One can almost feel the air of acceptance, and a reluctant astonishment, that hung over Nobel prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz when he wrote these lines:
"Ill at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic,
In the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of corruption . . .
I learned at last to say: this is my home, here, before the glowing coal of ocean sunsets . . .
In a great republic, moderately corrupt."
Born in 1911 in Lithuania, the Polish diplomat defected to the West in 1951 and became a professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley. His poem is almost an acknowledgment of the extraordinarily mundane that only poets can illuminate: that he is living in a normal country, "a great republic, moderately corrupt".
It strikes me that, in this 10th year of a democracy which so many people hoped and fought for and yet thought impossible to achieve, we too need to drink from the wine of astonishment that seems to have intoxicated Milosz.
We need to acknowledge where we are and how we live now. We need to acknowledge the achievement of an extraordinary thing called an ordinary democracy.
For we are in a country we once did not have the imagination to conjure. Though we all had intellectual constructs of a democratic SA, this great republic is not a place we could imagine.
Not that we hid guns under our beds and stockpiled food euro la Rian Malan and the right-wing doomsday prophets as election day loomed in 1994. But many of us, rushing to cast our first votes, were reminded that the forward march of a country is not easy. And an African country . . . Well, experts here and abroad were quick to point north. Cautionary tales abounded. Even before they entered government, the ANC's policy makers were urging caution - even at the heart of the most optimistic organisation in the world, the trajectory that we have travelled could not be imagined, only hoped for.
The people of SA were polarised. Race had for so long been at the heart of human interaction that a nonracial future seemed a dream too far. Bombs were going off days, even hours, before the first democratic elections. The civil service was so huge that any attempt to slash it was expected to cause an eruption. Apartheid debt was huge. The army was restless and its chiefs were clearly still loyal to the old regime. The masses expected houses, water, electricity, roads, jobs and hundreds of other demands to be met immediately.
But the present is a place my contemporaries and I cannot fathom simply because we dared not, could not, imagine it.
A year after that first democratic election the phrase "it was better under apartheid" was escaping many lips. Not only were many of our people ill at ease in the republic, but as memories of the tyranny faded they were starting to forget the jackboot they had lived under.
Our reality 10 years ago precluded any idea of the normal country we live in today.
That is an achievement that is impossible to quantify, to translate, to communicate, except to say: watch the sun rise on a crisp winter morning, witness your daughter being born and know the meaning of humility.
From that pre-1994 reality to this. You see, we never dared to believe in normal. Normal as in a country that is working, a bit. Normal as in a democracy, with spectacular failures sometimes. Normal as in there are joys and they come with angst and yet we get up in the morning and go to work, or we have a hope that we will indeed get jobs and make a future for ourselves and our children. Normal as in corruption exists in all democracies and will be exposed and yet not all of it will make it onto our front pages.
With a touch of exaggeration at the opening of parliament this year, President Thabo Mbeki said: "Since time immemorial, the overwhelming majority of our people had known nothing but despair. They knew this as an incontestable matter of fact that tomorrow would not be better than yesterday; it was also fixed and given that the following day would be worse. But then, April 27 1994 came and things changed radically and irrevocably for all South Africans."
Radical and irrevocable have led us to this: a normal republic, a good republic. If you forget the past and try to appreciate where we are now you are likely to be reminded of Mbeki's heartbreakingly beautiful words at the adoption of the constitution in May 1996 in Cape Town.
"This thing that we have done today, in this small corner of a great continent that has contributed so decisively to the evolution of humanity, says that Africa reaffirms that she is continuing her rise from the ashes."
What of our fractured past?
In these 10 years our past has become clear, written, pinned down. As we come out of our third democratic election, I am reading Jacques Pauw's book on apartheid's hit squads, Into the Heart of Darkness - I have had it for more than five years and could not read it until now. The Truth & Reconciliation Commission has come and gone and its volumes are closed. The past is becoming old men's memories. History books are churned out and will one day fire up our children's imaginations.
We have not put the past to rest yet, but we are tying up loose ends . And as we do that, South Africans are more concerned about the future than about retribution and all the other issues that came up before the 1994 election.
The future is two-pronged.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, fortunes were made by scenario planners consulting for anyone from Anglo American to the Central Intelligence Agency. They are still around and any FM reader who wants to find out what the scenarios for our country are will surely find them.
But here's what I think we should do to entrench the ordinary.
First, understand that it is not an easy battle. This country has become too used to the extraordinary. Nelson Mandela, peaceful transition, the adoration of the world, the 1995 rugby World Cup, the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, Desmond Tutu, the Boipatong massacre, a government of national unity under Mandela, an incredible economy driven by a freedom fighter . . .
Tell a South African that they are in danger of living in a normal country and they start panicking. They do not see the tourists invading them in Cape Town and think: we are becoming Spain's Costa Brava, we are becoming normal.
Mbeki has referred to how his government seeks to expand the "frontiers of freedom". For me it means entrenching the frontiers of all that makes us good - the continued return of our dignity through the constitution - so deeply that we take them for granted.
The search for freedom is the search for normality. Normality is equality and freedom and prosperity and human fulfilment so deep in the fabric of society that the foundation of all these is never thought about. It becomes who we are. It just is.
We are, to paraphrase T S Eliot, at ease here, among these beautiful, corrupt, earnest, ugly, intelligent people of ours. At ease, in our very own republic. And so it should be in 10 years, but no-one will tell you so today.
Even the best analysts in the world do not know how to predict normality inching up inexorably on you and your people.
- Malala is the editor of ThisDay.
