At the entrance to the polling station, magistrate Moses Mtsweni voters a simple question in Zulu: "Fundile?" he says. ("Are you educated?") A weathered old man smiles shyly and shakes his head. Mtsweni points him to the slow line for illiterates. "Fundile?" he says to the next person, a middle-aged woman wearing bifocals. "Of course," she answers proudly, "I'm a nursing sister at the clinic, I read every day." Mtsweni waves her toward the fast lane.
Until recently Ndwedwe, a rural area about 40 miles north of Durban, was the scene of some of the worst violence in South Africa. "We've suffered quite a lot here," says Sizikele Goge, a mother of six. "My hope is that this voting will stop the violence and bring prosperity."
Throughout the rolling hillsides of Ndwedwe, calm prevailed for the first time this year. At schools, government offices and hospitals, hundreds stood in line in the midday sun waiting for their first chance to cast a ballot. "Ja, it's nice to see, isn't it?" said an Afrikaner police sergeant as he watched an elderly couple enter the polling station. "These people have waited so long for their chance to vote."
Like most rural areas in KwaZulu/Natal, Ndwedwe experienced numerous logistical problems, particularly during the first two days of voting. Most polling stations ran short of both ballot papers and the special Inkatha stickers affixed to each ballot after the party's last-minute entry into the elections. At every station, hundreds, sometimes thousands, showed up without the required identity documents. And at one polling station, voting ceased until the presiding officer borrowed four AA batteries from visiting journalists for the ultraviolet lamp used to check voters' hands.
Intimidation was rife but subtle. One old woman, who refused to give her name, was pushed to the polls in a wheelbarrow. She told U.S. News she had been told she would lose her KwaZulu government pension if she did not vote. At the Ndwedwe magistrate's court, the local warlord, a pistol visible under his shirt, entered the polling station on numerous occasions. "I've been at the wrong end of his gun before," said one official. "Who's going to stop him?"
Yet election officials and party monitors at most stations said voting was generally free and fair, particularly after an extra day was added to accommodate the thousands who needed temporary voter cards. But the calm will prevail only if the results are accepted by all sides, particularly Inkatha, which expressed reservations about the fairness of the vote after the first day. "Should [Inkatha leader] Chief [Mangosuthu] Buthelezi not be satisfied with the results," says one Ndwedwe resident, "the violence will start again, not only here but throughout Natal."
