil rights movement had "a powerful sense of identification with those in the far more deadly struggle for freedom in South Africa." "Martin said Montgomery [Ala.] was the second-most- segregated city in the world. The first was Johannesburg," says Coretta Scott King, King's widow and the president of the Atlanta- based King Center.
Part of the allure of South Africa's liberation struggle for African-Americans is the relative clarity of the issues -- the right to vote, the principle of majority rule, the defeat of institutionalized racism. In the United States today, racism is often clouded by other concerns such as crime, drugs and more subtle forms of discrimination.
"Many have felt the issues were harder to get at in the U.S.," says Mark Quarterman, 34, a former development assistance worker who dropped out of law school in California this year to coordinate more than 200 American election observers in South Africa. "The continuation of de jure segregation in South Africa was a lightning rod. It was a way to channel anger and frustrations about racism in a positive way."
African-Americans have devoted less attention to other strife-torn African countries, which won their freedom from white colonial rulers 20 to 30 years ago but remain mired in tribal conflict, civil war, poverty, starvation and corruption. "Nigeria is too tribal and too complicated," says former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young. "We couldn't relate to famine in Ethiopia very well, either. But we know about black folks and white folks."
For all the similarities with the civil rights movement in the United States, there are important differences in South Africa. Blacks are a minority in the United States; in South Africa, the right to vote means the black majority will control the country's future. "They are living out the ultimate conclusion of social change, the achievement of state power, and we will never be able to achieve that in our situation," says Ronald Walters, a political science professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
Other contrasts are likely to become more apparent after the transfer of power. South Africa's new Constitution recognizes 11 official languages, and there are 10 black tribes and a "colored" population that often identifies with whites, not blacks. Without the common enemy of apartheid, ethnic and political divisions are bound to sharpen.
Black South Africans have generally welcomed support from the Americans. But not in all cases: Irked at the NAACP's financial aid to the rival ANC, Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi refused to meet in February with a visiting NAACP delegation.
Still, for McDougall and other activists the rewards far outweigh the setbacks. "For people in my age group who had any connection with the rural South and the civil rights movement, it's like coming full circle," she says. "And it's like having the chance to do it again with a hell of a lot more maturity and insight."
