JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Watching the birth of a new South Africa through the wonder-struck eyes of its citizens calls to mind Thanksgiving in the USA.
For one day, just about everybody does one same thing.
On Wednesday in South Africa, it was voting. Citizens of all races and heritage turned out for their country's first democratic election.
They eagerly descended on more than 10,000 polling places in numbers that clearly astonished election officials, bewildered the outgoing apartheid government and shocked international observers.
Lines to the ballot boxes looped back and forth - some more than a mile long. Waiting time stretched to eight hours and more.
Sun beat down or rain poured. Babies cried. Feet swelled. People squatted. Some ate. Some read books. Others made new friends.
But nobody left before making their mark in South African history.
Most were voting for the first time in their lives. It was like a festival, but the main event was in private.
"My feet are cold and I'm unhappy about this bad organization," says Nduna Vuyano, 22, waiting in driving rain in Cape Flats, a shantytown near Cape Town. "But it's a blessed day."
In garbage-strewn Alexandra, a black township of rutted streets and tin houses, people arrived at 4 a.m. and were waiting patiently at noon.
Down the street in glittering Sandton, the Beverly Hills of Johannesburg, whites who arrived before 7 a.m. finally voted at 12: 30 p.m.
People were caught looking around at a rainbow of faces they were seeing for the first time. Most couldn't help but laugh when asked about the significance of the vote.
A new flag replaced the apartheid-tainted banner at midnight. A new constitution is in effect. A new coalition government will be selected when results of the polling are announced this weekend.
"I'm elated," says police Sgt. Theo Bronkhorst. "Being a young, white progressive South African, I've lived too long with the guilt of apartheid and fellow South Africans not going to the polls."
But Gretta Mvubu, a Zulu-speaking mother of six, captures the essence of voter sentiments in Sandton with one simple sentence: "Life has already changed because we're standing in a queue with whites."
The only smudge on the day: a car bomb blast at Jan Smuts International Airport, injuring 18. Hours later, 31 white supremacists were arrested.
Mostly, it was a day for patience while election officials coped with too few ballots, incomplete ballots, ballot boxes stuffed to overflowing, faulty or missing security equipment and other mishaps.
One notable held up by late-arriving ballots was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who turned up in his purple robes to vote at Gugulethu, another township near Cape Town.
"I'm a township urchin and I wanted to vote in the township," says Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for opposition to apartheid. "It is the people who live in these circumstances whose lives liberation is going to change."
The lines exposed another lesson of apartheid. The government had bad numbers on how many South Africans there actually may be.
On Tuesday, election officials opened three days of voting with 80 million ballots for a country with 22 million eligible voters. The extras were supposed to cover spoiled ballots or misplaced shipments. By mid-afternoon Wednesday, officials had to order nearly 10 million more.
Trying to explain the long wait, election Judge Johann Kriegler said diplomatically: "We, like everybody else, grossly underestimated the population of this country."
The last census was conducted from airplanes. The government estimated the number of residents according to the number of houses. That count in 1991 put the population close to 41.6 million.
Such a method underestimated population count in a place like Katlehong, a local black township with 28,000 houses - not counting squatter shacks - for 500,000 people.
And the population grew by three in the black township of Alexandra: The first babies born on the first day of the new South Africa were boys named Freedom and Happiness, and a girl named Thankful.
All those emotions erupted from the words of 70-year-old Nimrod Tubane as he left the poll: "It just struck me how simple something as important as voting really is."
