Meditation

Winds of change

On a cool and cloudy evening in the late Baltic summer of 1989, a northern wind was blowing. Protesting the Soviet occupation of formerly sovereign lands, two million people peacefully joined hands on 23 August to form the Baltic Way to independence. Flowing unbroken for 675 kilometres through the capital cities of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, this human chain occurred as part of a Singing Revolution that had been shaped by a series of environmental protests (Darst, 2001). Baltic insurrection generated rapid social change. Alongside its sister states, the Republic of Latvia regained its independence in 1991, enabling Latvians to embark upon a massive project of national reconstruction.

An equally powerful wind was blowing at the southern tip of Africa. Less than two weeks after Latvians participated in the Baltic Way, South Africans converged in Cape Town on 2 September 1989. Demanding an end to White supremacist rule, thousands of activists took to the streets in a peaceful demonstration of civil disobedience that soon became known as the Purple Rain Protest (Smuts and Westcott, 1991). The police sprayed a volley of purple water onto protestors to mark people for arrest, and so the following day, graffiti sprung up around Cape Town stating ‘The Purple Shall Govern’. In less than a year, South Africa began transitioning to multiracial democracy, with the anti-apartheid movement’s revolutionary leader, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, assuming the presidency in 1994 (Kök Arslan and Turhan, 2016).

The state apparatus was powerless to halt these winds of change. The final Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, had opened the door to democracy by embarking upon perestroika in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, but his plan to reform the Soviet Union was overwhelmed by populist demands for more revolutionary change (MacKinnon, 2008).