Overture Balek a Uzoh aqwa!

(Escape Before You Are Injured!)

Low-hanging clouds shadowed Cape Towns at-topped colossus, known in English as Table Mountain and in isiXhosa as Umlindi Wemingizimu (Watcher of the South). Streams of fog swept its craggy slopes, wrapping the entire city below in misty ribbons. On the drive from the airport we slowed through brief whiteouts; one minute the view was clear, and in the next it was all pale oblivion. On our left, a stand of trees veiled the massive hillside monument to Cecil Rhodes, the sixth prime minister of the Cape Colony in the nineteenth century who envisioned the imposition of white rule across the continent from Cape Town to Cairo. This was a place that always inspired big dreams of radical change. For outsiders, mention of South Africa summoned up memories of the extreme form of racial segregation that held sway here for more than forty years, and also the stunning transition to one-personone-vote democracy in 1994. A decade later, in March of 2004, I had traveled to South Africa, in part to get a x on how the grand experiment in creating a dierent kind of society had worked out. The country, a land of ragged coastline and open savannas where humans rst emerged to stand upright on two legs more than two million years ago, was in the midst of

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a struggle to hang onto the vision of a nonracial, nonsexist, and egalitarian nation promised at its birth. The emerald waters of Table Bay came into view. If you squinted, you could make out Robben Island, a stark islet far oshore where generations of rebels like Nelson Mandela were once held. This glimpse was superimposed, naturally, over a palimpsest of images from newsreels, photographs, books, and lms Id seen that gave visitors a powerful, and sometimes misleading, sensation of knowing the place already. For my generation, South Africa had symbolized a modern moral fable. For millions of other people around the world, the mass global mobilization against the system of racial segregation known as apartheid had unfolded much like the international campaign to end slavery a century earlier. In demonstrations in the United States for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, students also had hoisted placards with Mandelas image and chanted, Free Mandela! because they believed there was an essential link between his freedom and theirs. Under apartheid (which means apartness in Afrikaans), ones identity was established chiey on the basis of skin color: you were European (white), Coloured (mixed race), Asian (Indian), or Native (black). The vast majority had been governed, for centuries, by the white minority. Now, at last, the natives were in charge. For ten years, the country had been governed by a three-sided coalition including the African National Congress (ANC), the continentals oldest political party; the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU); and the South African Communist Party (SACP). Political liberation hadnt led to material freedom yet, though. On this rst trip, I had brought along with me ten students from the university where I teach, and they were stunned by rst impressions. On the drive into Cape Town there were shacks along the highway for as far as we could see. Kids from informal settlements darted out from the side of the road to play chicken to the concrete median strip, where they watched

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luxury sedans whiz by. We passed, soon enough, into the parallel universe of a gorgeous tourist destination with a world-class convention center. Just o the last o-ramp into Cape Town, at Riebeek Street, there was an Alfa Romeo and Rolls-Royce dealership, where business was brisk. Up on Long Street, near the hostel where we would be staying, cafes and clubs overowed with people dressed in designer-label clothes. The image of Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandelas successor as president, was plastered on utility poles up and down the alleys and streets. Campaign posters for the ANC showed him dressed in a dark business suit, smiling shyly beneath the governing partys ubiquitous slogan: A Better Life for All. An unruly clutch of street kids wrapped in tattered blankets shouted in the background as more fortunate people were ordering skinny lattes and tramezzini. The kids latched onto us before we could nd our footing at the curb. Captain! Master! Baas! they cried, using the old Afrikaans word for white boss. Were hungry, Baas! It startled us to be implicated, right from the beginning, in the language of oppression. If you lost track of developments in South Africa around the time Mandela retired as head of state in 1999, its recent history seemed rather disappointing. When Mandela took oce, he was depicted as the indispensable leader, using his magic to inspire a miracle. If you paired the terms magic and Mandela in a Google search, you would nd a million hits. By contrast, the 154,000 entries for his successor, Thabo Mbeki, were stripped of any inference of magic. He was dubbed the enigmatic leader who had stabilized the national economy but also had sabotaged the countrys eort to control the spread of AIDS. President Mbeki was the chief architect of the postliberation transition, but his administration was swamped by two world historical forces that might have sunk even a more visionary leaderrapid economic globalization and an unprecedented sexually transmitted plague. South Africa was the only place on the globe where advanced capitalism, AIDS, and political freedom rushed through the door together.

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Could the idea of a rainbow people, creating a Rainbow Nation, survive the pressure?

H
On our third day in Cape Town, the students and I headed out to a demonstration, in a township outside the city, called by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). The group was the countrys largest and most successful civic organization, responsible for advocating on behalf of HIVpositive people. Leaders of TAC in Khayelitsha had called the protest to raise hell about the rape and killing of an activist who had disclosed that she was infected with HIV. Our guide, hired to show us around, initially balked at taking us to the township. You never know what these blacks will do, he told us. To us, he looked as dark as any African American, but in South African terms he was coloured, or of mixed race. It was our rst lesson in the tapestry of racial bigotry that extended far beyond divisions between blacks and whites. We arrived in Khayelitsha just as organizers from TAC were unveiling banners that read, Once a Killer Always a Killer / Keep Them Away from Our Community, No Bail for Murderers, REMEMBER LORNA, and JAIL THEM FOR LIFE. Within a half hour we had gathered a collection of stories from women who had been raped into AIDS and who together had successfully fought back against discrimination. Our guide stuck close to the car, though, looking quite uncomfortable. He regained his composure only when we left the black township and moved on to another settlement, Mitchells Plain, which under apartheid had been set aside for mixed-race people, or coloureds. This incident marked the start of a long education for us about ongoing ethnic tensions in the new South Africa. New black acquaintances back in Cape Town volunteered the opinion that coloureds or brown people were really closet whites. But this sort of tension between blacks and coloureds was only the beginning of the complications we

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encountered. There were eleven ocial languages in the country, nine of them distinguishing black groups. The archaic and anthropologically incorrect word tribe didnt help in guring out disparate identities, partly because of the long history of groups fusing together and breaking apart. The correct term, ethnic group, sounded rather at against the emotions threaded through intergroup bigotry. Leaders of the ANC often emphasized the dangers of tribalism and the importance of nonracialism. One of the signal successes of the liberation struggle had been bridging ethnic cleavages, which apartheid leaders had exploited in a strategy of divide-and-rule. As a white outsider, I had set out to avoid old tropes without closing my eyes to reality as it presented itself. The two most populous groups in the country were Zulu speakers and Xhosa speakers. Within days of our arrival we heard Xhosa speakers muttering about the ways Zulu-speaking blacks were intellectually inferior or especially prone to violence. Non-Xhosa speakers told us, in a similar tone of voice, that there was something suspicious about Xhosa speakers as a group; we were told they were clannish, money-grubbing, and far too clever for their own good. Our friends cited as Exhibit A the conspiratorial style of President Mbeki. Just a decade after its founding, inhabitants of the Rainbow Nation, including the young, seemed decidedly over the rainbow.

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I had set o to South Africa, in early 2004, in part because there was a mystery I had been trying to unravel in nearly three decades working as a journalist: how most people, most often, seemed so imprisoned by the past, while others managed to slip away from historys grasp. In dispatches I had led from places such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, and Argentinaas well as from the agricultural valleys and booming cities of my native CaliforniaI had covered mass social and political clashes for

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decades. Without planning it, over the years I had developed a pattern of moving in to investigate what happened in the aftermath of great social convulsions. Other journalists were better at covering wars or blazing conicts. I tended, instead, to turn up just when the pack of reporters moved on to the next big hot spot. In so many places, I had been drawn to witness the ways people stitched their societies together in the wake of horric traumas. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that I should eventually get so hooked on the postliberation story of South Africa. During the initial visit in 2004, I intended to stay a few weeks before heading o to the Congo. Every time I prepared to leave South Africa, though, something startling would happen. After spending long periods in the country during the next three years, I nally surrendered to the seduction of the place. On New Years Day in 2007, I put my furniture in storage, packed up my belongings in Chicago, and moved to Johannesburg for the year. By then, it seemed to me that the country was in the process of revealing something of its essence. At the close of that year, South Africas emerging democracy perched on the edge of a revolution within a revolution. By chance, I had the good fortune to be around when this new ght for freedom began. Along the way, I had the opportunity to travel with presidents and interview business and political leaders. The discipline I undertook, as reporting for the book proceeded, was to butt the vantage point of the emerging new elite up against that of working people and the poor, giving added emphasis to the voices of those less often heard. I underscored the experience of the young. The post-transition ANC now governs a country where nearly 40 percent of its people are less than eighteen years old; fully half the population is less than twenty-ve. During my travels around the country, a series of individual and group interviews involving hundreds of young South Africansthe children of liberation heroes as well as seamstresses, nurses, mechanics, schoolteachers, gangsters, and the unemployedshaped my understanding of future prospects for the country.

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Six key individuals helped me stitch the general narrative together: Ndaba Mandela, the grandson of the founding president of the country; Thuthukile Zuma, the daughter of President Jacob Zuma and Minister of Home Aairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma; Thomas Maree, son of the leader of the opposition, Helen Zille; as well as three others from more straitened backgroundsVunene Mabasa, from a remote town in Limpopo; Gwendoline Dube, who lives in a hardscrabble township south of Johannesburg; and Jonathan Persens, who lives by his wits in the alleys of Cape Town and sometimes sleeps on the lawns near the National Museum.

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On a sunny day a few months after I arrived in the country in 2004, I crossed the Grand Parade. It is the vast plaza on the west side of City Hall. A new friend, Gavin Jacobs, had agreed to show me around. He was a tall, lean, mischievous-looking man in his mid-thirties with golden skin and high cheekbones that gave him away as a typical Capetonian. Descended from indigenous San people and from blacks who arrived thousands of years after the San, Jacobs was classied under apartheid as coloured. We passed by the colonial-era City Hall, an Edwardian building dwarfed by more modern neighbors. To our right loomed the oddly majestic pentagonal Castle of Good Hope, built more than 350 years ago. The castle once served as a crude stone monument to would-be conquerors Dutch and Britishwho had long competed for control of the Capes rst military fort and, through it, dominion over the southern tip of Africa. I stood right here on the day Nelson Mandela was released, Jacobs said, stopping abruptly to mark the place.1 Twirling around, I located the tiny wrought-iron balcony that I had seen several times in video clips taken on February 1990, when Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and was shuttled by car to address the massive crowd here. There were tons, more people than Ive ever seen, before or since, Jacobs added. That image of Mandela, wiry and spry but looking dazed and clenching his

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st in a revolutionary salute, came back to me. Mandela had begun his speech with the cry Amandla! Iafrica! Mayibuye! and he called on South Africans to seize this moment so that the process towards democracy is rapid and uninterrupted.2 Craning his neck, Jacobs said that it was impossible to convey the force of emotion that had welled up from the people on that day. The impossibleMandelas releasesuddenly proved possible. The imprisoned hero was free, and it looked like the narrative arc of his life, from entombed martyr brought back to life, might be superimposed as the narrative of the nation, setting the pattern for similar, amazing transformative changes in the lives of his people. Jacobs squatted, then rose, bringing his palms up toward the sky. Class and racial divisions hadnt seemed to matter any longer on that day, he said. Everything petty and cruel in the culture seemed to vanishhe snapped his ngersjust like that. He had no memory of the violent clashes between the police and the crowd that had been reported in contemporaneous accounts on that day. It felt, to him and so many others, as if the slate of history had been wiped clean. South Africans could slip from the constraints of their own past and create something new. We stood for a few moments as if still being jostled by a vast crowd and reinvigorated by past hopes. As we walked on, Jacobs lled in the gaps in his own life from then to now. He hadnt had a steady job, not under white rule and not since the day of his supposed liberation; like most coloured and black young people he was unemployed in the supercompetitive global economy South Africa had rejoined after decades of explicit racial discrimination. He admitted that his memory of the period 19901994 was a little dim. Along with his friends, he had partied hard in drawn-out celebration of national liberation. Right around Freedom Day, that rst election day in 1994, Jacobs was infected with HIV during a night of carefree sex. Like one in six young South Africans, he now lived with the virus that led

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to AIDS. He was a slow progressor, which was good newsit meant he had not needed medication yetbut the virus was often at the back of his mind. Jacobs recently had signed up at a school for tour guides, because he gured that he might have a future in telling the story of national transformation he had witnessed rsthand. Then he had unked out of the program. Why had he failed in the program he had wanted so much to pass? Partly because he hated following anybody elses rules, he said. Like many of his contemporaries, Jacobs had been surrounded in early life by the spirit of rebellion as people rose up against the police, the law, and the state. He felt rather unsuited for building anything up, even if it was his own career. I just never can get traction, you know? he told me. On a brightening, sunny day, the kind that steals your heart in Cape Town, he looked a little broken. Registering my reaction, Jacobs laughed and launched into a ri about how South Africans always beat the odds. God, you have to love this country! he exclaimed. Theres nothing like it. An unemployed young man with HIV, he was still celebrating the miracle while heading across a bridge to a train that could take him anywhere if only he had the fare. Jacobs and I headed o on a day trip to Stellenbosch, a lovely, lush valley planted with wine grapes and the center of production for distinctive Pinotage. I had arranged to meet a colleague from Stellenbosch University, and afterward we hung around the picturesque town. On the way back to Cape Town, we crossed over from the large bubble of privilege back to the hard realities of the Cape Flats. He larded every story he told with loads of details about the history of protest against the old system. By the time we returned to the hostel in Cape Town, it was nearly dark. From the balcony we could see the harbor. Farther out ashed the turquoise sea. The sounds of hip-hop and kwaito, the countrys distinctive hybrid genre, rumbled down Long Street. A sound system in a passing car blasted the voices of a pair of singers, Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu, the white Zulu anthropologist and his black partner. They were singing, Baleka Uzohaqwa! (Escape before

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you are injured!)words from an eerie, searing ballad called Human Rainbow from their 1988 collection Shadow Man. The lyrics shifted from Zulu to English and back again. Uwahaqwa! (Too latehe is injured!) was the swift reply to the invocation. The chorus went as follows:
Same old human story The saddest winds do blow While we are trapped in the language of dark history.

In the kitchen, a domestic worker cranked up her own music. One of the most compelling voices I had ever heard lled the room. When I asked who was singing, she looked startled that I would prove so ignorant. Brenda Fassie! she cried, swaying to the chorus. Fassie was the crossover artist from a township outside Cape Town whose ode to Nelson Mandela, My Black President, struck a blow against apartheid. Now she belted out a post-apartheid message:
Higher and higher Aint nothing stopping us from reaching for the top. Aint nothing stopping us from reaching for more!

A chilly wind blew from the sea. The sun fell. Neon lights from surrounding clubs ickered on. Darkness settled in. Johnny Clegg reminded listeners of the persistent eects of oppression while Brenda Fassie crooned her seductive invitation to forget about the countrys brutal history: go faster, farther, quicker, she suggested, and dont look back. It occurred to me that both messages deserved their due. One voice crossed over the other; together they made a discordant, and quite beautiful, duet. It seemed an appropriate augur for the amazing and troubling, puzzling and transformative things bound to happen next.