“When I can no longer run, either because of time or more regulations targeting people like me, you will still see me on the track supporting the coming generations. I am a proud South African woman born in a tiny village to people who loved me. They have survived more humiliations than I could possibly know. It is from them that I know about maintaining dignity in the face of oppression. It is my hope that by telling my truth, I inspire others to be unafraid, to love and accept themselves. May this story contribute to a more tolerant world for us all.

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’.

When we drove through Khayelitsha, a sprawling township not far from Cape Town airport, lots of little black kids were running behind the bus shouting,’Siya! Siya!’ But suddenly I heard them shouting, ‘Elizabedi! Elizabedi!’ I turned to Siya and said, ‘You know what, my brother, people think having a certain amount of players of colour in a team is transformation, but this right here is transformation.’ My name being chanted in a Black neighbourhood.

He reminisced about Biko, paying tribute to the role of the Black Consciousness Movement and indeed the role of other political parties in the liberation, mentioning Robert Sobukwe by name. Again, he was so generous in his inclusiveness. The question of his giving the Steve Biko Memorial Lecture came up, and indeed he gave the lecture the following year.

Nine days earlier, when F.W. de Klerk announced that Mandela would be free, a nine-year-old girl I know greeted the news by jumping up and down and urging her mother, “Please, let's make a big card and send it to Mandela. It’s say, ‘Welcome home, Baba Mandela!’” The girl and her mother lived in Newark, and in 1963, when Mandela had been jailed for life, the mother Kenyan had been only a baby. Quite clearly, Mandela is in the minds and hearts of several generations— all of whom value human freedom— in Africa and the world.