We may wish to abolish conflict, but we cannot get rid of diversity. We must face life as it is and understand that diversity is its most essential feature. Fear of difference is dread of life itself.
—MARY PARKER FOLLETT
Every morning when we awake and look at the news, we see almost everything through a single powerful belief. The institutions and arrangements of the world are fixed, we think, and we must operate within their boundaries. All the normal structures of life in America—the limits set by our Constitution, the laws constructed by our legislatures, the rules and practices established by our most powerful institutions, including our corporations, and the social standards and practices reinforced by daily life—seem to be made of steel.
These structures of society represent a body of received wisdom that developed over many years and that we now silently accept. They function as the rules of the road for our collective behavior. Only rarely, within a few communities or at key historical moments, are our practices ever fully debated from first principles.
Yet clinging to old answers is not always the right solution for difficult problems. By doing so we face the danger that our institutions will slowly slide away from our aspirations, that they will grow in rigidity without reason. We can become so accustomed to everything around us that we find ourselves increasingly trapped by the past and by forms perpetuated without function. It is as though we started off swimming in a pool of water into which time pours a slow stream of powdered cement. Without being aware, we find ourselves swimming against a thicker and thicker liquid, which gradually slows us down, dries out, and imprisons us forever.
Though we may firmly believe that we are stuck, the truth is that European and American society has been changing constantly for centuries. Every generation has faced a new social and political reality with new problems, new rules, and often new freedoms. For many people, such questions seem abstract, far removed from the demands of daily life, but every now and then the opportunity arises for people to design from scratch a new organization, or perhaps an entirely new social system. In the United States, this happened over the fourteen-year period from 1775, when Americans began armed resistance to British authority, to 1789, with the ratification of the Bill of Rights. In those rare historical moments, people get to step back and ask: What is the best way to organize our lives? To achieve our goals?
One of the greatest experiences of my life was the opportunity to observe at close hand the complete transformation of a whole country—South Africa—as it remade itself from a nation driven by force and fear into one that now embraces the goals of liberty, justice, and equality. The transformation was not without difficulty, and the result has not been perfect. Yet seeing the complete reconfiguration of a nation unfold before my own eyes without widespread violence permanently changed my view of what is possible. I saw that the goals and structures of society can be controlled by the values and dreams of its citizens, and not the other way around.
In the late 1980s I finished my doctorate at Harvard Business School, which included a long technical dissertation that examined how some of America’s largest investors—pension funds, church and university endowments, and foundations—made decisions about their investments in South Africa. While working on this project I read hundreds of articles on every aspect of this debate, and I pored through archives in different institutions and libraries around the country. Oddly, though everyone I interviewed told me that it was an extremely important topic, no one seemed to be working on a single comprehensive book on the subject.
One afternoon as I was nearing the end of my dissertation, I stopped by the office of Rosabeth Moss Kanter, one of the business school’s most creative and distinguished faculty members. She asked me where I was in my studies, and I told her that I was nearly finished. I then shared with her the mystery of the missing book. It was peculiar, she admitted, but maybe the comprehensive book could only be written by a person with the right background. I thought about my own training—as a historian and an economist, as a minister who understood the passion for justice, and as a business school graduate who understood the mechanics of foreign investment—and I found myself wondering if perhaps this wasn’t the perfect opportunity for me. I mentioned this to her.
“Well,” she commented, “I have always felt that life is too short for small projects.”
And that’s all it took. As I walked out of her office, I knew what I was going to be doing for the next few years: writing a full account of the struggle for racial justice in the United States and South Africa in the era of apartheid.
After a valuable stint at the Kennedy School of Government in a new and creative program on ethics, I was hired by Harvard Divinity School to teach a range of crossover courses (the kinds of courses I’d dreamed of at Yale Divinity School) on the divestment movement, on how to create social change, on how communities in conflict could be reconciled. The dean encouraged me to establish a new venture called the Project on Business, Values, and the Economy. I settled into a small office on the second floor of an old carriage house on a back street in Cambridge. I organized monthly lunch discussions for faculty from across the whole university to discuss everything from the decision to close a major auto plant in Michigan (taught by an associate dean at the business school) to the pope’s encyclical on capitalism (taught by a leading professor at the divinity school). Soon I had a flood of passionate and brilliant students, mostly from the divinity school but also from across the university and the region.
I set out to assemble a project of research on South Africa. I began collecting information across many topics: foreign investment, American politics, civil rights, and African history. I developed files on U.S. presidential policy toward Africa from the time of Harry Truman through Ronald Reagan. Because many South Africans passed through Boston and Cambridge, I made a point of asking to meet them and interview them. One of the couples, André and Maretha du Toit, became dear friends. André was one of the most prominent political philosophers in South Africa, an Afrikaner who had left a post at the University of Stellenbosch because of his fierce opposition to apartheid and was now teaching at the University of Cape Town. His wife, Maretha, the daughter of an Afrikaner minister, had also rejected the entire system of racial injustice, and she radiated enthusiasm and affection toward everyone around her, including me. The two of them took me under their wing, and soon I was regularly eating dinner in their small sublet apartment with South Africa’s most distinguished leaders, white and black, as they stopped in Cambridge for a few days.
After a few years Dana and I realized that we would both benefit from a research year in another country, and we picked South Africa. I had already been there several times for research, and it seemed an ideal time to go as a family. Nelson Mandela had been released from prison two years before, and the exiled members of the African National Congress had returned to South Africa to begin the arduous process of negotiating a new constitution and a transition of power. Dana and I each applied for a senior Fulbright scholarship, which would give us just enough money to move there for six months with our young boys. In 1992 we received the award, and we scheduled our departure for early January 1993, a few weeks before Bill Clinton was to be sworn in as the new president of the United States.
The day arrived in late December, we handed over our keys to our house sitters, and we boarded a series of flights that would take us to the southern tip of Africa. When we arrived in Johannesburg, we traveled to the home of a gentle Afrikaner couple, Jacques and Carol Kriel, whom I had met on an earlier visit. It had been in their kitchen that I first encountered South African gastronomic peculiarities like rooibos tea, made from the red leaves of a South African bush, and the strangely delicious yeast spread imported from England known as Marmite. They also fed me mielie pap, a cornmeal porridge, and rusks, which are slightly sweet hunks of dry raisin bread served and dunked at teatime. It was in their home that I first noticed that though South Africans never have screens on their windows, there are remarkably few bugs at night. It was in their garden that I first saw great African birds sweep through the sky and watched monkeys pick through a compost heap. Flanking their driveway stood two six-foot-tall jade plants, magnificent tropical plants that had taken decades to reach that height.
As we were driving along their street I noticed the tight security around most of the homes. Every residence was surrounded by a tall fence, and every gate announced that a security company known as “Armed Response” or some other frightening name was protecting the premises. Everyone had added two or three feet of stones or fencing or razor wire on top of their walls—a physical barometer of the fear rising among Johannesburg’s white elite. The one exception to this neighborhood trend was the Kriel home, which had such a low wall that a child could have hopped over it in a flash.
I asked Jacques about his wall, and he said that he did not want to make it any higher, even though they had already experienced a theft. Several months before, a group of thieves had entered their home while the Kriels were asleep and stolen the only two pieces of electronic equipment they owned, their television and stereo. Their immense dog, Bassie, a mixture of Great Dane and Rhodesian ridgeback who stood as tall as a pony and normally emitted a giant bark that struck terror into newcomers, had slept through the whole incident.
I asked Jacques whether things were becoming better or worse. Crime was definitely worse, Jacques replied, but on the whole this was a better South Africa than I had seen on my earlier trips. “You turn on the television and you see the neo-Nazis and the Communists debating each other,” he said. “That was inconceivable a few years ago. So we are seeing an improvement.”
Though our eventual destination was Cape Town, a thousand miles to the southwest, where we had rented a home, we took a few days to drive around the area, including a visit to the nation’s capital, Pretoria. The great irony of South Africa was that its discriminatory structure had arisen because of the ardent desire of a particular ethnic group for freedom. The Afrikaner people, who numbered barely more than a million, were descendants of the original Dutch settlers who had built their homes in the Cape Province. After a hundred and fifty years, as part of the wars with Napoleon, the British navy sailed into Table Bay and took control. The British quickly established their own language, laws, and customs as the rule of the land, and they treated the Afrikaners as second-class citizens with regard to land and political rights. Afrikaners had a long history of importing slaves and subjugating local African groups, and the British insisted that they could not punish or kill their workers without proper judicial review. Eventually the Afrikaners decided that they had had enough, and they organized the “Great Trek,” an enormous wagon train in which thousands of people moved all their portable belongings across the huge desert to find a home outside British rule.
These “Fore-Travelers”—Voortrekkers—settled in Pretoria, nearly a thousand miles to the northeast of Cape Town, only to find, to their horror, that within a generation the discovery of gold in nearby Johannesburg prompted the British to come rushing into their new republic in search of new wealth. The Afrikaners wanted freedom; the British responded by conquering them with force. At the end of the nineteenth century, they sent an imperial army to crush the resistance of these farmers, or Boers, in a brutal war of attrition aimed partly at the civilian population.
This experience burned for decades in the living memories of the Afrikaners, who swore that one day they would regain control from the British and be free to do what they wanted with “their” land and “their” blacks. A huge wave of nationalist rallies began in the 1930s, and some of the major Afrikaner leaders, including one future prime minister, were jailed by the British for favoring the defeat of Britain by Hitler. After the war, however, the Afrikaners finally achieved what they wanted: they won a majority in the whites-only election for Parliament. Led by a charismatic and demented professor named Hendrik Verwoerd, they wiped out the remnants of British law and changed the voting structures to secure permanent power for themselves.
To make sure they had no future opposition of any kind, they constructed a comprehensive legal and police system to control the majority black population. Africans were denied the right to vote, to own businesses, to travel without permission and identity documents, to live anywhere except in designated areas, to speak in public or to protest, to attend universities, or to resist the government in any way. They were to remain in a permanent state of “apartness,” or apartheid, excluded from every chance to participate and to prosper. And thus the Afrikaners’ desire to preserve their culture in freedom and their generational grievances against the English justified the creation and enforcement of the most modern and aggressive system of racism in the world.
To see some of the monuments of this troubled history, we drove north on a major highway cutting through green and yellow rolling terrain dotted with industrial parks that reminded us of east Texas. We went first to the Voortrekker Monument. Built in 1938 as a neofascist shrine to Afrikaner victory, the monument is one of the most visually powerful and politically controversial structures in the country. We climbed a hundred steps to the central chamber, where Afrikaner settler mythology is laid out in a large frieze around a central crypt. The building is built so that each year on the sixteenth of December—the date in 1838 on which five hundred Afrikaners rebuffed an attack by thousands of Zulus—a shaft of sunlight streaks through the window and illuminates a stone table at the center. The table resembles a sarcophagus; carved deeply in the top are the words “Ons Vir Jou Suid Afrika”: “We (Are) for You, South Africa.”
The place evoked many sentiments. It bothered me that the settler imagery seemed so familiar. If the bearded white men had been wearing Pilgrim hats or cowboy boots, I wondered, would I have found it as appalling?
We climbed more steps to obtain a sweeping view of Pretoria. There my mind shifted back to college. During my senior year, in the same spring as my bout with the eating clubs, I had also become deeply involved with the student divestment movement to protest apartheid. We had spent weeks marching in front of Nassau Hall, the student administration building, shouting, “Princeton—Pretoria! Break the connection now!” During my final months at Princeton, hundreds of students had joined this daily protest. I had admired the top student leaders greatly and wondered how they had acquired so much detailed knowledge about the business connections of the university. We handed out flyers and took buses into New York City to see one of our classmates testify against apartheid at the United Nations. In April 1978 more than two hundred students, including me, had seized and occupied Nassau Hall and spent twenty-four hours singing songs, holding teach-ins, and sleeping in the corridors to provoke a response from the university trustees, which never came. That incident, as much as any, launched me on a lifetime of study and activism on corporate and investment policy.
As the sun beat down on my little family nearly fifteen years later, I thought how far away Princeton seemed—a small town now locked in the snows of an opposite season on the other side of the world. The claim that there had been a connection between Princeton and Pretoria had at first seemed unlikely. It had required squeezing a long and complicated set of relationships into a single binary pair. “It’s not that simple,” administrators and trustees had told us in the 1970s, and in one sense they had been right. And yet they had also been wrong. Firms from around the globe—from the United States, France, Great Britain, West Germany, and Japan—had provided South Africa’s white leaders with large amounts of money and technology to build their racist state. When I was at Princeton, nearly four hundred American companies owned subsidiaries in South Africa. Even though these firms never accounted for more than a fifth of South Africa’s direct foreign investment, they dominated such key sectors as electronics, automobile manufacturing, financial services, and petroleum refining and distribution. Dividends from these companies had flowed into Princeton’s bank accounts, and some of their executives sat on the university’s board of trustees. The connection had been real.
Over the next few days we moved to Cape Town and settled into the house that would be ours for nearly six months. Our new home came with a station wagon, two dogs, a gardener named Nelson, and a maid named Tembisa. It was surrounded by a high wall and included a swimming pool just off the kitchen entrance. By the standard of South African whites, this was not particularly affluent, and I realized within days how seductive the whole environment could be.
My goal in South Africa was ambitious. After years of archival research and interviews in the United States, I had come to South Africa to complete the other side of the equation. It was one thing to write about apartheid as an idea, but what was it like for the people, black and white, who lived it? I was trying to assemble, as diligently and fairly as possible, a thorough explanation of how and why South Africa had both started and ended its modern system of racial domination. With this goal in mind, I made an ordered spreadsheet of the 120 places I wanted to visit and people I wanted to see in the 180 days I would be in the country. I jumped on this list immediately, making arrangements through phone calls, letters, and visits. E-mail didn’t exist in South Africa, and many people were too busy to make commitments over the phone, so I found that the most effective way to get something done was simply to show up at an organization or a person’s front door.
To maintain our daily life, we enrolled our boys in the local Catholic school, where they wore uniforms and ran around with mostly white children in a neocolonial setting. John, who was three and a half, exuberantly made friends and seemed oblivious to issues of race. I began hearing about his friendship with a little girl in the class, and one day, when I picked him up, I asked him to point her out to me. He pointed to the only African girl in the room.
“There she is,” he said, smiling. “She’s the one in the purple dress!”
Samuel, five and a half, was blond and serious. One of his favorite pastimes was explaining plate tectonics to perplexed adults. He became popular in his class because he could help other children learn to read. He was nicknamed “Home Alone” because his blond hair and American accent reminded the other children of the actor Macaulay Culkin, who had starred in that movie a couple of years before.
Soon we settled into the easy lives of a white South African family. Our house was comfortable and food was cheap. The boys swam in the pool and made friends, and we went to dinner parties. People invited us over to their cookouts, and the men drank beer around the grill and chatted while the owner waved away the smoke.
From this bubble of privilege, it was harder to learn what was happening in other parts of South Africa, even parts that were physically nearby. Our maid, Tembisa, came and went and mostly resisted my efforts to engage her in conversation about her life. One of the few questions she asked me was whether South African blacks who traveled to the United States were forced to live in black townships during their visits. I tried to explain that although there was segregation in America, in which people of color lived together in poor neighborhoods, it was also true that a visiting black man could stay in a hotel in the center of the city if he had the money. She didn’t quite believe me. I eventually learned that her father had died in one of the government-created potato famines and that Tembisa was struggling to support three children.
Our gardener, Nelson, appeared once or twice a week but then stopped appearing completely. We got word that he had fallen ill with tuberculosis, but he was out of our reach in one of the remote and largely invisible townships that ringed the city. When I made an effort to try to find him, I was cautioned by our physicians against doing so, because tuberculosis in South Africa was highly contagious and often fatal.
To add to the illusion of comfort and to the surrealism, the weather constantly reminded us of California. The sky was almost always blue, and the sun sparkled on the bay. Dana set up a place to do her research on the main campus of the University of Cape Town, and I drove into the city to an old prison that had been renovated to become the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business. The route passed a small game reserve near the base of Table Mountain in the center of the city, so I often found myself on a smooth highway zipping past the South African antelopes known as kudu grazing in the blond grass while I listened to the Beach Boys.
In many ways, the Graduate School of Business of the University of Cape Town also seemed familiar, having been modeled on modern business schools around the world. It had all the accoutrements of respectability: well-organized MBA and executive programs, semicircular classrooms with printed name cards, carefully drafted case studies as part of the curriculum. The place was spanking new, and it also exuded potential.
Yet as an outsider, I immediately sensed peculiar and disturbing undercurrents. I couldn’t help wondering what kinds of grim things had happened in those cells now turned into whitewashed offices with jaunty modern furniture. I found it distasteful that the school joked about its legacy. On the walls one found framed lithographs of the construction of the building by prison labor, early maps of Cape Town with “Breakwater Jail” clearly marked, and even a “wanted poster” for a black man named John Brown. The poster was so popular that the school had put it on a T-shirt that was sold in the gift shop, a move that struck me as tasteless at best, racist at worst.
Even though the business school saw itself as one of the leading institutions in the “new South Africa,” and even though most of my colleagues thought of themselves as far more liberal than almost anyone in the country, there was one glaring problem: there were virtually no black students. When I asked, I was told that in the MBA program of over one hundred there was one African. The curriculum at the time showed no evidence that the country was undergoing significant political change or that there was an immense population of black Africans and “Coloureds” (members of a distinctive mixed-race community who spoke Afrikaans rather than English) who would soon be released into an economy in dire need of advanced management training.
Even though the country was in the midst of rapid change, I encountered highly racist attitudes almost everywhere I went. Traveling on a boat across Table Bay, a friendly teacher from a technical university asked me where I was from. When he learned that I was from the United States, he immediately launched into the standard white South African line about how good it was I had come to see the country, because the problems were so much more complex than the international media suggested. Within five minutes he had delivered an unusually compact version of a speech I heard many times. There would never be peace, he said, because South Africa is made up of too many different nations, cultures, and “people groups” (a tip-off to his conservative religious views); blacks were uneducated and couldn’t think for themselves, so democracy was an impossibility; if there were elections, blacks would vote on the basis of who could intimidate them the most; and Coloureds were terrified of blacks. I tried to slow him down with a few polite rebuttals—“Perhaps, but don’t you think that …”—but he was undeterred. He seemed so eager to have the approval of an outsider that he didn’t seem to hear that I was not giving it.
For a few minutes he offered his own pet solution: that South Africa should be divided into three nearly autonomous areas which would cooperate only on foreign policy and defense. “What would be the racial composition of these three areas?” I asked. He looked at me blankly, as though it were the first time he had ever considered the idea. Then he launched into a bigoted description of the Zulus in Natal.
Many new friends insisted that the question, of course, wasn’t about race; it was about maintaining excellence. When I asked whether there might be a significant component of bias in the determination of standards—and even more in the testing to see whether those standards had been achieved—people looked at me with confusion and distress. Indeed, as I traveled through the privileged parts of South African society, particularly in business and the universities, I met scores of well-intentioned, intelligent, generous people who seemed to have little understanding of their own country. They read the paper and traveled abroad and wanted Nelson Mandela to succeed. But walking through these circles, I often felt that I had entered a beautiful restaurant where everyone was laughing and clinking glasses without being aware that the whole establishment rested on the rim of a rumbling, smoking volcano.
I did not spend all of my time in white South Africa. I also went to places where black and Coloured people lived, in many cases only a few miles away and yet a world apart. Stretching out across a long sandy plain, Cape Town had two kinds of slums. The first was the township, a slightly older and more established community, with tiny cinderblock houses, a few stores and gas stations, and the occasional church. Garbage blew aimlessly through the streets while people did their best to collect the necessities of life and walk to the bus stations that would take them to their jobs in the white sections of town. Up in Johannesburg, the white authorities had set aside a portion to the south which they named the “South West Township,” whose name was shortened into a kind of acronym: Soweto. By the time I visited South Africa, Soweto had grown to more than a million people. The comparable townships in Cape Town were Nyanga and Langa.
The second kind of slum was the squatter camp. In these areas hundreds of thousands of people, many seeking work and housing but denied both, set up makeshift shelters in whatever form they could find: cardboard, plastic garbage bags, old crates, strips of burlap, and sheets of corrugated tin. Families jammed themselves into spaces about ten feet square, side by side, stretching mile after mile after mile. In Cape Town, one of the squatter camps, known as Crossroads, contained a million people and sprawled across the Cape Flats around the airport. The terrain looked as though a huge bomb had exploded, throwing up dirt, rocks, and concrete in every direction, and then people had moved in and built hovels on top of the rubble. In the middle of these oceans of humanity, the police and military had set up intimidating forts of concrete and lacerating barbed wire and watchtowers armed by soldiers with high-powered assault rifles. Parked behind the walls were rows of Casspirs, greenish-yellow armored personnel carriers that carried soldiers out among the black community and served as the main tactical weapon of the government during the suppression of township violence. Most of the young boys killed during the uprising in 1985 and 1986 had been shot like rabbits by soldiers inside the protective steel womb of the Casspirs.
In many ways it was easy to be moved or outraged at what I saw in South Africa, but I was self-aware enough to realize that I was seeing things that also existed, with less intensity, all over the United States. I was making the effort to explore the contradictions of a foreign country without ever having made the same attempt in my own. There are many places in America that are just as invisible to most Americans as the squatter towns are to South Africans.
Still, while I was there, I wanted to see things with my own eyes, and that desire took me all over the country. I took a special tour of a South African gold mine which plunged me two and a half kilometers below the surface into a dark and sweltering world where I was invited to try my hand at the hydraulic drills, march through miles of subterranean tunnels, watch the building-sized machinery crush and filter the rocks into powder, and witness the final pouring of molten gold into ingots. Thousands of men labored around me in tunnels stretching for miles in every direction, and yet even when I was down in their midst, I could get only the tiniest glimpse of the harsh conditions that humanity imposed on them in search of the ultimate symbol of human greed. Later the Chamber of Mines treated all the foreign visitors to a fancy lunch, to which they invited some of the white mine supervisors. The supervisors were delighted to be out of the mine for an afternoon, and after they had each downed three or four beers, they happily shared their wisdom with me, particularly with regard to the differing characters of the thousands of African men still working miles below us as we ate.
“The Shangaans, the Zulus from Mozambique, they’re the best,” said one man, grabbing me by the shoulder to get my attention and waving a big finger in my face to make his point. “The Xhosas, they are big, strong, and stupid. The Zulus are hard workers, but you have to watch your back. The Tswanas and the Sothos, they’re shit. They are all political, all ANC—they always want something, and they cause trouble.” Then he laughed congenially and slapped me on the back, as though I, as a white person, certainly knew what he meant.
Given the rage and fear that gripped people of all races in every corner of the country, I wondered how anyone could rise above this cauldron of misery and hate in order to create a genuinely new nation. While Africans yearned desperately for rapid progress, whites worried about everything they might lose, and the members of other ethnic groups—the Coloureds and Indians and other peoples of South Africa—felt that they were inevitably going to be caught in the crossfire. Yet through all of this, leaders like Nelson Mandela, only recently released from prison, and even his counterpart, F. W. de Klerk, the head of the apartheid National Party, had decided to guide their nation into a new future, to move forward with a measured, careful, and inspired commitment to creating a democracy. They were joined in this effort by thousands of people trying to contribute to peaceful change. I traveled the country seeking out the exceptional men and women who seemed able both to sense the terrible longings and fears around them and to patiently chart a new course.
I came to know and love Barney Pityana, one of the martyr Steve Biko’s closest friends, who had been imprisoned, then eventually left for England, where he became both a lawyer and an Anglican priest before returning to South Africa. He eventually became the head of the Human Rights Commission and then vice chancellor of South Africa’s largest university. I met and sometimes had dinner with Albie Sachs, a brilliant Jewish lawyer who had joined the ANC as a young man, had argued for the creation of a nonracial democracy, and was nearly killed by a car bomb in Mozambique. The blast blinded him in one eye and tore off his right hand. He later became the equivalent of a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. I spent a long time in conversation with Desmond Tutu, the archbishop of Cape Town and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who had been vilified in the press as “that black Communist bug” and yet laughed with joy at the thought of the new nation being born. I met theologians, business leaders, teachers, community activists, and men and women who had been tortured or whose family members had died in prison or been shot on lonely roads at night by the security forces. I even met the president of the country, F. W. de Klerk, at a reception at the U.S. embassy. I told him that I was studying the effect of sanctions on the South African economy, and he asked me pleasantly if I was finding good data.
“It depends on the industry,” I said diplomatically. “As you know, Mr. President, some industries are not currently permitted to release such data.” (It was, in fact, still a crime for South Africans even to ask.)
“It will be interesting to see what you discover,” he said.
This was my moment, and I seized it. Plucking up my courage, I asked him point-blank, “Did your religious convictions play an important part in your decisions of the last few years?”
“Yes, yes!” he said emphatically, to my astonishment. “People keep calling me a pragmatist, but that’s not right. If anything, I have to struggle with not being a fundamentalist. I belong to a church that takes the Bible very seriously. I am always looking, always searching, for the basic foundation, the underlying principle, from which one can build an idea of the future, from which one can construct an action plan. As a Christian, I have always been preoccupied with this question of principle, of what is the right thing to do.”
For a moment I found myself speechless, staring at a man who was both the head of one of the most brutal regimes in the world and someone actively seeking to bend his country’s history toward justice. How could I ever communicate such human contradictions in my writing? I wondered.
The most elusive person in the country was, of course, Nelson Mandela. After he was imprisoned, in 1962, his name and his face were officially banned from every South African publication. I had visited South Africa just before his release, and since there were no known pictures of him since he had been in his forties, the newspapers had hired artists to imagine what the seventy-two-year-old man would look like when he stepped out of prison. The South African government even decided to minimize the shock of his sudden launch into freedom by driving him around the area in an unmarked car, and on more than one occasion they pulled over and allowed him to go into a corner store to buy a newspaper.
Many remember the image of Mandela finally leaving prison on February 11, 1990: the tall, gray-haired man dressed in an impeccable suit, surrounded by triumphant assistants, walking with measured steps toward the gates of the prison, hand in hand with his long-suffering wife, Winnie. The image was carried live on television around the world. He had spent nineteen of his more than twenty-seven years in prison in a tiny cell on barren Robben Island, surrounded by rapid ocean currents and marooned just six miles offshore yet in full view of Cape Town’s beautiful cityscape. After Mandela was released, I had the opportunity to visit his old cell in the company of the United States ambassador, Princeton Lyman. The building was still being operated as a prison at that time, and the authorities had to clear the prisoners from that cell and from that block when we went. When I walked in, my heart rose to my throat. It was a tiny room, no more than eight by ten feet in dimension, with a small metal bed and a tiny desk. The ambassador and I could not fit inside at the same time. I tried, in the few moments I was there, to project backward through nineteen winters and summers, to wonder how anyone could have survived in this space without going mad. I looked at the thick, heavy bars that covered the window and realized that all I could see was a naked stone courtyard.
Yet Mandela had somehow remained internally free. After he left the prison, he instantly became the central figure in the South Africa story and an international beacon of hope. During my visit I arranged to meet with his personal attaché, a woman named Barbara Masekela, who later became minister of culture and ambassador to France. She had traveled with Mandela when he began to make foreign trips to support the transition to democracy in South Africa. She told me in particular about a recent trip to Tanzania, when thousands of people were lined up along the roads to the cities to catch a glimpse of Mandela. “We were traveling in an open four-wheel-drive truck,” she said, “and if you listened carefully, you could hear the people saying ‘Mandela, Mandela.’ As soon as they saw him they said his name, as though they couldn’t believe it. So as we drove, we heard the name, Mandela, Mandela, wave after wave, repeated like an echo. Everyone who sees him for the first time suddenly realizes ‘There he is,’ and for that moment they are alone in history with Mandela.”
“They are alone in history with Mandela.” The phrase struck me as profound. Most of us think of history as something that other people, important people, make. We read about it, we follow behind it, we bend to its force. We are like small boats tethered to the stern of an ocean liner, bouncing around in the boiling wake as we are dragged along. But for those standing on the bridge, there is no history; there is no wake; there is only the sea stretching forward, only the destination ahead. Everything happens in the present; there is no need to look back. Masekela said that this was something that amazed her about Mandela, Sisulu, and the others who endured Robben Island. “One cannot help looking at him,” she said, “and thinking that he was robbed of his life. Yet he never mentions this. It is the same with all of them—Sisulu, Mbeki, all of them—they never allude to the fact that twenty-eight years of their lives were taken away. They are just going forward with what has to be done now.”
And as she finished her sentence, the door behind her popped open, and Mandela himself stepped in.
“Madiba,” she said, using the name of both affection and respect favored by his inner circle, “this is Dr. Massie from the United States.”
Mandela stepped forward and shook my hand, beaming. The only thing I could remember to say was that the secretary to the dean of the Harvard Divinity School, an African-American woman named Gwen Hawke, had made me promise that if I ever met him, I would give him her personal expression of gratitude.
“Please thank her very much,” he said. “Tell her I find her words most encouraging.”
And then he turned, papers in hand, and went back to his office, signaling to Masekela to join him. I watched the door close and realized that the camera I had brought all the way from the United States just in case anything like this ever happened lay unused in my briefcase beside me on the floor. But whether or not I had the visual proof, I had for a moment been alone in history with Mandela.
When asked about the personal adulation that was his constant fare, Mandela was always scrupulously modest. “I serve as one small human peg on which the nations of the world hang their admiration for the African National Congress,” he told one American television reporter. In some ways it was true. Mandela had not made the revolution himself. Yet he also enabled some extraordinary things to happen because, not unlike another tall, reticent figure who played a key role in the birth of his nation—George Washington—Mandela gave subtle approval or discouragement to many impulses that had been let loose in the complex negotiations for the transfer of power.
For several years South Africa had been slowly and steadily working to define both a new form of government and a pathway that would enable it to get there. It was a devilishly complicated problem. The Afrikaners had felt brutally oppressed by the British, and the key to their decision to impose apartheid was not so much that they hated blacks—though many of them did—but that they wanted to design a structure under which their political, cultural, and economic dominance would never be threatened by anyone. As a result of this insecurity, people of other races in South Africa had been systematically excluded and brutalized. Property had been stolen, families annihilated, futures destroyed, parents and children killed. Though the violence was mostly on the part of the white government, Africans had sometimes fought back, stealing cars and shooting their drivers, tossing hand grenades into truck cabs, and sweeping down on farmers and settlers in the depths of night. The South African military and police routinely tortured and murdered civilians, planted bombs, and drove opponents of all races off the roads into fiery deaths in ravines. To shatter the political unity of their opposition, the South African government also set up stooge governments in fake black “homelands,” where petty tyrants, wallowing in government cash and using their guards and militias to demand tribute, drove around in Mercedes and lived in luxury while their enforcers dragged men and women from their homes to beat and kill anyone who dared to object.
At about this time, my son John asked, “Are there any dinosaurs in the world?”
“No, John,” I replied. “There are no longer any dinosaurs in the world.”
“Are there any ghosts in the world?” he asked.
“No, there are no ghosts,” I said.
“And Daddy,” he said, his face filled with earnestness and anxiety, “are there any monsters in the world?”
Suddenly I felt a pang of anguish. What I said was “No, John, there are no monsters in the world.” But the voice in my mind said, “Only human ones, John. Only human ones.”
Later that night John’s voice came back to me—“Are there any monsters in the world?”—as I tried to fall asleep. A rapid stream of images from the last few months roared through my mind: the elderly white farmer strangled by thieves and left in a cupboard for days; the four township women lined up against a wall and shot through the back of the head; the hollow eyes of abandoned urban children begging for coins; the humiliated faces of the men who shuffled to our door pleading for food and work; the man screaming as he burned to death in the trunk of his car just a few miles from our home.
Suffering of any kind is terrible, but needless suffering is worse, and deliberately inflicted suffering is a specially hideous evil. The world abounds in deliberate, calculated cruelty wrought by rational persons on other persons. As the images rocketed past, my intellectual explanations and psychological defenses deflated and I felt only horror. John’s voice and mine intermingled, ringing like bell changes from a distant cathedral: “Are there any monsters in the world?” “Only human ones”—again and again, until I fell asleep.
F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, and the thousands of people who pulled together to build a new nation, woke every morning during this period and looked out at millions of people still boiling with deep historical grievances, reacting to current incidents of violence and gripped with fear that the future would only be worse.
How did they make progress? They designed a disciplined process and set clear expectations. Though their organizations had been enemies and were still in competition with each other, they found ways to work together. They promised that all the issues would be discussed until people around the country felt they had been heard. Accordingly, hundreds of groups pulled together in forums and debates and lecture halls and meeting rooms to announce their preferences. In retrospect, I can hardly believe how much time was spent talking. There were “national forums” on housing, on education, on a bill of rights, on a free press, on the role of the judiciary, which would sometimes draw in two or three hundred people for several days every few months. Everyone got the chance to speak, and then to speak again, and to keep going, on and on, until people finally decided that the issue had been talked to extinction. This didn’t mean that every effort led to agreement, but it certainly meant that most people felt they had been given the chance to speak their minds.
As in the United States during our own revolutionary period, every political decision carried an attached theory. The natural tendency in political systems toward tyranny meant that there had to be checks and balances. Clarity of national purpose and efficiency of execution meant that there had to be a strong central government. Yet regional and ethnic differences needed to be acknowledged through smaller political boundaries, which Americans call states and South Africans decided to name provinces. The South Africans allowed their eyes to roam over the other constitutions of the world, and they adopted features from those of the United States, Canada, and Sweden. They worried about how to balance executive and judicial power. They debated for years about how to identify and preserve the individual rights of citizens.
Every morning I would rise from the bedroom that looked out over a piece of Table Mountain, descend to the kitchen, make a cup of coffee, and open the newspaper to read documents that reminded me of the Federalist Papers. In how many places in the world could one follow daily debates over fundamental constitutional issues at the moment of a nation’s birth on the front page, in the editorials, and even in the comics?
And in how many places in the world could one see an entire nation looking for a method that would enable the country to mix justice with mercy? In most cases in which a war has taken place, especially a civil war, the victors expend their newfound power in hunting down and punishing the leaders of the other side as well as the perpetrators of the worst atrocities. The battles may no longer be military, but the sense of outrage and blame continues apace, with one side seeking openly to force the other to acknowledge their mistakes and pay the price.
South Africa had endured so many terrible acts over so many years, many of them in secret, that the truth, even after decades of efforts, thousands of prison sentences, and tens of millions in expenses, might still never be known. The need for justice in the most egregious cases was never doubted, but eventually the South Africans realized that an even deeper political and, more important, human need might be met through the creation of a commission that sought not punishment but truth, not vindication but understanding.
Thus the South Africans, borrowing from earlier experience in Chile, created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or TRC. Cochaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and made up of leaders of all races and backgrounds, the TRC was given clear instructions. Anyone who had committed a crime could be freed from prosecution by stepping before the commission and offering a full and complete confession. If a person offered only part of the story, he or she could still be charged and punished by a prosecutor for the unnamed part. Only through a full explanation of what had happened would the hand of justice be stayed.
The process was only just being organized during 1993, and it was deeply controversial. It sounded to some like cheap forgiveness. Wiser heads pointed out that for a nation to begin anew, the secrecy needed to end. And the designers and participants understood a deeper truth: that in many cases, the families of victims wanted more than anything to know what had happened and why. Prosecution was only one tool to obtain that information. And now that South Africa was changing, many of the perpetrators were feeling troubled by their own decisions and actions. Over the months and years ahead, hundreds of men and women came forward to ask their questions, tell their stories, and bow, figuratively and literally, before the horror of what had happened. The testimony produced moments of excruciating human suffering and of remarkable courage. The process created the opportunity for those who had done something grotesquely wrong to ask their victims and their listeners, in all humility, for what they knew they did not deserve: forgiveness. It did not happen in every case, and perhaps it should not have happened in some, but when it did, it unleashed a healing power that took everyone by surprise and often left them in tears.
Though events continued to unfold at a blistering pace, with major decisions about the future of the country being made every day in the paper, our sojourn as a family drew to a close. I attended the memorial service for the assassinated South African Communist leader—and surprising peacemaker—Chris Hani in Desmond Tutu’s cathedral in downtown Cape Town. After the service I joined an initially peaceful march that turned ugly as the police surrounded the central square with soldiers who carried military weapons loaded with live ammunition. I walked past burning cars and smashed shop windows into a huge rally, where I found myself caught between dancing, chanting, angry young African men and the white soldiers fingering the triggers on their machine guns. I realized uncomfortably that, unlike in the movies, there would be no background music to warn me when the shooting was about to start, and that I could there and then be killed by a bullet without ever being aware of what had hit me. I gradually withdrew and found my way back to my car. Eventually the protest ended without a massacre.
A few days later the negotiating parties took a major step and committed themselves to a firm date—April 1994—for the first countrywide elections to determine the future government and president. That move gave all the citizens a specific focus for their concerns and activism. The energy in the country shifted to making rules for the elections and analyzing the politics of various races. In the midst of all of this, Dana and I and the boys packed up and returned to the United States, at the end of June 1993. The weather in Cape Town was becoming cold and rainy as the region entered its dark winter period. Within a few weeks, however, we were sitting on the porch of an airy summer cottage in the Catskill Mountains, where we sometimes went for part of the summer. There was almost no news about South Africa, even in the New York Times. It was as though we had awoken from a long, remote, and impossibly detailed dream.
The most surprising outcome of my extended stay in South Africa is that soon after I returned, I began to think about running for office myself. Up until that point I thought I had lived by a decision to work for change, but not through elective office. My experiences with Washington, with the Vietnam War, with Watergate, and even with my own short clash with the pharmaceutical industry had convinced me that politics was a corrupt, venal business, and that to step forward into political life was to risk both disappointment and contamination.
South Africa had changed this view. Of course there were huge complexities and unpleasant realities in that country, and the participants ran the gamut from virtuous to foul, with every intermediate blend. Yet it had been moving and exhilarating to watch a whole nation tackle its most basic problems, define its bedrock principles, and then put those into place. By flying practically around the world, I had come to a new appreciation for the democracy that had been born on our own soil here in America. When I returned to Massachusetts, two questions immediately presented themselves: Was I ready for politics, and was politics ready for me?
I assembled a group of close friends for a weekend and told them that I wanted their advice and spiritual scrutiny. That I felt a pull into politics was not in doubt; what needed to be answered, in personal terms, was more subtle: was this a temptation or a calling? Was I pursuing this purely as an act of ego, or was there some deeper, more worthy motivation? My friends spent several days putting me through detailed questions, and I then spent months pondering the decision. Eventually I came away with a clear sense that I should try.
The decision to become a candidate did not automatically open a pathway within politics. In the fall of 1993 the state representative and state senate seats were solidly filled. The mayor of Somerville showed no signs of stepping down. To run for office, you need an office to run for. After examining the options carefully, I decided that there was only one: the office of lieutenant governor.
At first blush, this seemed to many like an absurdity. I was thirty-seven years old, I had no political network, no personal fortune, and no name recognition. I was not an athlete, a movie star, or an astronaut. Moreover, the lieutenant governor had an unclear role in politics and in government. I was often asked the same two contradictory questions by different reporters. First they would ask, “What makes you qualified for the second highest constitutional office in the state?” and second, often asked immediately on the heels of the first, “Why do you want this do-nothing job?”
My response was always the same: I wanted to reinvigorate democracy within both the Democratic Party and the state. I talked about all the things I had cared about for years—health care, social justice, jobs, poverty, and the excitement of directing our own future. To some, I undoubtedly seemed naive. Slowly my words began to seep out and affect people. People were tired of a political agenda that included nothing but anger and division, that talked only about crime, welfare, and taxes (the three big topics that year), and they wanted to hear something and someone new.
I visited the chair of the Democratic Party, state senator Joan Menard, and asked her how many people were planning to run for lieutenant governor. She knew of only one, she said, a state representative. Is it possible that he would be the only person and might simply end up with the nomination? It could happen, she said. Did she know of anyone else who was thinking of running? No, she replied.
Surprised by my interest, she spoke with fairness and respect. As I left her ornate office, I thought to myself, “There really is a hole at the center of the Democratic Party. And maybe someone like me could fill it.”
I visited the Democratic issues convention in October with Bob Colt, a well-known political operative who worked for the attorney general. After seven hours of shaking hands and greeting skeptical people, I felt sorry when they began streaming out of the stadium.
“But I haven’t met everyone!” I complained to Bob.
“Oh, you are hooked,” Bob said with a laugh.
Starting with two graduate students, no money, and no campaigning experience, I began my run. Soon I had raised a few thousand dollars and we opened a tiny office on the Cambridge-Somerville line. The technology could hardly have been more primitive: we had one computer, which we used to keep track of donations. We were a few years away from the explosion of the Internet and the technological revolution that changed American life and politics so dramatically. It took us months before we could finally afford a single portable telephone that would travel in the car. We had no e-mail and no GPS. But we had volunteers, and we had spirit, and more than anything we were having a great time.
The weather in early 1994 was brutal; I ended up driving to events through sixteen different snowstorms. I visited restaurants, union halls, factories, VFW posts, as well as innumerable living rooms for house parties. I was delighted that I was able to persuade my old friends Peter, Paul, and Mary to come to Massachusetts to hold a concert for me. They arrived in late February to perform in a hall that held 1,200 people. The morning of the concert, twelve inches of snow dropped onto the streets and cut our attendance to about 700, so that even though the trio had offered their services for free, the overall expenses outweighed the revenue. But it produced a huge return in credibility and enthusiasm for the campaign.
In early March, as my campaign was reaching fever pitch, South Africa suddenly popped back into my life. I received a formal invitation to serve as an official international observer at the South African elections, which were going to be held at the end of April. I presented this opportunity to my campaign manager Lynda Wik and the other members of my campaign staff.
“What would this mean?” they asked.
“It would mean I would fly to South Africa for a week.”
My field director, Barbara Opacki, objected strenuously. “The state convention is only six weeks after that!” she protested. “If you don’t get fifteen percent of the vote at that gathering, you won’t even be on the ballot. You need to use every breathing moment to be calling delegates to introduce yourself to them in the hope that you can round up at least five hundred votes!”
I said I was still inclined to go.
“You also need to talk to about fifty reporters to see if a few more of them will write about you before the convention,” my advisers continued. “How are you going to get any coverage if you’re in another country?”
I felt uncertain. On the one hand, they might well be right. I had set off in pursuit of this unlikely nomination, drawn other people in, organized a strong campaign, and challenged the party establishment. It didn’t seem sensible to pack my bags and leave for a week in the middle of the fray.
At the same time, I had been following the transformation of South African apartheid for nearly twenty years. I had just been there during a key constitutional period. With this invitation I was being offered a front-row seat and a particular way to help.
I went home and thought about it carefully. The next morning I returned. The South African elections were a key moment in world history, I said, and I wanted to participate in them. My team shook their heads with bewilderment but accepted the idea. We prepared as best we could for what seemed like a long absence.
I flew from Boston to New York City and walked through the terminal toward the sixteen-hour flight to Johannesburg. As I was entering the boarding area, I heard an announcement over the intercom.
“Would Robert Massie please pick up any white phone to speak to information?”
Bewildered, I found a phone and picked it up. The operator informed me that my campaign was urgently trying to reach me. I phoned my campaign manager.
“We just got a call from one of the local television stations. They’ve learned that you are going to South Africa and they’re wondering if they could do an on-air telephone interview with you tomorrow when you arrive. They don’t have a reporter on the ground, and they would like to get someone to describe the situation.”
“Sure,” I said, startled.
“Here’s the number,” she said. “And don’t forget!”
I arrived in Johannesburg the next day and made my way to the downtown skyscraper that lodged the offices of the International Electoral Commission, which gave credentials to observers. The security was tight, so the line of people waiting to be admitted snaked across a vast public plaza surrounded by parked cars. The morning’s newspapers were filled with threats from neo-Nazi parties that they intended to disrupt the elections through any means necessary. All around me police were stopping and searching vehicles for bombs. Standing out in the open under a gray sky, staring at rows of unoccupied cars parked closely to the electoral nerve center of the country, I found myself praying for the line to hurry up. When I eventually made it inside, I breathed a sigh of relief.
I received my credentials, including a special blue cap, a photo ID badge to hang around my neck, a large set of stickers for whatever car I was using, and reams of papers and instructions saying that I was legitimate. I reported to the deployment area and discovered that the region around Johannesburg and Pretoria had been swamped with thousands of observers. I called a friend at the Independent Electoral Commission office in Cape Town.
“How many observers do you have down there?” I asked.
“Not enough,” he said. “Only about three hundred for the entire Western Cape.”
I hung up the phone, went outside, hailed a taxi, and went straight to the airport, where I caught a thousand-mile flight to Cape Town. Four hours later I walked into a new set of offices and received a map of where I was to go during the three-day elections. My territory covered the area north and east of Cape Town, including an incredible array of different voting areas: entrenched white Afrikaner towns, destitute African squatter camps, modest Coloured townships, rural plantations where the majority of voters were likely to be illiterate farmworkers.
On Sunday before the election, I called the television station in Boston and asked what the producer wanted me to talk about. He said he wanted me to describe what I had seen as vividly as possible.
“How long do I have?” I asked.
“Two minutes,” he replied.
When they started to broadcast, I talked about the people, the preparations, the undercurrent of fear, the pervasive sense of disbelief, and the thousands of police and visitors. At the end the producer came back on the line.
“That was great,” he said. “Do you think you could do that again?”
“How about this time Tuesday and again Thursday?” he said.
“Sure.”
And so, much to the consternation of all my competitors and much of the political establishment in Massachusetts, I reported for the next few nights as a foreign correspondent from South Africa. I relished the irony; sitting inside Massachusetts, I had been ignored. When I went overseas, I ended up on television every other night.
As the election day approached, tension mounted. Parties held tumultuous rallies; volunteers attached pictures and slogans to every vertical surface; reporters speculated endlessly on the outcome. Driving along South Africa’s most modern highways, I marveled to find the once-banned likeness of Nelson Mandela grinning from the top of every lamppost framed by the words “MANDELA FOR PRESIDENT”—thousands of these images, passing rhythmically for miles.
Beneath the fervor of a normal presidential campaign lay a universal sense of amazement, even bewilderment, as people watched the lightning transformation of unattainable fantasies into routine realities. The voting began at seven in the morning on Tuesday, April 26, and stretched over three days. I had persuaded Marijke du Toit, one of my best friends, a female graduate student at the University of Cape Town and daughter of André and Maretha, to join me on this adventure as my driver. Her car was an ancient bright yellow VW bug covered with patches of rust, but we turned it into an official observer car by gluing the bright blue INTERNATIONAL ELECTION OBSERVER signs to each of its door panels. As we drove around the Cape Province and came up on police and military roadblocks, those blue signs caused the officers to step aside and wave us through, sometimes with a crisp salute.
On the first day the voting was limited to the elderly and the infirm, in part to give the officials at each voting site a chance to iron out their procedures. At Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, women in labor and patients who were about to go into surgery insisted on casting their ballots at the hospital’s polling site first. At South African consulates and other polling stations around the world, an estimated quarter of a million overseas South Africans began to cast their ballots.
The next morning people began arriving at the polls as early as 4 A.M. Everywhere the lines grew longer and longer. Black and white, young and old, men and women, stood with eagerness and patience, even when the technical arrangements faltered. The autumn rains opened up, and Marijke and I drove from place to place with the windshield wipers operating at a furious pace. Despite these regular soakings, people refused to give up their places in line. In previous years anti-apartheid activists in the huge townships had taken down the street signs in order to make it harder for the police to navigate. We worried that we would not be able to find the polling places, since we often had only the skimpiest address. It turned out to be easy; we would enter a township and make a wide loop through the streets until we came to the end of an incredibly long line. We would then drive along that line—sometimes for a mile, sometimes for two—passing thousands of standing people, until we reached the community building or church that had been designated as the place to vote.
As voters reached the entrance to the polling station, they were greeted by a strange assembly of policemen, foreign observers, peace monitors, party representatives, and IEC officials like us. They moved quickly past a succession of tables. Their identity books were examined and marked with invisible ink, their fingernails checked and then sprayed with long-lasting dye that showed up under ultraviolet light. They were then handed a national ballot and escorted to a standing booth where they could mark their ballots in secret. If they had any difficulties, a throng of officials, including me, would surround them to make sure that the advice they were given was impartial. After depositing their ballots in a sealed box, they collected a second ballot, for provincial government, and voted again. Minutes later they were back outside, their faces bearing a range of emotions from sober dignity to tearstained joy.
In most parts of the country the voting unfolded more smoothly than expected, with fewer crowds, more efficient operations, and, most amazingly, no violence. The polls closed at 7 P.M. on Thursday, April 28. At that very moment I was standing in a small church courtyard in the African township of Langa. Barney Pityana, my lawyer/activist/priest friend, had invited me to go with him to a celebration of the Eucharist at this local church. He had just stepped inside to change into his liturgical robes and I was standing by myself, reliving the magnitude of the last few days. Above me rose the dark and towering impassivity of Table Mountain, which stretched up nearly three thousand feet high. A brilliant white moon shone in a black and cloudless sky. All around me was silence. At the precise moment the polls closed, I began to hear a strange murmuring washing over the high walls of the churchyard. As I listened, I realized that I was hearing people’s voices as they came rushing out of their houses. All around me I heard a rising blend of excited conversation, laughter, shouts, and songs. From behind my plaster wall I could not see any people, but as I stood there, I felt emotion sweep through me as well. It was the sound of a nation’s soul, rising from the dreams of millions of long-suffering people. A new democracy had been born, and I was hearing the cries of joy at its birth being carried to me on the wind.