June 24, 1995: Why it matters 30 years later
Nostalgia? A wasted moment? Or a day to be embraced and celebrated
Do you remember where you were on June 24 30 years ago?
Of course you do. It was a day of belief, disbelief and relief, glory and wonder, anxiety and calm, luck and destiny all mixed into a discombobulated watershed moment when South Africa told itself that maybe, just maybe, the country was going to be okay.
Like many watershed moments it didn’t bring the future it promised, namely the healing of a fractured, unequal and uncertain nation, but on that day in 1995, South Africa was the Rainbow Nation, all the colours bleeding into one, hope springing eternal, a future so bright we would need to wear shades. I remember magic of June 24 – the Madiba Magic, that is. It felt very real, tangible, more than just a catchphrase. It was the embodiment of what we wanted to be as a nation, the element we needed to take ourselves forward, to do away with the inescapable cycle of poverty, the evil of racism and the fear of revenge and doing the right thing.
On June 24, 1995, I was at the same place I am writing this column today – the Pirates Sports Club. I live 800 metres up the road in Parkhurst these days, a straight walk down Braeside Road, past the places that have stood the test of time on Fourth Avenue – the Jolly Roger, Bottega, Parkhurst Hardware and Espresso – the three ice cream shops, pouting influencers, the steam of vapers and the sad smile of the hat seller.
On Thursday morning, I saw a blindfolded woman in a yellow car guard jacket being taught how to use a cane to find her way along the pavement on Fourth. I do not think she was blind, but it was one of those Fourth Avenue moments that made me chuckle, stop and think. I wondered where she was on June 24. Was she even born? What did June 24 mean to her?
Which days does she look back on with fondness and nostalgia, days when it felt like things were going to change for the better, a lesson learnt, a foothold gained in life… what was her watershed day, or is it still to come? Perhaps I should have asked her, but that would have been a little weird.
I had little idea I would be where I am now, in a strange, uncertain purgatory of a place contemplating a life lived a little differently, the good and bad, the joy and fear, the truths and the lies. There are things I said too often and too many things left unsaid. Love was found and lost. Most days I am both happy and sad. As actor Billy Bob Thornton said of his feelings for his late brother: “I have to really force myself to think that things are going to be OK in terms of worrying about my family, myself or one of my friends. … There’s a melancholy in me that never goes away. I’m 50 percent happy and 50 percent sad at any given moment.”
Melancholy is a motherf**ker. Professor Brian Treanor, professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, wrote in 2021: “Beyond simple contentment or despair, there’s a ‘melancholic joy’ in looking, clear-eyed, at our brutal, beautiful world.”
Is it, Treanor asks, a challenging time to be an optimist? “In his book C’était mieux avant! (‘It was better before!’), the French philosopher Michel Serres lauded the successes of science and reason while playfully mocking our tendency to view the past through the rose-tinted and selective lenses of nostalgia… The idea that the world is getting worse, he argued, is misguided, ‘not just a little wrong – wrong-wrong, flat-Earth wrong’.”
June 24 was a great day, but was the watershed moment wasted or has the Madiba Magic become part of South Africa’s DNA? David Walsh of The Sunday Times wrote in 2019: “Though it was the single greatest day in the history of rugby union, the 1995 Rugby World Cup final in Johannesburg was also the most seductive illusion the game had ever created.”
Another Times headline was more optimistic: “Rugby World Cup: South Africa hopes for a new Mandela moment, 24 years on.” When the South African Rugby Union were bidding for the 2023 World Cup, Jurie Roux, then the CEO, said: “The opportunity to recapture just some of the spirit of ’95 has been an obsession with us.”
It is a recurring theme. It may be nostalgia, but does that make the hope and the spirit of 1995 any less a moment that should inform and guide us? Is it wrong to have hope? Where would Springbok rugby and the Proteas be without 1995? Would we have had 2007, 2019, 2023 and 2025? Mandela. Habana. Kolisi. Bavuma. June 24 runs through them all.
Remember June 24. Embrace and celebrate it. Days like those don’t come around very often.
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