And as for what my father said about Africa, as much as I wanted to belong to Africa or to any place for that matter, I knew that I didn’t. Not really. Not completely. In countless ways and for countless reasons, I loved growing up in many countries, among many cultures. It made it impossible for me to believe in the concept of supremacy. It deepened my ability to hold multiple truths at once, to practice and nurture empathy. But it has also meant that I have no resting place. I have perpetually been a them rather than an us. I have struggled with how to place myself in my family histories.

“My father would always tell me, “Mokgadi, a White man will always be a White man.” As I got older and came into contact with more people from around the world, I would tell him that the world had changed. That there were plenty of good White people, that Mandela had helped change our world and that things were moving forward. And my father would just repeat himself, “Maybe so, my child. But you must never forget. A White man will always be a White man.

*Redreaming the World: For Chinua Achebe

“It is possible that a sense of beauty, of justice, of the inter-connectedness of all things, may yet save the human species from self-annihilation. We are all still learning how to be free. Freedom is the beginning of the greatest possibilities of the human genius. It is not the goal.

In reality, I met a lean, dark-suited gentleman, whose height dwarfed mine. Was he going to talk about his prison days? Ask me about Kenyan politics? Or simply voice his dreams for a South Africa whose leadership he would soon assume? He didn’t ask about any of these things. He talked mostly about books: what African writers had meant to him and his fellow political prisoners, and how books had played a role in buoying their spirits. Books, books, and more books. I felt as if through me he was talking to all writers of the world.

In the South African system, people see the bitter fruition of at least five forces that have bedeviled the development of human beings: classical colonialism, neocolonialism, slave wages, racism, and the usurpation of the people’s sovereignty through the denial of democracy.

But Black South Africans are not endlessly helpless victims of superior forces. Their history presents a people who have been pioneers in the struggle for communal survival, national liberation, and social emancipation. The ferocity of Black South African resistance blunted the determined efforts of European settlers to annihilate them.