Birth: The Conspiracy to Stop the ’94 Election by Peter Harris

Description

In the early 1990s South Africa was repetitively rocked by violent incidents that often threatened to derail the delicate peace process and negotiations for a new state. Among these was a right-wing conspiracy to ruin the 1994 election by staging a coup d’etat from the northwest of the country, aided by mutinous elements in the SA Defence Force. Harris relates grippingly how some of the biggest bombs in the country’s history were exploded in the then Transvaal, and, with moving sympathy, the desperate plight of the right-wingers in their pitiful invasion of the then homeland of Bophuthatswana.

But the biggest drama was perhaps the attempt to break into the electronic counting system of the election, for whose supervision Harris was responsible. Harris has one at the edge of one’s seat as he tells of the drama behind the scenes, eleventh-hour meetings with Mandela and de Klerk, the plans to make the results flow again, and of how closely the country steered away from disaster and ended giving itself a miracle result.