Going to bed last night on the eve of Zimbabwe’s 2008 Harmonised Election, I sent a text message to a friend of mine: How often does a dictator concede power in an election?

I woke up this morning to his reply – Rarely. This election is just one of many phases. But as he said, it is also a part of the thrill, the rush of being on that white water and hearing the thunder roaring in the distance.

So despite my better judgement, I’ve suspended my cynicism for the day, and I’ve been enjoying the rush of looking at polling stations, watching groups of people walking down the road and being certain that they’re all on their way to the same place – the polling station nearest them. On my bike this morning, I was relieved to see that the voting queues in the Avenues were longer than the bread queues. Or the ATM queues.

And I’m not the only one caught up in this sense of excitement. I watched a group of teenaged boys jump out the car in their bare feet, untie a Simba Makoni flyer from a tree on the side of the road, and smile victoriously as he ran back down to the car waving his prize in the air. I got a text message from a friend of mine at 6:30. She was already at her polling station, she told me, and there were about 200 people there. Ten minutes later I heard from someone else on the other side of town – a hundred people at his polling station, complete with deck chairs, flasks, a festive picnic atmosphere. Surreal he told me.

And in a way he’s entirely right. There is such spectacle, such drama and performance associated with the process through which we choose the people to represent us. The songs and the rallies, the t-shirts and the posters. All whips up to this tremendous sense of excitement and anticipation and What If notions of possibility and hope. That sense that maybe, just maybe, this one day will make all the difference.

Of course, it’s not all smooth sailing. I found a voter education flyer on the side of the road this morning, spelling out just how complicated the process of voting for four different offices – and putting these papers into four different ballot boxes – can be. Apparently at one polling station in a low-density suburb of Bulawayo, it took them 45 minutes to process 13 voters. In Harare, one foreign-born citizen was turned away from the polling station and told he had to go get the paperwork proving that he had renounced his foreign citizenship before he could vote.

But there’s a sense of purpose today, a vibe, an anticipation and smell of promise that Some Thing might just happen.

This entry was posted on March 29th, 2008 at 11:56 am by Amanda Atwood and is filed under Elections 2008, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.