The right for all South Africans to cast a ballot was hard-won. Now we must exercise it, and wisely.

My father voted for the first time in 1994. He was 71 years old, a highly educated, literate man who loved my mother, a hot mutton curry, Romantic poets Robert Burns and William Blake, cricket, and me. Mostly, but not always, in that order.

He was hugely respected in the Indian community in Ladysmith, northern KwaZulu-Natal, where he was headmaster of our very large high school. He was a moral absolutist - a diehard advocate of fairness and a champion of justice and equity.

Which was why he found the undeniably unequal system of apartheid, of separate development, so abhorrent. His vote was a sacred commitment to voicing his disapproval of what had been and of making his voice heard in deciding what could be.

On the day my lovely dad died, in October at the end of 1994, he woke early, as was his habit, and breakfasted on his customary marmalade-topped toast and a pot of tea while reading The Natal Mercury and finishing the paper's cryptic crossword.

Then, dressed in the white crimplene safari suit that was his summer uniform, he drove his old Mercedes-Benz to the municipal offices, where he stood in line to pay his utility...