I was in Johannesburg yesterday with some friends, shopping for a computer to replace the one that got stolen back in October. It was the Day of Reconciliation, a national holiday borne out of two rival holidays, one for Afrikaners and another for Zulus. As this New York Times piece Holiday of White Conquest Persists in South Africa describes, "Afrikaners, the descendants of white settlers, celebrated the Day of the Vow, a covenant said to be made between their ancestors and God in 1838 that led to the slaughter of 3,000 Zulus. Blacks commemorated the same day on the calendar, marking the start of armed struggle against the apartheid regime by the African National Congress in 1961."
The holiday was renamed in 1994 and is now meant to be "a time for all races to come together in the spirit of national unity."
Want to know where they come together? The same place we do in the ol' U.S. of A: the shopping mall.
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