Some years later, I would go on a trip to Namibia to visit Tom, when he was then working for the newly independent government, and I would also meet Mandela after he became South Africa’s first black president. But in 1989, I had no idea what my future would be.

When I look back, the absolute highlight was meeting Mandela himself. When I shook his hand, I felt like he was a very old soul, gentle and kind. I know absolutely nothing about reincarnation, but the only way to describe it is that it felt like this wasn’t his first life. His energy was unique, unlike any person I’d ever met. He was comfortable, wise, settled and strong. Being in his company, celebrating his birthday, was one of the greatest honours of my life.

This wound we call ‘apartheid’ will continue to be picked at compulsively. In both mind and practice, empathy has its limits; the relational pathologies of shame, envy and impasse are here to stay. The shame-filled violence, the envious value delusions and the ambivalent-avoidant attachments will persist long after we are gone. No matter the reparative attempts: there is a brokenness at the heart of our nation that cannot be wished away. If one considers the matter at the level of the individual, when the parent, teacher, or psychotherapist succeeds in providing optimal conditions for empathetic connection with a child, student or patient, it is hardly unusual for the latter to collapse the frame with enactments derived from still-active complexes.

I wanted us to be normal. An impossible ask when the people who raised me were so shaped by an abnormal system. They carried survivors’ guilt and memories no one should ever have. Sometimes my mum talked to me about the children she had taught before she had left Soweto. The ones who marched on the streets on June 16. She told me about Hector and I knew that he was 12 years old like me. I had seen the photo of him dying. I knew, too, that my mum was on Vilakazi Street that day, along with the kids who called her ‘Teacher’ and ‘Ma’am’.

To say that we were missed in Soweto feels like an inadequate and flimsy way of describing the rupturing of hearts and scarring of the souls of those who loved us. For the family in Diepkloof, it followed a series of deep losses, first my great-grandfather, then my great-grandmother, then my mother and me. In Orlando East, the family put on a brave face. Life went on because it had to. They tried to place their grief behind a locked door, but it was still there. We were alive, so my uncles and aunts told themselves they were not grieving. But what else do you call the loss of a child who is the flesh of your flesh, and a sister-in-law who had become like blood? Rakgadi says it is the alternative that would have crushed her; her brother or sister-in-law imprisoned or worse, and me robbed of my parents.