Malia in Oahu

Update 11/28/12: A few photos of our bon voyage Malia staff lunch are now posted on Facebook.

“If you come here to help me, you’re wasting your time. If you come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” —Lilla Watson

In 1991 as a graduate student of International Relations, I signed up for a Global Exchange Reality Tour to Cuba. I wanted to learn about the impacts of the U.S. embargo on Cuba and understand what the current socioeconomic realities of the Special Period were on the nation. That trip dramatically expanded my understanding of the power of travel.

While I had backpacked to over 30 countries before that Reality Tour, I had never experienced that type of life sharing journey before. I engaged with grandparents, doctors, teachers, artists, musicians and politicians. In effect Reality Tours changed my life.  I experienced connection and insights, and returned to the United States committed to advocate for sane U.S. foreign policy. Once home, I promptly cut out and placed Lilla’s quote (see above) on my fridge. Little did I know that six years later I’d start working at Global Exchange, where Lilla’s quote found a new home on the Global Exchange office wall.

Visiting Art and Hope in Cuba, with Ethical Traveler

Today it is my bittersweet honor to announce that after almost 16 vibrant years I am transitioning out of Reality Tours. Being the Director has been a true vocation. I’ve had the unique opportunity to combine my skills as an educator, social justice activist and alternative travel business woman to build up Reality Tours’ travel destinations, themes and reach.

Looking back I sit and smile thinking of all the talented, opinionated and solidarity minded people that ebbed and flowed through the Reality Tours department in San Francisco. And I think of the everyday heroes in the U.S. and all around the world whose  generosity of spirit welcomed us, collaborated with us and compelled us to meet them as brothers and sisters. We learned about their struggles, successes and aspirations which inspired us to seek changes in U.S. foreign and economic policies.

Princeton University in Mostar, Bosnia, 2012

I know the model of socially responsible travel to educate and inspire advocacy works. In fact, I could fill volumes based on my personal experiences and those often brilliant, joyful and incredibly painful moments of learning.

From the jungles of the Amazon and the struggle of the Sarayuku nation, to the healing and rehabilitation efforts in IDP camps of Northern Uganda; from facilitating thousands through migration in Havana and sharing the incredible tenacity of spirit of Cuban’s through the “fruits” of their Revolution and in their models of sustainability post “peak oil” to learning about how poachers become conservationists in Tanzania; from the smiles and solemn survival stories of children saved from the sex tourism industry in Cambodia, Nepal, Peru & Thailand to the important organizing efforts of elders training the next generation of leaders in Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and Vietnam… I leave Reality Tours personally and professionally enriched with memories and experiences, and breathtaking vistas.

Malia with Yury, Ecuador Reality Tours program officer

To each of the program officers who so diligently work to take care of every creature comfort, airport transit, hotel reservation, and days and days of program confirmations, thank you for your solidarity!  It is such necessary work, yet it is painstaking and not so glamorous. When Reality Tours runs a 100 departures a year and 98 go off perfectly, nobody knows how much work it takes to make that happen! You are all stars.

Reality Tours would not exist without our members and supporters. Sometimes I’ve called you strangers, then associates and later friends, collaborators, teachers and alumni. I’ve shared some of my deepest human connections beside you, and cultivated some of my closest friendships.

Some of you “serial trippers” know I will miss traveling with you! Again, I could write volumes on what I have seen as humans blossom, when we disconnect from the phones, computers and to-do lists and when we truly spend time to talk, share and push our comfort zones to be and to grow. How many times have I lead a group when each person typically required 1-2 feet around them to have their “zone” of comfort, only by the end of a tour to see everyone touching arms and hugging their new friends good-bye? There are so many surprising rewards on a group travel experience.

Suffolk Univeristy group visiting an orphanage in Busia, Uganda

For those of you I giggled with trying to find a bathroom to wash my fingers after blue ink was all over my face in Tehran, or scrambled to find  “relief” in the fields of Nagpur, India or tried out bartering in crafts markets in Amman knowing but a few words in Arabic, I thank you. To those I cried with, flooded by the power of the human spirit hiking through the Cu Chi and the Sarajevo tunnels; trying to get through check points from the Occupied Territories in Palestine into Israel; and being permeated by the horrific human costs of war in the War Remembrance Museum in Ho Chi Minh City and in Pyong Yang, the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg… I thank you. To those I just held hands with as we heard the testimonies of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, and walking through the Killing Fields, I thank you. And, for those that I dragged out to teach salsa dancing to over and over, ya tu sabes, gracias.

Kevin and Reede being “Good Sports” as my sons dress up

Words cannot express my deepest appreciation to the Global Exchange founders Kevin Danaher, Kirsten Moller and Medea Benjamin to whom I  have been so blessed to work with. They each are hard working visionaries and phenomenal human beings, yet they are also friends, babysitters and cuddlers, and mentors. How I love and admire each of you!

Global Exchange has been a family to me. To all the members and staff, and especially to those that serve and have served on the Board of Directors, you are brothers and sisters and I thank you for your commitment to make this world a better place. Because of your tenacity and persistence, I know “another world is possible”.  I am who I am because of my years at Global Exchange, and I  look forward to moving forward pa’lante and continuing to using my life in service to humanity and to the planet, because its liberation is bound up with mine!

With Aloha,
Malia Everette

As many nations struggle to provide their LGBTQ citizens with the appropriate all-encompassing freedoms and protections deserved of all human beings, South Africa looks on as it boasts one of the most progressive constitutions on the books. After the dissolution of apartheid in 1994, discrimination based on sexual orientation was explicitly prohibited within the Bill of Rights thus ensuring gay and lesbian equality. Additionally, in 2006 South Africa became Africa’s first and the world’s fifth country to recognize same-sex marriage.

While we in the United States are seeing the slow but steady progression of such rights, unfortunately the same cannot be said for the majority of Africans. Even with South Africa’s enviable constitution, Africa in its entirety has experienced a regressive shift in the provision of basic human rights for its LGBTQ citizens. Thirty-eight African countries have laws that criminalize homosexuality, all of which have penalties ranging from minor fines to the death penalty for engaging in homosexual behavior. Many of these laws found their initial creation with colonial times and today continue to serve as outdated and repressive blockades for the advancement of LGBTQ rights. Not only are members of the African LGBTQ community harassed, humiliated, arrested, imprisoned, tortured and even killed, but those friends, families and activists seen as supporting and/or lobbying for their cause experience many of the same consequences.

The most recent and publicized case of the many to arise within the recent wave of homophobia in Africa was the introduction of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill in 2009. The bill is still currently being debated but if passed in its current form by the Ugandan Parliament, it would punish those individuals engaging in acts of homosexuality with life imprisonment. In addition, offenders found to have had sex with a minor or a disabled person or to have infected their partner(s) with HIV/Aids are to face the death penalty. The proposed legislation even goes so far as to punish a third party for the failure to inform the police of possible homosexual activity.

Standing in stark contrast to the current cascade of homophobic campaigns, legislation, and rhetoric plaguing the Africa continent, is South Africa. Not to say that South Africa reigns as the desired example for all countries hoping to perfectly align their laws and the lived realities of their people, because surely South Africa has its flaws. But its progressive laws represent a noble and very brave start to the path of complete LGBTQ acceptance both continentally and globally.

One of the fundamental goals of the LGBTQ Rainbow Nation Delegation is to learn about how South Africa deals with the major schisms that exist between its laws and the day-to-day experiences of LGBTQ citizens. Despite their rights and freedoms having been explicitly outlined within the Bill of Rights, many members of the LGBTQ community see the translation of such rights and freedoms unrealized as they live feeling unsafe in their own nation. More specifically, a demographic currently experiencing this particular sentiment are black lesbians residing in various South African townships. There has been a recent spike in the rape of these women, such an overwhelming spike exhibiting such malicious intent that the phenomenon has earned its own term – “corrective rape.”

“Corrective rape” occurs when a member of the LGBTQ community is raped by a member of the opposite sex in an effort to “correct” their sexual orientation. The most publicized case of this practice to emerge in South Africa occurred in April 2008 when Eudy Simelane, member of the South African women’s football (soccer) team, was gang-raped and murdered by a group of men. An avid campaigner for LGBTQ equality rights, Simelane was one of the first women to live openly as a lesbian in both her hometown and on the national stage.

Anti-gay acts such as the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill (2009) and South Africa’s “corrective rape” trend not only spot the African social landscape, but the world’s as well. It can be safely said that there isn’t a country in the world that exists as completely free of all degrees of homophobia. What sets South Africa apart from its fellow African nations and from the rest of the world is its unique, complicated and very tumultuous history. The acute awareness of such history has manifested into laws that theoretically accept, accommodate, and protect ALL its citizens. With such guidelines in place, social environments ranging from urban to rural, rich to poor, black to white can begin to move forward and internalize a progressive mentality that normalizes the absolute equality of LGBTQ South Africans.

It is one of the major intentions of the LGBTQ Rainbow Nation Delegation to connect members and supporters of the global LGBTQ community. By learning about parallel issues and struggles that connect us we can create a broad knowledge base and awareness that will ensure no one is left behind in the fight for equal rights – African or American. More specifically, this delegation will serve as proof that hope exists for LGBTQ rights across the African continent and that the myths of homosexuality as ‘un-African’ and/or a ‘Western imposition’ quite simply, fall flat. Being LGBTQ identified is an aspect of the human condition and transcends all ethnic and racial boundaries as exemplified by the existence of LGBTQ individuals everywhere in the world.

In addition to learning about historical and current issues facing South Africa’s LGBTQ community, don’t miss the opportunity to meet with leaders and activists at the forefront of South Africa’s LGBTQ equality movement. Intimate and exclusive, thought-provoking and rewarding, this delegation means to leave you feeling as part of a global (and colorful) family.

Blog piece written by Elliot Owen, Africa & Asia Reality Tours Program Associate.

Find out more information about the South Africa Rainbow Nation delegation on the Reality Tours website. You may also contact Alessandro at alessandro [at] globalexchange.org or Elliot at nabadu [at] gmail.com for more details.

After only 18 days in South Africa I am hardly an expert, but I want to share what I saw and learned of this complex and beautiful country. I had to keep reminding myself that I was visiting a place that had undergone a huge transition just 12 years ago and is still struggling with the legacy of apartheid. We witnessed people and places going about the routines of daily life, some of it very familiar looking urban life, and yet most of these people, including our professional guides and drivers, had only had this kind of normalcy since 1994.

I was on a tour with 9 other Americans organized by Global Exchange, a San Francisco based organization dedicated to global human rights. I wanted to see the natural beauty and the animals for which Africa is famous. I was rewarded by an abundance of visual delights from oceans, plains and mountains to penguins, giraffes and elephants. I also wanted to learn about post-apartheid South Africa, and about the anti-apartheid struggle and how it was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, who started his nonviolent activism in South Africa. That is the story I want to tell.

Gandhi came to South Africa in 1893 as an Indian lawyer, young, naive and loyal to England, then the empire that ruled both India and South Africa.. But he soon learned that England was not loyal to him because of the color his skin and, finding himself sprawled on a railroad station platform because he refused to leave the first class coach he was riding in, he resolved to do something about it. He remained in South Africa for 23 years to organize and defend the human rights of his fellow Indians, at first just the merchants and later the indentured laborers who were brought in to work the cane fields. From the beginning, Gandhi’s approach was to resist unjust, racist laws without the use of violence. He and his Indian followers used people power and soul force, basically taking the higher moral ground.

Not only was Gandhi successful in obtaining some respect for Indians, but he encouraged Blacks to follow the same course. According to one source, the Black leadership did not think the Black culture of the time would tolerate receiving violence and not retaliating in kind. So the African National Congress (ANC), founded in 1912, did not initially adopt nonviolence as their strategy.

However, by the time Nelson Mandela became active as a leader of the ANC Youth League in 1944, nonviolence was the avowed policy of the organization, which adhered to it even while other anti-apartheid groups called for their followers to take up arms against the White oppressor. Mandela reluctantly gave up this policy in 1960 in the face of increasing state violence against peaceful protestors, but he and the other leaders of the ANC preferred to use sabotage against non-human targets in an attempt to avoid taking life. Still, Mandela stated in a ” Time Magazine” article in 2003 that he “followed the Gandhian strategy for as long as I could.”

With this history as background, we wanted to know if anyone recognizes Gandhi’s influence today and if there is a consciousness of nonviolence in the country. In one way Gandhi is recognized: formally via statues, plaques at historical sites, and in several museums. We were able to meet with his granddaughter, Ela Gandhi, and to visit the Phoenix Farm where she grew up, and which was founded by Gandhi himself. While Ela gave us hope for the continuation of Gandhi’s legacy in general, the condition at Phoenix Farm was more symbolic of his lack of influence today. The house where Gandhi lived– a simple but ample structure — had been destroyed by a fire and rebuilt. It contained a reasonable collection of documents and photographs, but it was not open except by appointment. The printing shop where Gandhi and later his sons and even Ela had hand printed the newspaper that was a major organizing tool for the movement for South African Indian rights was basically empty. There are plans to reinstall the old machinery, etc. when there are enough funds. A large, two- roomed library on the premises is being used as an elementary school for 250 children, in keeping with Gandhi’s practice of serving the community, but it was staffed by only 4 teachers with 114 kids to each classroom!

More poignant, though, is the state of South Africa’s current economy in terms of who is served by it. While Gandhi called for local self-sufficiency, and identified himself with the poorest of the poor, and while he sought Truth or God through being with the people he served, thus bringing morality and spirituality into the political arena, today’s South Africa is caught firmly in the grip of global corporate capitalism. Sadly this means that repayment of the apartheid -era debt, and adherence to the demands of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank which call for privatization of public services come before and in fact cancel out the needs of the poor. And the poor in South Africa are the majority. Apart from the elite and a small middle class, 75% of the population is poor and Black.

I admit I was very disappointed to learn that Mandela’s party, the ANC, had chosen a path that basically turns its back on the poor. There are those who say that Mandela had no choice, given the power vested in the global economic structures, that to defy their demands is to lose foreign investors and face the collapse of the country. Maybe they are right. And there are others who say that these were not decisions made by Mandela but by his vice-president who is now president, Thabo Mbeki. This does not absolve Mandela of all responsibility, but his focus as president and his legacy to the country is the process of unification across racial lines, the nonviolent transition of power from oppressor to oppressed, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that provided the nation a means to heal from the brutality of 50 years of apartheid.

These contributions raise Nelson Mandela above the stature of most world leaders, and seem miraculous coming from a man who spent 27 years in prison. I highly recommend the documentary film called “Long Night’s Journey Into Day”, about the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”

I imagine that Mandela, now retired, is also troubled by the state of affairs in his beloved South Africa. To quote the 2003 article again, he wrote, “As we find ourselves in jobless economies, societies in which small minorities consume while the masses starve, we find ourselves forced to rethink the rationale of our current globalization and to ponder the Gandhian alternative.”

The legacy of apartheid — a rigid system of separation of the races, enforced by intimidation and violence, and non-Whites marginalized in every way– is seen in the acres and acres of make-shift shacks that house squatters for whom there is no available housing, and in the “townships.” The latter are large isolated tracts of two-room, cement block houses, commonly called match-box housing. They were constructed by the apartheid government to contain the millions of Black and Coloured workers whose city neighborhoods were entirely demolished in order to remove them from proximity to Whites-only neighborhoods. Townships are like sprawling suburbs to the large cities, but no provision was made for stores or services, so people have adapted by selling small amounts of goods out of their homes. We visited a shack that had such a store in its front room, dark and unlit. In addition there was one bedroom and a tiny common room/cooking area with no running water. The whole house would fit into one of our living rooms.

Under apartheid townships, not to mention shack communities, were denied access to electricity and running water. The people used candles, coal and propane for light, heat and cooking. One of the first improvements after the elections of 1994 was to provide electricity (and public water taps) so that by now about 75% have electricity. However, the power grid was not upgraded to account for this new demand, resulting in a fairly new phenomenon: blackouts. The night we arrived in Capetown, we had to walk the twelve floors to our hotel rooms, because the power had just gone out in the entire city. Also until recently there was no sanitation in the shack communities. Now a ring of sturdy outhouses circles the communities and are cleaned out regularly by a municipal sanitation truck.

But perhaps the worst legacy of apartheid are the attitudes that are hard to change: by Whites that Blacks are inferior or violent; by Blacks that Whites are all well-off and racist; by Coloureds that neither Whites nor Blacks will be concerned for their welfare. One example of how this plays out is that Coloureds now resent the affirmative action policies that favor Blacks because they can result in Coloureds being displaced or subordinated to less well-trained Black supervisors. However, the country calls itself a rainbow nation, and there was no evidence of racial violence, surely a big achievement.

There is growing discontent in South Africa. Unemployment is over 30%, new housing is slow in coming, roads are not paved as promised, and privatized water and electricity are more expensive than most can afford. But still people remember how it was 12 years ago when only White people could move about freely, while all non-Whites had to carry pass books or ID cards and needed their employer’s written permission to leave their township. When every single facility and institution had a Whites-only section. When arbitrary arrests often resulted in beatings and imprisonment for indefinite amounts of time.

People remember, and so are still hopeful that the new South Africa where they are free to move about and to vote, will bring them more prosperity. Many are organizing to bring about the needed changes. We visited one group in the township of Soweto, that has decided not to wait for the ANC to deliver. Because of poverty and unemployment, the people cannot afford the high price of privatized water and electricity. The Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee is ripping out the water and electric meters and connecting directly to the municipal grid and water mains. Then they call a meeting and march to the corporations that try to sell the electricity and water upon which life depends, and deliver the broken meters. It is an empowering, well organized protest that is gaining ground, and it is based on democratic decision making and on nonviolence. So, there is anger, there is hope, and there is action.

Our bus pulls up to a brick building with barred windows in the struggling black township of Soweto, another heart-wrenching stop on our Reality Tour of South Africa. It’s Morris Isaacson High School, from which students marched on a June day in 1976 to plead for a humane education, only to be gunned down by the police: shot in the back as they fled.

Today is the last day of school and the kids are all juiced. They horse around outside in noisy groups, still wearing British uniforms. The seniors are signing each other’s shirts with felt-tipped pens. Some of them stop to talk with us. One wants to be a botanist. His friend, more thoughtful, isn’t sure. In 1976 Africans were trained only to be servants for the white economy. But these could be teen-agers anywhere, with futures to behold. Some 800 children died in that uprising, according to our guides, who are people of color themselves. Standing here now–this sunny spring day, the kids so carefree–how can we believe such a thing? “After that,” says William, “South Africa was never the same again. People said: So far, and no further!”

This is a different kind of Africa tour. No game parks, no animals. Stalking people, instead: cross-cultural understanding. We look around the school. In the computer room the teacher says that students love to e-mail teen-agers in other countries, so eager are they to join the big world. But the school ran out of money for the internet fees, because fortune has not followed freedom for the people of South Africa. In a classroom someone has written on the blackboard: How Can a Hungry Teacher Teach a Hungry Student? In another room the lesson: Love Them All, But Trust No One.

“We’ve created moments of darkness and light” is how Clive Newman, our charismatic head guide, describes these tours, which are put together by the human-rights group Global Exchange. As with Reality Tours to other contentious parts of the world, these are educational trips for people who want to really get involved in a nation’s drama–people who, given the choice, would rather hang out with oppressed foreigners than those who are in charge. Clive Newman and his guides are not just witty microphone jocks, but men and women who took part in the resistance against white-separatist rule–a campaign which won out in 1994. Their excitement about helping to build a new nation is sobered by the horrendous indignities of the past. “We are giving you our lived experience,” Clive tells me one night over drinks. “We’ve been beaten; we’ve been jailed. This is our lived experience!” Such a trip, then, becomes a specific kind of holiday–a vacation from the deadening effects of indifference to the less fortunate people of the world. So it should come as no surprise that our group of eight Americans is a teary-eyed gang of aging pinkos, including an inspiring woman of 86 who’s nearly blind but who tape-records everything so she won’t miss a word. For four days in Johannesburg the schedule is rigorous. A human-rights commission briefing; a hospital; Museum Africa; a health clinic; an abused-women’s center. Driving around the city is an education in itself, seeing how the sidewalks of the white business center have become free-form African marketplaces; how settlers have reclaimed abandoned offices and army barracks; how traditional healers have set up shop under an elevated highway. One afternoon we visit the black ghetto of Alexandra, half a million people jammed into one filthy square mile, their shacks patched together from corrugated iron and plywood, with tires on the roofs to keep them from blowing away. Then we tour the rich ghetto of Sandton a mile away, the fine homes barricaded behind electrified fences and razor wire. That night we attend a joyous African dance performance at the Market Theater, and on the way back to our hotel the driver runs all the red lights, as they do now in Jo’burg at night, to outwit the carjackers.

Hope and devolution, darkness and light. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been meeting for five years, its impossible assignment the healing of barbarities hundreds of years old. More than 7,000 policemen and other apparatchiks of the white apartheid state have come before amnesty hearings to confess their crimes against humanity and to ask legal absolution. We attend such a hearing at which four policemen are seeking amnesty for the 1987 disappearance of one Betty Boom, a military operative for the African National Congress, and three of her cadres. A three-man amnesty panel is grilling a small, older man–the only policeman among the accused who is black. He steadfastly denies knowing what happened to Betty Boom and her comrades, despite a vast weight of evidence and presumption that they were executed and buried on a farm. Exasperated, one judge finally says, “Mr. Jantjie, please, we are not children here. You can see how absurd your statement is, can’t you?” At another point he chides, “You’ve got to be joking.” A painful scene: the tables full of lawyers surrounding the little man…his desperate lies, as if he alone were responsible for what happened to his people…the booths full of translators echoing back the testimony in four mutually incomprehensible languages…the relatives of the victims sitting in the front row, straining to understand why the policemen won’t tell them what happened to their loved ones. Later in a stairwell I run into one relative, a large woman with a scarf around her head. “If they were not the judges here I would have beaten him!” she assures me. “We were expecting the truth! We want to know where they are! If they were killed, where are they buried? But we are angry now!” We meet other people who are upset about the reconciliation process because white leaders have shown little willingness to apologize or atone for the past. The best thing South Africa has ever given to the world is the example of forgiveness set by Nelson Mandela in 1990 when he was released from prison after 27 years. Imagine it: dining with the very guards who once confined him. To an amazing extent, the African majority have done their part in the healing process. At amnesty hearings 80% of victims’ families have forgiven the perpetrators. But, as I see in the paper today, the country is still waiting for the appearance of “a white prince of reconciliation”–the white Mandela.

Soweto, 20 miles from downtown, sprawls out under a blanket of smog from a power plant that was built to serve distant white communities. Some 3 million people, from Mandelas to shantytown squatters, live here in South Africa’s soul capital, its Harlem. We tour the Regina Mundi (Queen of the World) church, where services were held for the massacred children in 1976, and where survivors sought sanctuary from the police. An elderly caretaker shows us the bullet holes in the ceiling, the corner broken off the altar by a rifle butt. We tour the two-bedroom, red-brick house where Winnie Mandela endured the years of her husband’s imprisonment, sleeping on the kitchen floor to survive the many assassination attempts by government snipers. Just when we’re getting depressed about the human condition, Clive takes us to lunch at a bright little Soweto cafe, The Rock Pub & Grill, which has folk art on the walls, ESPN on the tube, and Capetown jazz in the air. The owner, Tebogo Motswai, is young and upbeat and empowered, a dropped-out BMW engineer who’s starting a chain of these grills. “Making friends every day,” he’s happy to tell us. “We’re a recognized brand.” He shows me around his dusty but enterprising neighborhood. To one side is a room-sized shipping container where people who can’t afford phones are lined up to make cellular calls. Nearer to the road, a guy working out of his van is set up to repair mufflers. In the shade of a billboard, a refugee from Mozambique sits in a discarded car seat offering to do shoe repair. “Soweto has always set the pace,” says Tebogo Motswai. “In the white areas the walls are so high you don’t even know your neighbors. Here, we know you.” An old man who sells coal plods past in his horse-drawn cart. Someone pulls up in a flashy Honda sports coupe and the homeys all cluster around; it’s one of South Africa’s biggest soccer stars. “We call it the ubuntu concept,” Tebogo tells me. “Ubuntu?” “Humanity,” he says. “It means, if I have a party, you don’t need an invitation.”

We fly south for an hour and a half to rural Umtata, then drive into the hills through forests of long-needled pines to the village of Mbolompo, which rarely sees foreigners. Two or three times a year a Reality Tour comes to visit with the clan of a Mr. Bam, and when the women spot our bus coming they start singing and dancing a welcome song outside their thatch-roofed huts. Mr. Bam is a man of some years with a deeply lined face and a coonskin cap like Davy Crockett’s. He leads us on a walk down to the community garden, pointing out the mountain valley where they had always lived until the white government declared it a tree farm and trucked them down here to fend for themselves. Mr. Bam is proud of the garden, which was started with a grant from the Netherlands. Peanuts, cabbage, spinach, green peppers. In the beginning, he says, thirty people tended the garden. But it’s hard work, carrying water up from the river, and now only eight people are left. I ask him if he’ll let all thirty of them share in the harvest and he laughs. “No, no, I go to fence and say, ‘Give me money.’ Because they run away!” Potatoes, onions, carrots, chilis, tomatoes. In any case, Mr. Bam has bigger things to worry about. He confides to me that other clans in the village are jealous because of his garden, and because he filed a claim to get his old land back without going through the chief. “Headman want to kill me!” he exclaims. He demonstrates, comically, how he dodges the bullets. “God protect me!” he exults. “Bullet can’t come to me!” Later we sit down for a lunch they’ve prepared. The village women are all giggly as we eat together inside a dirt-floored hut. Then we unload the crates of food we’ve brought in payment for their hospitality: sugar, flour, rice, corn. We take their pictures, and they dance again, and this time we dance with them. But our mission to Mbolompo is not over. We’ve gotten word that the chief himself wants to see us. So we drive to his part of the village, and are greeted again by dancing, singing black women in their Sunday best, straight out of 1890s Mississippi. They seat us on chairs in the chief’s yard. Then an older woman steps forward–the village speaker, it seems. “Sometimes we see airplanes fly over!” she cries out, gesturing to the sky. “But we never DREAMED that some day people would COME HERE from AMERICA!” With melodramatic animation, she goes on to tell us that her clan wants its own community garden, “so we can sell and get money–AND BE LIKE EVERYBODY!” She begs us to understand how industrious but poor they are: “We know how to bake! But we have no goods! We have a preschool! But nothing where children to play! We have a sewing project! But not enough maa-sheens!” And in case we’ve missed the point she shouts in conclusion, “WE HAVE A LACK OF CASH HERE! WILL YOU BOOST US TO A GOOD STANDARD?” We applaud her showmanship, although we’re not used to being hit up so brazenly. Then Clive suggests, tactfully, that if the women have some of their fine products to sell the Americans might be interested. So we buy a few baskets and dresses–the first crafts they’ve ever exchanged for money. The transaction is so innocent, both sides are delighted with the prices. Then they feed us, and we hobnob with the chief: a roly-poly man who (we learn later) took the government reparations payments meant for the village and bought himself a fleet of taxis in Umtata.

Laughter and tears. Darkness and light. We drive through rolling green hills to the cemetery where lies Steve Biko, who proclaimed black consciousness in the ’70s. Clive, who’s usually so gregarious, walks ahead on his own to the marble slab. There he tells us: “Steve Biko taught us that black is beautiful, regardless of what the white people were doing to us–that we should be proud. We should stand up high, at a time when we were being followed day and night…having flowers and coffins delivered to our houses…seeing hearses drive up and down the street…hearing perverse laughter over the phone.” It’s plain, by the tremor in his voice, that he can forgive all he wants, but he’ll never forget. “At a dark time,” he says, “when we could have given up the struggle, Steve Biko said, ‘You have an identity.’” For that the police arrested Biko, stripped him naked, chained him to a chair, and beat him to death. Capetown is our last stop, a cosmopolitan city pinched gorgeously between mountain and sea. We visit some optimistic development projects in the pitiful suburban squattertowns. We spend a pleasant Sunday at a barbecue cookoff with some working-class families, and a morning in Pollsmoor Prison meeting common criminals. One day we even join a march through the streets to protest unfair bank practices, waving signs that read, MAKE BANKS SERVE THE POOR!, gladly meddling in other peoples’ affairs. We visit museums and shrines to the atrocities of apartheid: the different mass murders, the forced removal of 60,000 people from District Six, the migrant-labor slums of Lwandle. A poem at one memorial begins: Remember to call at my grave when freedom finally walks the land… To white South Africas who say, “Forget about the past,” these museums reply: We can’t forget, lest it happen again. We take a ferry out to Robben Island, the political prison where Nelson Mandela spent most of his years. Now it’s a big tourist attraction, and our guide is a former inmate himself. A squat, graying man, he calmly describes how they were beaten with pick handles, or buried in sand up to their necks and urinated upon. “The warders,” he says, “never got tired of punishing us.” Now, he admits, he hates coming back here to lead these tours. His nightmares have returned. But it’s hard to find a job these days, and he has a family to feed. It is the accumulation of all of these poignant moments, day after day, which has made this tour such a moving experience, unlike any trip I’ve ever taken. As a musician named Mack tells me in Capetown: “Every person you see is a survivor, and every survivor is a superstar.” In the end, at the Cape of Good Hope, we do run into four ostriches stilting along the beach like prehistoric creatures. But how can mere wildlife satisfy us now?