EPILOGUE

It was nearly a year after the events described here before I managed to leave southern Africa. I saw more of South Africa, including, at last, Soweto, although my involvement with the country felt relatively superficial once I was no longer teaching. Rachel did get a job in Zimbabwe and settled there. We did not make it Cape to Cairo. I traveled overland as far north as the Serengeti Plain in Tanzania before running out of money, screwing up my courage, and returning, via Europe, to the United States.

Coming home was less harrowing than anticipated. I was soon making a living by writing. My reservations about American magazines faded, and I was too busy to attend to all the tremors of the long culture shock of returning. South Africa stayed with me, though. The South Africans I knew, their humor, their intelligence, their heroism, their country's uncompleted tragedy—my own view of the world had been enriched, and darkened, I realized, by all this. I decided to try to write about South Africa, after all, for Americans, proceeding from my own experience. The result is this book.

The period of comparative political quiet in South Africa that followed the events of 1980 ended in August 1983, when thirteen thousand people from throughout the country gathered at Mitchell's Plain to found a new multiracial anti-apartheid coalition called the United Democratic Front. Opposition to the following year's elections for the tricameral parliament was the rallying point for the formation of the UDF, but the organization's political roots went much deeper than that. The UDF endorsed the Freedom Charter, and the list of its patrons included Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and other ANC leaders. Albertina Sisulu and Oscar Mpetha were founding presidents. Essentially an umbrella organization, the UDF within months contained more than six hundred youth and community groups with a

membership estimated at 1.5 million, making it the largest formally organized national resistance seen in South Africa since the Congress Alliance of the 1950s.

COSAS, the student organization that Mattie worked with, became a major voice of dissent for young blacks and a key UDF affiliate. A number of independent black trade unions also joined UDF, and started working toward the creation of a national labor federation capable of challenging the government directly. UDF-organized consumer boycotts, work stayaways, and protests against inferior education, the pass laws, and other injustices became more and more frequent and well coordinated. The successful boycott of the elections for the tricameral parliament dealt the government's "reform" program a crippling blow.

After the August 1984 elections, a wave of violent protest began to sweep black townships throughout South Africa. The government's response was extreme repression, and in the next two years more than two thousand people were killed. In July 1985, the government declared an official "state of emergency" for the first time since Sharpeville, granting security forces sweeping new powers to act against dissent. Thousands of activists were jailed without charges. In September, COSAS was outlawed. A number of UDF leaders were charged with treason (for allegedly conspiring with the ANC to create a revolutionary climate). Latin America-style death squads, widely suspected of connections with the security forces, began to operate in South Africa, kidnapping and murdering teachers, lawyers, and other community leaders. A second state of emergency was declared in June 1986, and twenty thousand more people were detained. Despite martial law, the death toll continued to mount.

Black anger often focused on black collaborators with the government, resulting in attacks on black policemen, local authorities, and the new Indian and "colored" members of Parliament. School boycotts became semipermanent in many townships, and troops were called out with increasing frequency to help the police crush protests. But the still unequal confrontation with security forces, the furious destruction of the outposts of apartheid in the townships, were no longer confined to urban areas like the Cape Flats and Soweto, as hundreds of obscure "locations" began to rise up in every corner of the country.

Inkatha, the conservative Zulu nationalist organization led by Chief Mangosuthu (formerly Gatsha) Buthelezi, predictably resented the rise of the UDF. Inkatha impis took to breaking up UDF meetings and rallies, then proceeded to attacking UDF funerals. Fighting be-

tween the two groups escalated steadily, in Natal and the KwaZulu bantustan, and, later, in the Transvaal townships, where the migrant workers' hostels became Inkatha strongholds. There was also friction between UDF and AZAPO.AZAPO remained a small but vocal group, claiming for itself the mantle of the Black Consciousness movement, continuing to exclude whites from its membership, and attacking UDF for its "popular front" approach to the liberation struggle. Local clashes between UDF and AZAPO supporters grew more violent after the state of emergency was imposed, making it impossible for groups to meet to iron out their differences.

A severe economic downturn, the worst in South Africa since the Great Depression, began in 1983, sending black unemployment soaring and reducing opportunities for black school-leavers. The projections made in the boom year of 1980 for the skilled labor shortage had to be scaled down. Even white workers began feeling the economic pinch, and those whites who blamed the government's "reforms" for their deteriorating position continued to defect to the far-right political parties. Foreign investment in South Africa declined, because of depressed local conditions, the likelihood of increased unrest, and pressure from the international anti-apartheid movement.

That pressure, and particularly the tremendous upsurge of antiapartheid feeling in the United States, seemed to belie Mattie's pessimism about America's potential role in the South African struggle. International economic sanctions had long been a centerpiece of resistance strategy, but few foresaw the impact of the August 1985 decision by American banks—under pressure from the disinvestment movement—not to roll over their short-term loans to the South African government. The South African economy went into a profound crisis, the rand plummeted, and the government was forced to suspend repayment of its $14 billion foreign debt. The debate in the West over disinvestment had already swung dramatically in favor of the disinvestment movement, as polls began to show that a large majority of black South Africans supported disinvestment, even if they believed it would hurt them personally in the short-term. (Many blacks were already making sacrifices, of course, in the campaign to undermine the apartheid economy—through strikes, stayaways, sabotage, and some remarkably successful consumer boycotts.) Finally, in 1986, the United States Congress passed, over President Reagan's veto, the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, mandating economic sanctions against South Africa. The European Economic Community had imposed less severe sanctions the previous month.

The Botha government, after a period of improved relations with the West—largely attributable to the "constructive engagement" policy of the Reagan Administration, and its counterpart in Margaret Thatcher's Britain—seemed to remove world opinion from its priorities once again as the uprising of 1984-86 gained momentum and international criticism of apartheid stepped up accordingly. Deaths in detention, which had become rare after the murder of Steve Biko, became regular occurrences once more. Aggressive destabilization of neighboring states, assassination of South Africans in exile, and full-scale military raids against suspected ANC offices and facilities in neighboring countries all became expected behavior for the "regional powerhouse." Intense military and economic pressure were brought to bear on Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Botswana to eliminate the ANC missions in those countries, causing widespread suffering in Mozambique and, in early 1986, toppling the government of Lesotho. The fierce bush wars against SWAPO in Namibia and (in alliance with the UNITA rebels) the government in Angola showed no signs of waning.

The ANC, meanwhile, stepped up its sabotage campaign and in the mid-1980s became a much more visible presence inside South Africa. The exiled leadership announced a new strategy, "people's war," and in 1985 Oliver Tambo called on the movement's supporters to "render the country ungovernable." Some townships began to be described in resistance circles as "liberated zones," and growing numbers of grenades and AK-47s began to turn up alongside the bricks and homemade petrol bombs in the arsenals of untrained black youths. As in the 1976 uprising, the ANC seemed to be following the revolt inside the country rather than leading it, but this time the UDF was explicitly representing the liberation movement's interests inside the country, and the UDF at least showed a capacity for mass organization. Internationally, the ANC's stature rose, and Western governments finally began making official contacts with its leadership.

Although the Botha regime ultimately managed to crush the uprising of the mid-1980s, effectively outlawing the UDF in 1988, South Africa's black majority was clearly feeling its power now, and in the late 1980s the major focus of resistance shifted to the trade unions. As with so many other government-initiated reforms, the legalization of independent black trade unions, originally conceived as a modernization of labor relations, had ended up creating an important opening for the resistance. Although the unions were banned from explicitly political activity, they soon began to provide what was probably the

most democratic, and certainly the most radical, expression of the black majority's political aspirations. They called massive strikes and stayaways, undermining corporate profits and state tax revenues and frightening foreign investors. Other government-initiated reforms, such as the repeal of several major apartheid laws—including, in 1986, the pass laws—each seemed to be too little too late. Nothing would suffice any longer, it seemed, to satisfy either the black majority or the international community but democracy: one-person-one-vote in a unitary South Africa. The bantustan system was plainly a fiasco, and the six remaining "non-independent" homelands seemed unlikely ever to accept "independence." Still, P.W. Botha refused even to entertain the idea of an end to white-minority rule. Instead, his government concentrated, myopically and destructively, on the continuing militarization of South African society against the "total onslaught" of communism and the Soviet Union's lackeys, the ANC.

Something had to give, and in the end many things did, including the Soviet Union itself and P.W. Botha's health. He suffered a stroke in early 1989, and later that year was replaced as State President by F.W. de Klerk, a relatively young, rather colorless Cabinet minister known primarily for his caution. The government that de Klerk inherited was confused, repressive, and demoralized; the country itself was chaotic, internationally isolated, and in economic decline. The Soviet threat was in the process of magically evaporating and, after a major defeat of South African forces by the Cubans defending southern Angola, the long war in Namibia was finally ending, with U.N.-supervised elections on the horizon. Namibian independence would mean that there would be only one white-ruled state left in Africa. De Klerk clearly needed legitimate back leaders to talk to, and everyone knew where they were: in exile and in prison. And so, in October 1989, he released a small group of prominent political prisoners, including Walter Sisulu, the ANC's former general secretary. Then, having seen that no cataclysm occurred, de Klerk took the big step, and in February 1990 he released Nelson Mandela and lifted the longstanding bans on the ANC, the PAC, and the South African Communist Party, while also lifting restrictions on the UDF.

It was a great breakthrough, and much of the world seemed to share South Africa's joy, particularly at the release of Mandela, who emerged from twenty-seven years in prison, at the age of seventy-two, spry, resolute, and, to judge from his public remarks, quite clear-minded about the uncompleted task of liberation. More than ten thousand exiles returned to the country, the state of emergency was finally lifted,

and Mandela and the ANC, suspending their "armed struggle" after nearly thirty years, began to reconstitute themselves as an aboveground political force, signing up hundreds of thousands of members and starting negotiations with the government about a new political dispensation—negotations that ended up dragging on for years, as the National Party pushed a "power-sharing" plan that would entrench white power inside a black-majority government.

These negotiations took place against a backdrop of appalling political violence, as the white ultra-right and the black ultra-left (the PAC's armed wing had still not renounced armed struggle) conducted sporadic terrorist campaigns, and the rivalry between the UDF/ANC and Inkatha grew into a small-scale civil war. Thousands died in Natal and KwaZulu and in some of the townships around Johannesburg. In the constitutional negotiations, Chief Buthelezi became an avid proponent of "federalism"—a system of strong regional governments that would, in effect, allow him to keep his fiefdom even after the bantustans were dissolved back into South Africa. Buthelezi's credibility as an independent politician was grievously compromised, however, when it was revealed, first in 1991, that Inkatha had been receiving money, arms, and military training from the South African police and army. Before the negotiations were over, Buthelezi was making common cause, in something called the Freedom Alliance, with the white far right, whose leaders were also interested in preserving their fiefdoms and in "cultural independence."

Throughout the negotiations, which were held near Johannesburg, the convulsions of political violence outside the halls affected the progress inside. After a massacre in a settlement called Boipatong, for instance, in June 1992—during which Inkatha impis went on a rampage, allegedly with help from the police, and killed at least thirty-nine people—the ANC delegation angrily broke off talks. Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders talked frequently about a shadowy "third force" behind much of the violence, presumably drawn from the ranks of the police and the army and often assisting Inkatha, and numerous independent investigations tended to confirm their suspicions. Mandela made it clear that he held de Klerk personally responsible for not doing more to halt "third force" activity, and publicly accused his main negotiating partner of indifference toward the loss of black life. The tension between the two men was terrible at times, and much of the day-to-day negotiating was eventually delegated to other leaders on both sides. In April 1993, Chris Hani, the general secretary of the ANC, was assassinated outside his home by white right-wingers. Hani,

a Communist Party leader and former commmander-in-chief of Umkhonto We Sizwe, was perhaps the second most popular man in the ANC, and his assassination, which provoked countrywide unrest, finally galvanized the negotiators into fixing a date for democratic elections: April 27, 1994.

The negotiations had produced an interim constitution and a new map of South Africa, with nine new non-racial provinces and no bantustans. The first elections would offer proportional representation, with each party presenting a list of candidates and, according to the number of votes it received, taking a commensurate number of seats in the national parliament. There would also be nine regional parliaments, elected on separate ballots. For the first five years of democracy, there was to be a government of national unity, meaning that any party that received more than five percent of the vote nationally would be guaranteed a seat in the Cabinet—not quite the "power sharing" that the National Party had hoped for, but making it certain, nonetheless, that there would be a place in the new Cabinet for F.W. de Klerk and some of his fellow Nationalists. Only in 1999 would the country move to full majority rule. Indeed, a permanent constitution still needed to be written. (This daunting task would fall to the new non-racial parliament.) The white ultra-right was unhappy with the plan, naturally, and continued to talk of war and an Afrikaner homeland, or volkstaat, and the black ultra-left was also unhappy, believing that the ANC leaders had sold out the interests of the masses on critical questions such as the redistribution of land and wealth, in order to gain power for themselves. But even the PAC agreed to participate in the election, and Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts.

Most of the election campaign was conducted in the shadow of boycott threats by Inkatha and the white ultra-right, with the ongoing violence in Natal and Kwazulu, which was by then claiming five hundred lives a month, making normal electioneering in the region impossible. In the end, the white ultra-right split, with a majority faction led by General Constandt Viljoen entering the elections, and the bitter-enders mounting a frightening but ineffectual bombing campaign. At the last possible moment, after having made a secret deal with the de Klerk government for vast amounts of land, Inkatha also joined the elections. Campaigning in Inkatha-controlled territory remained a suicidal proposition for the ANC, however, as a group of activists discovered when they tried to put up Mandela posters in Ulundi, the capital of KwaZulu, a few days before the election. The group was at-

tacked by a crowd of two hundred Inkatha supporters. Two of their vehicles were burned, and two of their members were shot dead. The survivors hid in the Ulundi police station, where the KwaZulu police repeatedly threatened them with death (they were saved by three South African Police officers who happened to be present), Chief Buthelezi himself gave them an angry lecture, and then, only minutes later, with Buthelezi still in the building, one of the ANC men was killed with a shotgun blast in a darkened corridor.

Other bantustans were simply imploding under the pressure of the approach of democracy—Ciskei when its civil servants rebelled, Bophuthatswana when the entire government service, including the police, turned against its dictator. A motley white ultra-right force tried to ride to the rescue of the president of Bophuthatswana, but was ignominiously routed by the bantustan security forces. Finally, the South African army was sent in to restore order. This episode contained several of the main ironic themes of the apartheid-twilight period: the hapless revolt against his masters by a bantustan leader; the growing popularity, in black townships and bantustans, of the long-detested South African army; the continuing collapse of the myth of white invincibility.

These violent interludes and sideshows notwithstanding, the election campaign of 1994 took place largely in an atmosphere of peace and political maturity. There were some twenty parties on the national ballot, but the two main contenders were clearly the ANC and the National Party, and both played to the political center, where the votes presumably were. The ANC was leading a "patriotic front" alliance that included the South African Communist Party, so naturally the National Party waved the red flag of anti-communism, and yet it was unclear how much success this tactic would have with black voters, many of whom still tended to associate communism with opposition to apartheid. In any case, the Communist Party, heeding events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, had so moderated its views on basic questions such as nationalization that it was no longer clear what sort of "socialist transformation" its leaders had in mind for South Africa. The ANC's published plans for restructuring the economy were ambitious but far from radical. The National Party also hoisted its traditional swartgevaar (black peril) campaign flag among whites, "coloreds," and Indians, but this too was unlikely to endear the party to the African majority.

The election itself was distinguished by a near-total lack of violence. Ballot counting was slow and chaotic, but the ANC's victory,

with 63 percent of the vote, was never in doubt. The National Party finished a distant second, with 20 percent, and Inkatha received 10 percent. General Viljoen's far-right party received just over 2 percent. The Democratic Party, the latest incarnation of the white liberal parliamentary opposition from the apartheid period, received a bit less than 2 percent, and the PAC, the ANC's more radical cousin, won only 1 percent. The ANC would control 7 of the 9 new provincial parliaments, and fill 252 of the 400 seats in the national parliament. President mandela appointed F.W. de Klerk as one of his deputy vice-presidents and included both National Party and Inkatha officials in his Cabinet. And thus, with the world's good wishes and many promises of Western aid, began the great business of building a new South Africa.

I have stayed in touch with some of the people I knew in Cape Town, and heard secondhand about others.

Most of my Standard Six students stayed in school for at least another year after I taught them. Many of them passed their Standard Eight exams, some after two or three years of trying, and then left school. Oscar went back to school and managed to finish Standard Eight. Charmaine found teachers more her style and also passed Standard Eight. I don't know what became of Terence. Hester, Shireen, and Marius Le Roux made unsuccessful attempts at Standard Nine. The handful of my students who went straight through high school without failing included Malcolm, Josef, Mieta, Amy, and Wayan. Malcolm went on to the University of Cape Town. Josef became a nationally recognized chess player. Wayan, who eventualy became, according to one informant, deep-voiced and muscular and "terribly handsome," went to the University of the Western Cape. Aubrey September made at least three tries at Standard Nine—I don't know if he ever passed, or if he and Wayan remained friends. Of my geography students, I know even less. Nico and Shaun both failed Standard Nine and went to work, Nico bricklaying like his father. Wayne never passed Standard Eight.

The pass rate for the 1980 matrics at Grassy Park High was even lower than for the previous year's class, and only a few achieved "exemption." Of those, three, none of whom I had counseled extensively, went to UCT. A large percentage of the matrics who passed went to "Bush." A few went to the local teacher-training college. Some of those who failed reenrolled at Grassy Park High for another try. Most went to work, as clerks and secretaries and salespeople. Glynnis, who wanted

to be a veterinarian, failed. Adam, who wanted to be an airline pilot, went to teacher-training college, as did Jillian, who had decided not to become an architect. Ishmail, who wanted to be a doctor, passed but did not achieve exemption, and decided to study accountancy at UWC. Warren went to UWC and majored in theology. Elliott failed, and went to a technical college to study computers. Michael, who wanted to be a marine engineer, passed, but his mathematics results did not qualify him for the apprenticeship programs offered by the local shipping companies. The last time I spoke to him, Michael was considering joining the South African Navy.

Meryl went to UCT, earned a B.A., and returned to teach at Grassy Park High. She married a fellow teacher (also a political protege of Nelson's), with whom she now has two sons, and continued her studies at night at UCT. In 1993 she received a master's degree in history and education. By 1994, she had become the chairperson of the history department at Grassy Park High. Her progress at the school had not come easily, however, for some of our former colleagues, people who had been friendly to her when she was an underpaid, unqualified teacher, resented her when she began to receive a higher salary than they did and was better educated than they were, and they snubbed her. Moreover, Meryl's politics became more public as she gained self-confidence, and that put her in frequent conflict with the school's administration and senior staff.

Nelson left Grassy Park High after one more year and resumed his studies at UCT. He completed a science degree and then went to work for an internationally funded alternative-education agency. The last time I talked to him, Nelson, who was still not married, said he was busy designing programs to teach mathematics to children in squatter camps, concentrating on the needs of older children whose primary education had been neglected.

Jacob did not return to teaching in 1981. When I left South Africa, he was in jail, convicted of possession of banned literature. He was later jailed again, and after his release finally fled the country. I started hearing from him a few years later, from Zimbabwe, where he was working for the PAC. He had been living, he wrote, in Libya and other radical Arab states, had survived what sounded like a long series of scrapes, and was now using an Islamic name. Jacob actually sounded rather sentimental in his letters about the good old days at Grassy Park High, and he looked forward to our meeting again in a liberated South Africa.

Mario Da Silva left Grassy Park High after one more difficult year for his long-awaited post at a "white" school.

Alex took his savings from teaching and flew off to Europe, first traveling around Italy by motorcycle, then staying in London with our mountain-climbing friend, Louis. Fiona made arrangements to travel by ship to the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena, where she planned to do nothing, she said, but live quietly in a house far away from everything. At the last moment, she abandoned this plan, however, and joined Alex in England. After several months there, they returned to Cape Town. Alex resumed his history studies at UCT, where he earned a master's degree, then became a lecturer, specializing in pre-colonial South Africa. Fiona, after working for a while as an architect, turned her energies in the mid-1980s to the founding and editing of an eclectic, large-format magazine, nominally devoted to the fields of art, architecture, and design. Although the magazine appeared only erratically, it was beautifully produced and a critical success, doing its part to define an emerging, post-apartheid, South African sophistication. Alex was a regular contributor, and the magazine seemed to be going strong as the new era dawned.

George Van den Heever, that denizen of the old era, left Grassy Park High to run for the "colored" House of Representatives. He was elected by a turnout of less than 5 percent of the qualified voters in his constituency. As the MP for Grassy Park, and holder of the "Home Affairs and National Education" portfolio for the Reverend Allan Hendrickse's "colored" Labour Party, Van den Heever's salary was many times what it had been as a school principal.

There was a heated succession battle for the post of principal at Grassy Park High. The main antagonists were Napoleon and Africa. Africa won and, by all accounts, proceeded to change drastically the atmosphere at the school. Enrollment was cut back, driving the teacherpupil ratio down to barely half that of schools in the nearby townships. Africa's goal, people said, was to boost Grassy Park into the ranks of the top "colored" schools in Cape Town. Whereas the majority of students in 1980 had been Afrikaans-speaking, by the late 1980s the school had a first-language-English majority. The heavy emphasis on academic achievement reportedly weakened the SRC and student politics generally. Grassy Park High began to gain a reputation as a nonactivist school.

Class boycotts continued, however, and a devastating boycott in 1985 produced confrontations with the authorities at Cape Flats

schools, including Grassy Park High, far heavier than anything we saw in 1980. Armed soldiers and police, exempt from all civil and criminal liability under the state of emergency, rampaged through schools again and again, beating, whipping, shooting, and teargassing students. If troops or police, when they entered a classroom, decided "normal" education was not in progress—if, say, there was no writing on the blackboard—both teacher and students were often arrested. At Grassy Park High, large numbers of children simply dropped out. (Meryl, by then back teaching, was forced into hiding; her husband was detained without charges.) There were attempts to force students to write their final examinations at gunpoint. In the end, the entire school year was lost.

The government had actually made attempts to improve black education after the 1980 boycott. Spending on black education was increased. The number of blacks graduating from high school rose. The permit system restricting black admission to white universities was scrapped. (And some "bush colleges," notably the University of the Western Cape, were also transformed. Jakes Gerwel, a "colored" scholar who became the rector of UWC in 1986, vowed to make his university the "intellectual home of the left" and, by all accounts, succeeded, recruiting progressive teachers in many disciplines and raising African enrollment more than twentyfold. By the late 1980s, the prospect of going to UWC had for matrics a radically different meaning than it had had in 1980.) But per capita spending on black education remained a small fraction of per capita spending on white education, and the 1985 boycott was, in any case, less a student-initiated protest against inferior education than a gesture of solidarity with the country-wide uprising already in progress.

As such, the boycott partook in large measure of the new doctrine of "ungovernability." Its resonant chant was "Liberation now, education later." Gone was the emphasis on political education, on community organization, on developing an "analysis." Under the state of emergency, more and more black youths seemed to focus exclusively on "action," forming themselves into small, virtually independent "fighting units"—whether in response to the ANC's call to form such units or not was an open question—and battling the authorities in the streets. Petrol-bombing buses and delivery vans, burning down the houses of policemen and township administrators—even burning alive suspected "collaborators"—these were the projects that replaced awareness sessions, study groups, and political theater.

Even after the uprising of 1984-86 had been crushed, this sub-

culture of violent "comrades," whose members ranged from student revolutionaries to apolitical criminals, continued to plague many townships, presenting a major challenge to political discipline within the resistance and, eventually, in the 1994 election campaign, a major problem for the ANC's public image—not to mention its capacity to govern after the election. The reign of the comrades was especially onerous wherever the conflict between Inkatha and the UDF/ANC had raged. And in many areas it continued to wash over into black schools, where students took to chasing off unpopular principals and teachers, even in the 1990s, with Nelson Mandela himself vainly asking the children to return to their studies.

The ongoing class boycotts and student protests tended to be sporadic and local, but they were not necessarily unorganized. COSAS, the now-venerable organization for high school students, while still aligned with the ANC politically, led a series of boycotts in 1993, some of which turned violent, protesting examination fees. And COSAS often acted in coordination with other student groups aligned with other political tendencies, as well as with the South African Democratic Teachers' Union (SADTU), the first non-racial national teachers' union, founded in 1990. SADTU, which was also part of the ANC's "patriotic front" alliance, staged two strikes in 1993, including a two-week national strike in August demanding salary increases and protesting a drastic proposed "rationalization" program. In "colored" schools alone, the rationalization program called for the phasing out of 3,200 teachers.

At Grassy Park High, the teachers' strikes of 1993 were bitterly controversial, and they exposed the political fault lines at the school much as the 1980 student boycotts had. Meryl, a union stalwart who found her commitment to her students being maligned by non-striking teachers and by the school administration, struck back by declaring, in a public meeting, that certain of her colleagues, whom she was not afraid to name, had been on strike for fifteen years, "since the day they came here to teach." Ultimately, the teachers won raises but the rationalization program went ahead, sending the teacher-pupil ratio soaring. At Grassy Park High, more than a dozen senior teachers and administrators, including Africa, accepted early-retirement packages. Cecil Abrahams, who had quietly supported the administration during the strike, succeeded Africa as principal in 1994. A luta continua , as they say in Mozambique.

As for those two shining stars of the Class of 1980, Clive and Mattie: Clive passed his matric, but did not gain exemption. In 1981,

he went to work—in factories and shops, on construction and road crews, changing jobs almost every month, it seemed. Clive continued to visit me regularly for as long as I stayed in Rondebosch. His plan to save money and leave South Africa to travel and write kept going in and out of focus. Every job Clive worked seemed to outrage him: he said he was always being put in charge of African laborers by white foremen who abused him, then advised him to abuse his underlings. Clive was drifting and angry and often asked my advice about what he should do with his life. More than once, I was on the verge of suggesting that he simply leave the country and join the ANC. I guessed he was thinking the same thing, but I was ashamed to say it, knowing so little myself about what that would involve, beyond great hardship and danger and the special pains of exile.

In the end, Clive did not leave South Africa. He enrolled at a teacher training college, earned a diploma, and became a teacher at a Cape Flats high school. He married another teacher, with whom he has a son, and bought a house. His political allegiances shifted over the ensuing years among the various strands of the Cape ultra-left, but in the 1994 elections he supported, he told me, the ANC—"though critically, of course." His support, like his criticism, was necessarily quiet, however, for Clive had taken a post, at a salary far higher than his teacher's pay, as a special campaign monitor for the Independent Electoral Commission, where political nonpartisanship was a job requirement. After the election, he said, he wanted to go into filmmaking. Did I perhaps know anyone who could help him break into the field?

I also saw a lot of Mattie during my last months in Cape Town. She was going to UWC, and liked to stop by on her way home from classes. We would sit on the porch outside my room, drinking rooibos tea and talking. Mattie was discouraged by the number of jollers at UWC, she said, but she was extremely active in student politics herself, and, just to bug me, often applauded in my hearing her own decision not to go to UCT. I met Mattie's family and saw where she got some of her fire. Once or twice we played Ping-Pong at a community center near her house, though Mattie refused to play squash at the multiracial sports complex in town because "some creep might take our photograph, and they'll use it overseas as 'evidence' that sport is being integrated here."

When I was nearly ready to leave Cape Town, I phoned Mattie's house. Her mother answered and when I asked for Mattie, burst into tears. Had I not heard? Mattie had been detained by the Security

Police. They did not know where she was being held. They did not know anything.

Mattie was still in jail—in solitary confinement—when I left South Africa. By the time she was released, she had missed her exams and failed her first year at UWC. Months later, I received a letter. In it, Mattie sounded fine. She sent her deepest sympathies to me and to everyone living in Ronald Reagan's America, and asked that I relay her critical opinion of the film Reds to its maker. ("The next time you pick up the phone there, Bill, I hope it's Warren Beatty on the line so that you can just tell him from me that he made an absolute mess of John Reed's great book. . . .") The only part of the film she had liked, she said, was the singing of the "Internationale."

In that letter, Mattie described her time in detention as "almost meaningless" compared to what other detainees had suffered, although she did refer to "days of terror and loneliness in the company of the Security Branch and a Bible." She was going to UWC again, she said, but throwing "80 percent" of her energy into a township youth group. "The struggle has intensified to such a degree that students, those with the least responsibilities and the least to lose, have been forced by circumstances to play a supportive role and no longer the seemingly leading role as in '76 and '80." Mattie enclosed with her letter the youth group's newsletter, noting with pride that "even workers who dropped out of Standard Six are writing articles for it—or part of an article." Across the bottom of the newsletter were drawn the silhouettes of people working in a field over the slogan "Let Us Speak Together of Freedom."

To my suggestion, made in cards and letters written while I was traveling north through Africa, that she should see those countries herself sometime, Mattie replied that it would "not be possible—now or in the near future. There are just too many complications brought about by going outside S.A. and then coming back. One always stands the risk of being picked up by the Security Branch and accused of going for military training." But she didn't mind being unable to leave the country, Mattie wrote. "One thing which I realized when I hitched to Johannesburg and Durban with you was that there is still so much to learn about South Africa."

The last time I saw her, Mattie, who is now a high school teacher, was traveling the country by air. She was still living in Cape Town, but schools were not in session and as a regional officer in the South

African Democratic Teachers' Union, a main link in the ANC's "patriotic front" alliance, she seemed to have meetings in Johannesburg at least once a week during the final month or so of the 1994 election campaign. It was a far cry from her days as a penniless student organizer, and yet I found her much the same: wry, dedicated, quick-tongued, her olive skin still unlined, her laugh still hoarse and frequent. Mattie had become, I thought, in the intervening years, a formidably educated woman. Still, she seemed unimpressed with herself. Her focus, as ever, was on political change, and whenever she was not out of town she seemed to be canvassing for the ANC on the Cape Flats. "There's so bloody much to do," she said. "We haven't even got time to sleep."

Seeing deeply-committed radicals like Mattie working through the system, abandoning their lifelong roles in resistance and pounding the campaign pavement like any American ward heeler, was disorienting. It was also strangely moving—and another reminder that the democratic opening in South Africa was a profound event. The end of the country's international isolation was also subtly exhilarating. The lifting of sanctions, an invitation to rejoin the Commonwealth, South Africa's readmission to the Olympics—all these palpably lightened the air in 1994. And yet it was the election campaign itself that really stunned anyone who had known the country only in the bad old days. I went to an ANC rally in Grassy Park—Mandela himself had been there only a few weeks before—and practically had to pinch myself as a long series of public endorsements from local doctors, traders (the Busy Corner Butchery, the Busy Corner Superette), sportsmen, and even Grassy Park High teachers rang out from the floor of the crowded new community center. The ANC speakers on the stage took questions, including tough ones about how they planned to stop capital flight from the country, or about the favoritism already being shown toward Xhosa-speakers by certain Cape Town employers. The featured speaker was Dullah Omar, a distinguished local lawyer whose theme, much repeated, was "Struggle is a wonderful thing." (Omar, who had been one of Nelson Mandela's lawyers while Mandela was in prison, was named Minister of Justice in the new, ANC-led government.)

But the most stunning thing about the election campaign in the newly drawn Western Cape province was that, in all the opinion polls, the ANC was losing—and losing to the National Party, no less. That was why Mattie and her colleagues were working so tirelessly, and why Mandela himself seemed to be making constant campaign trips to the Cape: the ANC was trying to stave off a disaster. Where was the National Party finding all this support? Not from the doctors and teachers

and traders of Grassy Park, obviously, but, according to the polls, from the Cape's majority population: poor and working-class "coloreds." These were, of course, the same people whose families had been forcibly removed from District Six and other neighborhoods, who had been subjected to the worst indignities of the apartheid laws: the Mixed Marriages Act, the Population Registration Act, the Immorality Act. These were the same people who had risen up in the streets again and again since 1976, making the Cape Flats a major flashpoint of resistance throughout the 1980s. It was like the Jews voting for the Nazis, many commentators observed, in an overblown analogy. It was, in any case, the major surprise of the election campaign.

"Colored" support for the National Party seemed to spring from many sources. There was the party's astounding self-reinvention since 1990 as a Western-style liberal party supporting human rights, market economics, multiparty democracy, and a depoliticized police and army—none of these exactly National Party strengths in the past—and its longstanding commitment to "minority rights," which were now understood to include protections for "coloreds" and Indians, as well as whites, from the potential tyranny of African rule. There was also the disbanding of the UDF, which many "coloreds" had seen as "their" organization, by the ANC, a move that seemed to acknowledge the truth of the government's longstanding charge that the UDF had been merely a front organization for the ANC, when in fact the UDF had been a popular front, an umbrella for countless smaller groups—local associations of taxpayers, students, women, and professionals, all united in their opposition to apartheid. But after 1990 the country's attention had shifted from local struggles to the national negotiations, to the new constitution, to the return of the heroes from exile and prison. And many of the grass-roots groups that had comprised the UDF were unhappy with the ANC's centralized structures—the Women's League, the Youth League—that they were now invited to join.

People in the Western Cape may have felt more of this alienation than their counterparts elsewhere. Peninsular in both geography and psychology, the Cape, with its "colored" majority, was ill-suited to rise from its parochial concerns to the grand, national-liberation narrative that came to dominate South African politics during the long, violent, enervating period of constitutional negotiations. The ANC, by all accounts, went into a protracted drift in the region, with ineffectual, unpopular leadership being sent in from outside and the cream of the local political talent leaving for Johannesburg, where the national political careers were being made.

Also working in the National Party's favor was the great personal popularity of F. W. de Klerk, who had publicly apologized for apartheid and who now claimed credit for having ended it. Many conservative "coloreds" seemed to give the Klerk credit for everything from releasing Mandela to allowing a multiracial, American-style shopping and entertainment complex to open on the Cape Town docks. De Klerk's perceived beneficence was often conflated with his public piety. "He always mentions God on television," people liked to note. "You never hear Mandela doing that." But it was the President's apology for apartheid that seemed to go down especially well with poorer "coloreds." "Our church teaches us that we must forgive," an elderly flower seller in central Cape Town told me, and her expression spoke volumes, I thought, about what a knotty, delicious pleasure it was for her to take under consideration this powerful white man's humble plea for her mercy.

But the biggest break the National Party got in its unlikely campaign to win "colored" sympathies was its own repeal of the pass laws in 1986, for the repeal unleashed a flood of new African arrivals in the Western Cape. Indeed, between 1982 and 1992, Cape Town was reckoned to be the fastest-growing city in Africa, with an annual population increase of 13 percent. The city's African population more than tripled during that period, putting great pressure on "colored" housing and employment from below, especially as apartheid-era laws like the "colored" labor preference policy and the Groups Areas Act were abolished. Where the government's scheme to enlist "coloreds" as junior partners in apartheid had never really succeeded in buying off "colored" militancy, the removal of "coloreds'" few privileges seemed to ignite a new dynamic. Suddenly the question was being publicly asked: Who will protect us from these invading hordes, who are even poorer and hungrier and angrier than we are?

The ANC did not provide especially reassuring answers to this question, even after it became clear that its election campaign was going to be an uphill fight in the Western Cape. "Affirmative action," which was part of the ANC's platform, frightened many "colored" workers, and then the ANC sent African firebrands like Winnie Mandela into "colored" townships, where she spoke not in Afrikaans, the language of working-class "coloreds," but in Xhosa, which few if any local "coloreds" understood.

The National Party, meanwhile, spoke Afrikaans, and spoke it with an intimate knowledge of its "colored" audience, derived from the centuries spent together as "baas and Klass" on the farms and in the

towns of the Cape. Seeing that its only real chance for an election victory anywhere in the country lay in the Cape, the National Party began to play to regional chauvinism, subtly suggesting that the relative prosperity of the Cape was being threatened by teeming, impoverished, burdened black Africa. And the anti-black subtext in the N.P. campaign was not always subtle. More than sixty thousand copies of an eighteen-page "photo-comic," suggesting that the ANC's next slogan might be "Kill a Coloured," were distributed in the Western Cape—before an electoral tribunal forced its withdrawal on the grounds that it was "undoubtedly inflammatory."

And raw racism did, as many ANC officials alleged, form the stinking undercurrent of much "colored" support for the National Party. I lost count of the number of people who told me that they "would not vote for a kaffir" or "would never call a black man baas ." Many told me that they had simply never met an educated African, and now could not believe—nor accept—that Africans were going to run the country. Such people were receptive to the National Party's never-ending reminders that black rule had been a disaster in much of sub-Saharan Africa. This was a popular theme with white voters, too, of course.

But the issue that most concerned "colored" voters was violence, and many told me that, while they were not racists, they could not help but observe how violent Africans were, which made them wary of an African-led government. It was true, of course, that most of the political violence in recent years had been among Africans, and that the vast new African townships and squatter camps on the Cape Flats operated largely without benefit of ordinary law enforcement. But the uncomfortable fact was that violent crime in "colored" areas was far worse than it was among Africans. Indeed, the per capita rates for rape, murder, robbery, and incarceration for "coloreds" in some years amounted, in the most crime-prone age groups, to more than those for whites, Indians, and Africans combined.

The law-and-order question was, thus, paramount among "coloreds." As the National Party had presided over the many years of criminal mayhem in their neighborhoods, it should therefore have been vulnerable on the issue. But by some peculiar logic of incumbency, the National Party was able to present itself, quite successfully in the Cape, as a force for order, battling the unruly elements erupting from below, while the ANC, with its emphasis on social justice, could never seem to turn people's fear of crime to its advantage. Indeed, the government lost no opportunity to identify its opponents with the teen-

age comrades who had helped the ANC pursue an insurrectionary strategy during the mid-1980s. A widely-reproduced National Party campaign poster said simply, "Stop the Comrades."

One of F. W. de Klerk's favorite campaign refrains was "We build, the ANC destroys." And I often heard "colored" people take the logic of incumbency a step farther, demanding to know how many houses the ANC had built for "coloreds" over the past fifteen years, while the government had been building Mitchell's Plain. Since the ANC had been illegal until 1990, and had never held power in the country, this was a point well-designed to confound rational debate.

Elections are, of course, equally about the past and the future: what parties have done, what they are likely to do. The National Party's task, when it came to "colored" voters, was to convince people that its past record gave no indication of what it would do in the future. On the Cape Flats, this meant that it had to overcome somehow the searing memories of the mass evictions and exile that nearly everyone there had suffered. And I found, among some of its more fervent "colored" supporters, a startling readiness to rewrite history. "The rats were as big as cats in District Six," one older woman told me. "The people were driven out of District Six for their own good. The rats would have bitten the babies to death. They would be as big as sheep now." Even the white National Party officials to whom I mentioned these sentiments seemed stunned—what did these people think President de Klerk was apologizing for ? It was clear, in any case, that National Party support was heavily concentrated among less-educated "coloreds."

Thus, a remarkable political paradox was emerging. In the Western Cape, at least among the "colored" majority, the ANC, the historic movement of the poor and oppressed, could apparently count on support only from the small, educated elite, while the National Party, the infamous citadel of white-minority rule, had captured the illiterate masses.

Local resistance activists were appalled, naturally, and mortified by this seismic shift in the political dynamics of their beloved Cape, this sudden reappearance of the slave's mentality that they thought had been defeated forever. Throughout the Cape Flats, one saw the scornful ANC graffito "Stem NP En Bly 'N Hotnot" (Vote National Party and Remain a Hotnot), "hotnot" being a derogatory term for "colored." Cape ANC spokespersons tended to blame the Nats' racist campaign, and the invidious effects of apartheid rule since 1948, for the unexpected electoral challenge they faced. But anyone familiar

with the Cape, and with the perpetual identity crisis forced onto people classified "colored," knew that racial attitudes and hierarchies in the region predated the National Party by at least two centuries, and that the political atmosphere had in fact changed dramatically in the region, particularly around Cape Town, since 1990.

Even in the schools, according to all accounts, the political atmosphere had changed fundamentally. Mattie was teaching in the Malay Quarter, near downtown Cape Town, at one of the few "colored" schools that had admitted significant numbers of African students. Her "colored" students today were, to an extraordinary degree, she said, politically illiterate and unblushingly racist. Activism had gone completely out of fashion since what people were now calling "the struggle years"—which had ended, apparently, in 1990. "It's unbelievable," Mattie told me. "Of course, most of the Xhosa kids are racist, too. They're just more charming about it, more confident . They say, 'You people have nothing—no language of your own, no culture. You are remnants.' I tell you, Bill, we've got to start from square one again." Most of her African students supported the ANC, Mattie said, "but they don't actually like to think about politics. They're just looking forward to power. If I give them a choice of essay topics, they'll take a fashion topic every time. They're all mad about American styles—Madonna, gangster rap, whatever. You and your bloody America! The few kids who want to talk about politics, the brightest kids from the townships, are all PAC. Unfortunately, the real thugs from the townships are also PAC."

While Grassy Park High still seemed to be entirely "colored" in 1994, its students' politics had also performed a complete volte-face. Meryl told me about a poll that she had helped conduct, about a month before the election, that showed a majority of Grassy Park students preferring the National Party. Invited in class discussions to explain their views, most students simply repeated what their parents were saying at home, she said, which in turn parroted the National Party's campaign themes. This seemed to be virtually the only source of political information that students were getting. Alarmed, Meryl and a few other teachers arranged a week of voter education. Speakers from all the major parties were invited to address the school. "It was very successful, but also very difficult," Meryl recalled. "Because I had been raised in a political tradition in which you simply did not expose children to the views of the enemy—that's how we've always seen the regime, as 'the enemy.' And here we were having to present all this material in a completely evenhanded, neutral way, as if it all had

equal merit. And the National Party speaker was good . But so was the ANC speaker, and so was the PAC speaker." At the end of the week, a second poll was taken and, to Meryl's relief, a slight majority of students had swung behind the ANC. "All they needed was a little history: to see some of what is really at stake," she said.

I visited a couple of Meryl's classes—matrics and Standard Nines—and talked with her students about my experiences at the school in 1980. The children wore the same motley maroon and beige uniforms, sat at the same (literally the same) old (now very old) battered desks, and many of them looked familiar—as if they were the younger brothers or sisters or cousins of my former students. And yet their questions about how I saw events in South Africa revealed a relativism, a credulousness, a tentativeness that were quite new to me. There were exceptions: a highly articulate PAC girl, talking about how the ANC had sold out on the all-important land question; the president of the school's SRC, talking about how the "new" National Party was not new at all, as anyone could see from the time-honored divide-and-rule tactics that the party was using in this election campaign. But most of the students reminded me of their undereducated American counterparts, ill-versed in history and politics, ungrounded certainly in any tradition of struggle. For my benefit, they argued about whether de Klerk had released Mandela out of the goodness of his heart or because circumstances had forced him to do so. They argued, gingerly, about whether Africans were ready to run the country—though not so gingerly that, at Meryl's urging, one boy could not bring himself to tell me that he himself was a racist. His parents had told him that blacks were barbarians, you see, so that was what he believed: blacks were barbarians. Some of the other students, I noticed, at least had the sense to be embarrassed by this confession.

I had found it remarkable at first that Grassy Park students now referred to themselves unself-consciously as "coloreds," and that "blacks" meant someone else—Africans—and I had said so to Meryl. She had laughed ruefully. "That is only the beginning of it," she said. Now I saw some of what she meant.

This is not to say that there weren't many "colored" teenagers working for the ANC on the Cape Flats in 1994. There were. Most of those I met tended to be the children of activists, however—and to have an abiding sense that they had been born too late. The sixteen-year-old son of one ANC activist, who lives in Grassy Park, told me, "In the '80s, Cape Town was the place to be. It was a burning fire here. Strikes, boycotts, riots, the UDF. But then it just got very quiet,

and a lot of UDF supporters, they just drifted away, they didn't even join the ANC. People in Cape Town, when it comes to looting, to free food and free wine, they're prepared to join. But when it's serious, when it comes to voting—no, man, they're useless."

Nelson October, I discovered, thought that voting itself was useless. "This election is a fraud," he told me. "The wrong issues are at stake. Look at Zimbabwe. After fourteen years of independence, the masses in Zimbabwe are no better off than they were. They've been sold out by their leaders. And now the liberation movements here are doing the same thing." Nelson's views on "bridge-building" to more moderate groups had obviously not changed. His sentiments were echoed by posters issued by the New Unity Movement and tacked up around the Cape Flats: "Elections '94 Are A Fraud-Do Not Vote."

When I told Meryl what Nelson had said, she sighed. "He's so idealistic," she said. "He never changes. But it's time to start putting some of our ideas into practice ." She and her husband were working, I gathered, for the ANC.

The looking-glass quality of the political climate that I found in Cape Town in 1994 was never more vivid, I thought, than when I went to an ANC meeting where Franklin Sonn, the former rector of a "colored" technical college, was speaking (eloquently), and where everyone was calling him "Comrade Franklin." This was the same Dr. Sonn whose notorious "collaboration" as an "apartheid administrator" I had often heard denounced by my students at Grassy Park High. Half of those same students, or their latter-day equivalents, were now National Party supporters. I considered trying to describe some of these ironies to Comrade Franklin, but decided he was too busy trying to help the ANC pull this election out of the fire.

Just how difficult that task would prove came home to me clearly at a huge, campaign-ending, National Party rally at the Good Hope Centre in Cape Town. Some fifteen thousand people filled the arena, 99 percent of them "colored" and at least half of them gloriously drunk in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. A tiny group of whites—mostly National Party officials—sat down in front in reserved seats while the ecstatic brown masses danced and sang in the stands all around them. There were "coon troupes" in whiteface, wearing Panama hats, satin jackets, and white trousers. There were multigenerational Muslim families, tattooed gangsters, toothless grandmothers. De Klerk gave a speech, looking a little stunned and weepy, raising the swartgevaar flag one last time. But the people were hardly listening, it seemed. They were far too busy enjoying themselves. And the National Party

was clearly enjoying, here in the Cape, the sort of mass "spontaneous support" that was expected to carry the ANC into power nationally.

But that scene at the Good Hope Centre also felt like a strange glimpse into the future. For the contrast between the twisting, rhythmic dancing and singing of the crowd and the stiff, uneasily smiling white people on the stage struck me as an institutional arrangement not likely to last. The National Party, if it did win in the Western Cape, would owe its one surviving redoubt of regional power almost entirely to the "coloreds," and if it wanted to keep that power, it would have to start delivering political goods. It would also have to start coming to terms with the fact that it was now a brown party.

I was reminded of what a psychologist named Chris Giles, who works in Manenberg, one of the poorest "colored" townships on the Cape Flats, had told me in an interview. "People here are hoping to regain access to resources, and many of them see de Klerk as their chance," he said. "You see, most of the people in Manenberg have never recovered from the trauma of being forced out of their homes in town. Being transported is such a classical punishment. It is meant to disorient and disadvantage generations, and it was very successful here. In fact, to thrive here has implied a kind of acceptance of the injustice that was done to people—unless, of course, you were thriving in the resistance. But that was difficult and dangerous. But now there suddenly came this opportunity, to take over the National Party itself, to become a majority subgroup within the N.P. And it was all pretty safe, physically. So that's what the coloreds have done."

Though less reputable, it was rather like what Jakes Gerwel and his colleagues had done, I thought, at the University of the Western Cape: taking an apartheid backwater and turning it into an institution that might actually serve its true constituency's needs. Of course, there seemed to be no one involved in this weird revolution from within the oppressor's traditional stronghold who could articulate a coherent political strategy. Still, it was a more hopeful analysis than that the slaves had simply rallied round the master.

The National Party did win in the Western Cape. It beat the ANC by more than 20 percent. In South Africa's Mother City, where Parliament sits, and in all of Cape Town's rich and sprawling hinterlands, the National Party would remain the dominant regional power. While ANC supporters celebrated their historic victory in the rest of the country, activists in the Cape mourned.

On the night that the election results were announced, I went out to dinner with Mattie. She was clearly reeling. "Are the mulattoes all

over the world like this, forever betraying the masses?" she raged. "We are going to be living in a volkstaat ! I am going to resign from every national board I sit on! How can I go somewhere and say, 'I'm from the Western Cape,' when the Western Cape is just a huge nest of racists? People will say, 'But who do you represent?'"

It was actually a good question. With this election, the time had finally come when political activists had simply to stand aside. "The people" were getting their chance to speak at last, and the radicals who had been speaking and acting in their names all these years could do nothing except listen. The Western Cape result was not a reflection on "mulattoes," of course—the new Northern Cape province also had a "colored" majority, and the ANC had won there. (The one other province in which the ANC had lost was Natal, where Chief Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party had eked out a bare majority in balloting that was rife with fraud and intimidation. The ANC accepted the result, but the election in Natal stank of an antidemocratic deal, of "power sharing" in the worst sense.) The election results were a reflection, rather, on the distance that had grown up—or always existed—in the Cape between activists and the conservative masses.

This was also, I argued that evening, probably only the first large-scale defection from the liberation movement. There would be others. The ANC could not be all things to all people. Other regions or ethnic groups would pull away. There might be major splits along class lines, even before 1999. This defection seemed extraordinary only because it had come before liberation. While South Africa as a whole had had its uhuru election, the Western Cape had done something far more ordinary. It had voted its fears, its perceived sectional interests, playing regional-minority politics. Perhaps future South African elections would be more like this one had been in the Western Cape.

Mattie listened politely but skeptically to this spiel.

In any case, I asked, how much power would the new provincial parliament have?

"Too much," she grumbled.

Well, I added, there was something to be said for denying one party all the winnings.

Mattie snorted.

This, I knew, was too easy for me to say. And I was starting to sound like Time magazine. I gave up trying to soften the blow.

We were sitting in a small, nicely-appointed restaurant in Sea Point, the Riviera-like enclave on the Atlantic coast that had once struct me as the quintessential South African whites-only redoubt.

Mattie had chosen the place. Now she started joking with a young white waitress about the wine list. She wanted to drink something, she said, that would help her "be philosophical." The waitress seemed to understand quite well that she was talking about the election.

Later, feeling philosophical, I predicted that the new South Africa was going to be an interesting place to live.

"Yes," Mattie said, not unhappily. "There's still such a long way to go."

Toward what, I asked.

"Toward overthrowing capitalism, of course." Mattie laughed, and her black eyes sparkled, but I knew she was also serious.

I asked if she was a member of the Communist Party.

"No," she said. "The SACP in the Western Cape is too bloody right-wing. It's all top-down, command-oriented. They have no interest in asking the people what they think, or what they want. I could never join them. If I lived in the Eastern Cape or in Natal, where the Party branches are more democratic, I would probably join. But here, no way." She sipped her wine, and shrugged. "People say my career is being blocked by my refusal to join the Party, to stop being so critical, but I don't care."

Mattie had a small-p party to go to. Some of the militants from the teachers' union, all of them exhausted from the campaign but determined to celebrate the ANC's national victory, were getting together at an old sports club near Woodstock. I was welcome to come along, Mattie said. I declined—I had a flight to catch the next day—but offered her a ride to the party.

We drove back into the city and, at the crest of a hill, found ourselves confronted with a magnificent view of Cape Town, spread out beneath the impossible backdrop of Table Mountain. "How could I ever live anywhere else?" Mattie asked.

"You couldn't," I said. "You couldn't."

New York City
June 1994