A Portrait of Anguish and Hope

"THE LORD ANSWER YOU in the day of trouble! The name of God protect you!...Some boast of chariots, and some of horses; but we boast of the name of the Lord our God. They will collapse and fall; but we shall rise and stand upright."

Allan Boesak Jr., age 9, read slowly from Psalm 20 at the conclusion of the family dinner. The words that appeared in the lectionary reading that night were particularly poignant. Just the day before, Allan's father had publicly announced to a packed cathedral that the Botha regime had signed its own death warrant.

Three nights before that, a large brick came flying through the Boesaks' living room window, sending shattered glass in all directions; a death threat over the phone followed. Allan Jr. and his 12-year-old sister, Pulane, had decided to sleep on the floor of the large walk-in closet in their parents' bedroom for a few nights, while a group of theology students kept watch through the night outside the house.

But conversation at the dinner table that evening was anything but somber. In spite of the threats that surrounded it, the Boesak home was full of joy and life. There was fear, to be sure, but laughter was a more frequent expression.

What I remember most about that evening, our second in South Africa, was not the spicy curry or the swelling background music of "Mozart's Hornpipe Concerto," but the faces around the table—the delight on Pulane's, mirrored in her father's; the compassion in Dorothy's; and the warmth from Leineke and Belen. But especially the intent look on Allan Jr.'s face as he read from the psalm the promises of God to us all in a difficult time.

It's the many faces we met on our 40-day sojourn through South Africa that still stay with me. They are a multitude of shades. One might consider the variety a gift. But in South Africa, the color of a face is a stamp for the future, the overriding factor determining one's existence.

Many of the faces cannot appear on these pages. The women in the migrant hostels—crammed with theirs and other families, a dozen people to a room—choose to live illegally with their husbands rather than separated from them. When you ask them how many people live in those small rooms, they will tell you, "Three men."

A woman in a squatter camp outside Cape Town, tired of being pushed from one barren corner to another and fearful of the police, will not show her face here, either. Nor will those clandestinely in the struggle against apartheid or on the run from the security forces. That makes a great many people left out of the picture.

But it is possible here to describe those faces and to tell their stories, which together tell the story of South Africa. Some of the names have been changed for obvious reasons.

SHE HAD FASHIONED for herself a big hair bow out of a discarded plastic bag. The bag swathed her head and "came to a knot with two points spread out to form the makeshift bow. She was only 4, too shy to pose for a picture at close range. She lives in a shack in Crossroads, where government control and destitution make it impossible for little girls to dream of silk or satin bows.

Her friends can be found all across South Africa. They piece together bits of paper and plastic and string to make kites. They create crude push toys out of fragments of wire stuck through tin cans. They fashion a childhood from the bits and pieces of life that are left to them.

In Crossroads they are fortunate to reach the age of 4. Diarrhea, dehydration, and the severe malnutrition known as kwashiorkor claim the lives of many children in this squatter camp outside Cape Town. At the medical clinic, intake forms for children read "Siblings: alive_____, dead_____."

Many of their brothers and sisters died in the homelands, where both productive soil and jobs are limited. Crossroads came into being when their mothers moved to be closer to the city, where a few of their fathers were fortunate enough to get jobs. But unemployment is rampant, and food is scarce. In desperate times sand is mixed with cornmeal to make a meal stretch further.

Their mothers formed the core of resistance when the government tried to force the families back to the homelands. They won their battle to be a "permanent" squatter camp, but the camp has since been wracked with corruption and vigilante violence.

On the edge of Crossroads is the KTC satellite camp. Entire portions of the camp, thought by the government to be a "communist stronghold" because of the strong influence of the UDF (United Democratic Front), were razed. For weeks the fires raged and the bulldozers ravaged and the children cried. Razor wire now encircles the area, and military blockades control the flow of people in and out.

Razor wire and rifles, petrol bombs and casspirs, and the whips known as sjamboks—all are part of the landscape for the children of apartheid. Childhood ends almost before it begins in black South Africa.

The children raise fists in defiant determination as soon as they are old enough to understand the struggle, an understanding that comes early. Their energy has threatened South Africa's ruling powers, who have targeted them in massive numbers for detention and torture. But there is no quashing that energy, which erupts most powerfully when they join together in a celebratory, defiant mass stomping called toi-toi, singing the freedom songs as they sway together, sending energy like a bolt of electricity surging through any crowd.

They do it at a detainees' meeting in Soweto with riot police just beyond the door. They toi-toi at a sports festival in Cape Town, and toi-toi past the bishop as he confers a blessing on all the children at the close of a Soweto church service. They defy police blockades set up around the city to come toi-toi-ing into a crowd of 3,000 at a Cape Town cathedral. The message on their exuberant faces is, "We're here. And things are going to change."

It's resurrection hope that's written on those faces. Ask a 10-year-old in Mamelodi, the black township near Pretoria, if he'll see apartheid end in his lifetime. Without hesitation he'll say "yes," and then add thoughtfully, "but maybe toward the end of it."

Then put this question to him: "Do you think your children will grow up without apartheid?"

His answer is clear: "I will see to it."

EDDIE WARNED US as we entered his home that a video camera is aimed at this house 24 hours a day, and conversations in the front rooms can be monitored by the police across the street and next door. He began talking about his detention, interrupting the story at one point to get a shoebox full of small pieces of toilet paper upon which he had kept a diary during his 55 days in prison. He had smuggled the paper out in the sleeves of a jacket he sent home to his wife, Lizzie, sending word without any explanation that she was not under any circumstances to wash the jacket until he got home.

Rev. Eddie Leeux was detained on Father's Day, June 16, 1986. His children had just finished giving him his Father's Day present, and Lizzie had walked toward the kitchen to start breakfast, when the men with guns appeared in the doorway. As his father was being taken away, Eddie's youngest son, Zebedee, threw himself on a heap of laundry and wept. One of the arresting officers had the audacity to complain that Eddie was keeping him from spending Father's Day with his family.

Eddie's crimes included preaching against apartheid and using his car to transport dead and wounded people out of Duncan Village when the township exploded in riots in 1985. Eddie remembers that the bells at his church rang as he passed by on his way to prison.

Lizzie was given no information about where her husband was taken, and her tireless efforts to find him took her to many dead ends. The security police did all they could to break Eddie emotionally and convince him that his family had forgotten him. He reached such despair that at one point he wrote in his journal, "I can still see the hand of God, but I am beyond his reach."

"In this country," said Lizzie, "if you don't have a strong faith in God, you go right down." Young Zebedee was also a source of strength. "Papa said before he went away that you must never cry and let them know that they have hurt you," he told his mother. Every day after school he asked her, "How are you? Did you cry today?"

Before we left their home, Eddie quoted the bishop of Port Elizabeth: "This country is mortally wounded. It is bleeding to death. And no one is allowed to heal the wound." But some people keep trying.

MILITARY EYES PEER constantly from the tower that rises above the black township of Duncan Village. The eyes are aided at night by powerful floodlights that can search out "suspicious activity" in any corner. We arrived in early afternoon and, under the tower's watchful eye, were greeted by a young man active in the struggle.

We walked unhindered for almost an hour, with Tommy pointing out overcrowded homes and fetid latrines and encouraging us to take pictures to carry out of the country with us for the world to see. To any township folk who raised eyebrows at whites in a black area—a rarity in South Africa, except for army personnel and police—Tommy smiled and said simply, "Comrades." We were greeted warmly by adults and thronged by children as we made our way through row after row of identical, box-like, four-room houses.

It was one of the South African Police's omnipresent yellow vehicles that first stopped and questioned us. Fifteen minutes later a casspir—a huge, armored personnel carrier—appeared on the horizon and made its way toward us. Eight members of the South African Defense Forces, wearing khaki fatigues and pointing rifles, jumped out and surrounded us, ordering us to the military "strong point."

We were escorted at gunpoint in the direction of the tower, taken past the rows of barbed wire that surround the military headquarters, and ushered into an interrogation room. A soldier told us we were being detained, pending arrival of a member of the "special branch," the term applied to South Africa's security police.

I kept my eyes on Tommy. The worst that could happen to us was a hasty, premature departure from South Africa, but Tommy could face far worse. Though his demeanor became immediately subdued, a glint of courageous pride remained in his eyes.

The security police officer spoke rapidly in Afrikaans to the other police and army personnel. He checked our passports and airline tickets and then asked us brusquely if we didn't know it was illegal under the current state of emergency to take pictures in a black area. We had been informed only that it was illegal to take pictures of police or military activity—and told by several people in the struggle that keeping up with this government's constantly changing body of regulations would be a full-time job.

He mentioned how much foreigners like to come to the townships and then take "unnecessary propaganda" about his country overseas. He accused us of "creating a rumble among the people" and added, "For all we know, you might be ANC"—a reference to the banned African National Congress, perceived by the South African government as apartheid's worst enemy.

After his interrogation of us, he turned to Tommy, shaking his finger and ejecting stern and threatening warnings. "Didn't you just get out?" he said, referring to Tommy's recent release from 10 months in detention. He finished with a promise that Tommy would be back in detention before long if he didn't give up his subversive activities.

Tommy's only response was to reach calmly into his back pocket, remove his pocket New Testament, and, putting it in front of the officer's face, say simply, "I am a Christian." A brief moment of silence descended as the arrogance of evil met the quiet power of the gospel.

In the end, the police decided against keeping Tommy or sending us home or confiscating our film. Instead they gave us an immediate escort out of Duncan Village. We took Tommy out with us, making sure he had a place to hide for a few months from the security police.

"Why did you do it?" Jim asked him on the way out. "Why would you take the risk of taking around a couple of white Americans you never even met before?"

Tommy talked about non-racialism at the core of the new South Africa he and his friends are building, about how important it is that people in the townships see whites who are with them in the struggle. "We are not fighting against whites; we are fighting against injustice," he said. He offered his observation that the police and even State President P.W. Botha are workers oppressed by the system.

He spoke of his detention, when he and many of his friends were rounded up, kept in cold cells, fed cornmeal infested with worms, and denied access to a doctor. Like many others we met, he was reluctant to talk about his torture.

"Our solidarity grew there," he said. As in every other jail in South Africa, the police strategy to thwart resistance was turned on its head. After participating in hunger strikes and hours of political discussion, young people came out more politicized and determined than ever to rid their country of apartheid.

"We are just going forward," said Tommy with determination written on his face. "It's not the time to be afraid."

WE GOT UP EARLY for our long journey with Eddie Leeux through the rural areas surrounding East London. At the border of the Transkei, an independent homeland, we stopped to get transit visas.

The homeland, or bantustan, is an integral piece of the South African government's plan of "grand apartheid"—a scheme that would have all of South Africa's blacks cornered in independent states on the most arid and unproductive land, leaving the best of South Africa for the whites, where blacks would be entitled to be "guest laborers."

The Transkei's rolling green hills, dotted with thatched-roof rondovals, are deceptively beautiful. The land is barren, good only for grazing herds. In the northern homelands, the barrenness is more stark-long stretches of sandy, dusty land lacking vegetation, shacks and huts built hastily on soft earth.

The faces here are mostly of women and children, seen carrying bundles of tree-size logs on their heads, herding sheep across our path, sitting by the side of the road offering pineapples with hollow reeds stuck into their juicy cores for sale. Many of the men are absent, in the cities looking for jobs that don't exist in the homelands.

The people are poor, the homeland governments without resources, and corruption is common. Electricity and running water are rarities. "Independence" means only being cut off from South Africa's resources, and it has no meaning when the South African security police decide to cross borders. Most blacks have rejected independence on these terms, refusing to live in the homelands despite government pressure to do so.

We left the Transkei and made our way north to the town of Lady Grey. We drove under a canopy of low-hanging trees as we approached the stream at the entrance to the tiny village. Playing children parted and waved as we drove through, sending a spray of water in all directions.

The members of a poor church in this isolated rural area are struggling to survive. A four-acre plot of land that lies not far from their church is overgrown with weeds. They have a dream to grow vegetables there to feed their families.

While we were visiting Lady Grey, the new pastor of the church was miles away in Port Elizabeth, trying to get government permission to acquire the land and transform the weed plot into a community garden. Though no whites lived anywhere in the area, word came back that the weed plot was in an area designated white; no blacks could own it.

The children smiled and waved again as we left Lady Grey. And I sent up a prayer for children who live under a government that will not surrender four acres of weeds—"white" weeds—so that they might eat.

EVERY AFTERNOON AT 3:30, the truck comes to the dump near the Buffalo Flats area of East London. About a thousand kids—orphans and runaways, blacks and Indians and so-called coloreds—live in the bush surrounding the dump. The oldest are teenagers, the youngest their infant sons and daughters—children of children.

Sustenance comes just after 3:30, when the children scavenge through the day's garbage. Nutrition is scarce, and chemicals and gasoline often get dumped over the "edible" stuff, slowly eating away at the young stomachs that swallow the tainted garbage.

An older kid they call "The Savior" came one day to Reggie Naidoo, a young Indian seminarian with dark, intense eyes, asking for food. He took a carload of bread to the dump; the kids, eyes as vacant as their stomachs, surrounded his car and rocked it wildly. Naidoo has been taking food there ever since.

Reggie Naidoo wants to build a "Child Safety Home" that will house 250 kids—as a start. He has offers of free mattresses and donated labor from architects and plumbers. But his dream goes unrealized. He won't build a home in a particular racial area that will exclude others; government officials refuse to allow a non-racial children's home.

They don't seem to be bothered about a non-racial dump.

THE HUGE TENEMENTS make up one of the most densely populated areas in South Africa. Women have to get up before dawn to secure space on a wash-line. Forty-five thousand families are on a waiting list for the small flats in the broad, three-story brick buildings. Meanwhile, homes in white areas stand empty.

Unemployment is above 65 percent and rising every year in Lavendar Hill. Gangs with names like the Mafia, the Mongrels, and the Young Americans—borrowed from American TV—have taken control of the streets, with the largest gang boasting 800 members.

The tenements of Lavendar Hill all bear names of streets from District Six. The residents used to live in District Six, a thriving, multiracial neighborhood of Cape Town that was destroyed when the Group Areas Act was enacted and the area was declared white. The Group Areas Act, with its forced removals and breakup of communities as more and more of South Africa is declared white, is one of the most diabolical parts of the white strategy to rid South Africa of blacks.

Just beyond Lavendar Hill is a place called Vrygrond, meaning "free ground"—ironic, since residents have to pay rent for space to construct a miserable, little shack. The shacks can be no larger than four meters by four meters here—government regulation.

Miriam came out of her shack when she saw us coming. She had just gotten word that 60 families in an adjacent area were going to be pushed out that night, their homes bulldozed. In a gesture of generosity beyond her means, she had offered to take three women and their children into her already overcrowded, tiny corrugated-iron shack. The rest would have to build shacks behind the sand dunes and tear them down by morning before the police saw them.

Bulldozing squatter areas is one of the government's strategies for making life in South Africa so intolerable for blacks that they will move to the homelands. New legislation introduced while we were in the country would fine illegal squatters up to 10,000 rand (about $5,000) or sentence them to five years in prison.

Unemployment here is 90 percent. "Most people don't even know if they'll have a piece of bread tonight," said Miriam. She and others in Vrygrond used to have monthly meetings with people from other squatter camps to try to organize for change, but the government banned the meetings.

"If only Botha could come and walk here...." Her voice trailed off, leaving her thought unfinished. She didn't want to accept that Botha and his friends were plotting her suffering. Her spirit of generosity made her incapable of believing that anyone would have an approach to life different from hers.

"This is our South Africa, too," she said. "That is the sadness—God created it for all of us."

Miriam knew it was only a matter of time before the police would come and raze her home again. She had been pushed out from numerous places. "The government never tells us where we can go," she said. "But this time we are not moving. This is our dead end. They can put us all in jail if they want to. And they will—the children too."

A woman with nothing was having even that taken away from her. "I see a very dark future-very, very dark," she said. "It's not only me—I think the majority of us sees it that way."

Vrygrond, like all black areas, lies out of view of white society. On the other side of the main road, a two-minute drive, is Marina de Gama. Sprawling homes painted dazzling white, draped with bougainvillea and roses, cluster around a human-made lake, with moorings for boats outside every door. There is no restriction here on the size of homes.

We had asked Miriam before we left her if she had any hope for her children. I had been conditioned from asking this question in food lines and jail cells at home and war zones in Nicaragua to expect a statement of steadfast faith in a God who loves the poor. The despair was evident in her eyes as she said, "No....No, I have no hope."

SHE SAT ON THE EDGE of the chair, a simple white bow fixed between the tight cornrows that covered her head. 'Her small legs, crossed at the ankles, occasionally swung gently; her unseeing eyes wandered in all directions.

Her fingers kept returning to the red rose pinned to her plain, blue dress. She stroked the soft petals, occasionally pulling one off and putting it to her face, smiling as she breathed its sweet fragrance.

She and her friends from a school for the blind outside Cape Town were the featured choir for the Good Friday service at the church where Allan Boesak is pastor. At the appropriate moment, teachers from the school brusquely grabbed the arms of the children in blue uniforms with flowers and herded them to the front of the church, where they sang a few songs and then returned to their seats. Her fingers returned to her rose.

When she prayed, her head bowed and her tiny hands came together in perfect form, fingers extended, just as she had been taught. By the time the preacher from America got up to speak, her head began to nod with weariness.

I wondered if it would be frightening to her to be gathered up and held by a stranger she couldn't see. Her only response to my gesture was to sigh and fall asleep quickly in my arms.

Jim focused his sermon on Jesus' cry from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He reminded the congregation that, despite God's faithfulness to the very end, the gut-wrenching cry of God's son was real, the feeling overpowering. I heard it echo in my soul for the sake of this land.

Jim held forth a resounding promise: "If the South African government puts the church of Jesus Christ on the cross, it will be overthrown by the Resurrection!" The words had the powerful ring of theological truth, and a rush of affirmation surged through the congregation.

But I could not see that truth. All I could see for this land was an unending Good Friday; I did not yet have eyes to see the Resurrection. I wondered if the child in my arms ever would.

I led her back to her seat for the closing hymn. Now she had only to wait for someone to grab her arm and take her home. She sat quietly with her head down, her small legs swinging, a stem without petals pinned to her plain, blue dress.

She could not see an older, more confident schoolmate rush to the front of the church. With some assistance, the teenager groped her way toward Allan Boesak, whom she had dreamed of meeting some day.

She asked to touch his face. She gently ran her fingers over every feature and then touched his hair. As joyful pride spread over her face, she said, "It's true; you're not white."

"What made you think I'm white?" Allan asked.

"I thought anyone who's so famous must be white."

She wanted to meet "the preacher" as well. She was led to Jim. She touched his face and hair, commenting with quiet surprise, "I never heard a white man talk that way."

In South Africa, even the blind are not allowed to be color blind.

WE KNOW HIS FACE only from pictures. A candle he gave his mother last Christmas is lit at every meal as a reminder while he remains in prison. A scrapbook she put together for him tells the story of his arrests; it includes news clippings, letters of support, and the tiny deck of playing cards he made out of toilet paper during his first detention.

Martin Wittenberg is a trusted, white UDF leader in conflict-ridden Pietermaritzburg. The recent detention of Martin and other UDF leaders has delivered a serious blow to peace negotiations in an area that saw 397 people killed in the last four months of 1987.

Before Easter, Martin's mother, Monica Wittenberg, mentioned to the authorities holding her son that it is a tradition at Easter to release a prisoner. Denied her petition, she asked that they at least allow his sister Reinhild to visit. The police refused that request as well, stating that it would be "too traumatic" for a teenager to see her brother in prison—this from a spokesperson for a system that is notorious for its torture of children.

We stayed in Martin's room during our time in Pietermaritzburg. I wished for the opportunity to meet him. It is abundantly clear that his witness has had a strong impact on his family and many others, as has his tenacious sense of humor in the most tragic of times.

Hanging on the front of his file cabinet, next to his UDF stickers and slogans, is a work of an African poet. It begins "In order to ensure absolute national security, the government has passed the Animal and Insect Emergency Control and Discipline Act...."

It outlines the new regulations: buffaloes, cows, and goats are henceforth prohibited from grazing in herds of more than three; birds can no longer flock, nor bees swarm, for such constitutes unlawful assembly; penguins and zebras are ordered to discard their non-regulation uniforms; and under no circumstances are elephants to break wind between the hours of 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., "for such could easily be interpreted as gunshot and might spark off a riot."

WALKING UP THE steep hill is like making a pilgrimage to a shrine. And indeed there once was a sort of shrine here. Now it is only a concrete foundation with the remains of a chimney rising from one corner.

This area outside Durban is the sight of Gandhi's first ashram, a farm and community and training center, among whose later pupils was Steve Biko. Until 1985 Gandhi's wood-and-iron home stood on this spot. Inside were his spinning wheels, books, and the brass name plate from his law office in town. The house was called Sarvodaya, meaning "welfare of all," a poetic reminder of how this non-racial settlement stood for decades in contrast to the rest of society.

In 1985, however, the peaceful non-racialism of the Phoenix Settlement evaporated in a tide of racial violence that engulfed the area. Fires were set and homes were looted. Sarvodaya was destroyed.

But three years later, out of the ashes, the phoenix is rising again. Gandhi's first printing press has been turned into a community-run school, and the sounds of children singing and chanting spill over the hill. His home was dismantled, not burned; one observer says pieces of Sarvodaya and its spirit now form parts of probably a hundred homes. And in the clinic named after him, a bust of the humble, little man—round glasses perched on the end of his nose—sits awkwardly on a folding metal chair, keeping watch over the babies as they line up in their mothers' arms to get weighed.

DUSK BRINGS A CHANGE of mood to the township. Domestics and laborers, weary from a day's work in the city, make their way home in the last moments of day-light. A stream of women, water jugs balanced on their heads, some with babies on their backs, moves slowly out from the central spigot over the township's rutted roads in the encroaching cool of the evening. Children leave their play and move inside, and dogs seem to take the sun's disappearance as a signal to commence barking.

In the waning light, the box-like houses take on even more sameness. The large, crude, hand-painted numbers distinguishing them—the work of the police, who got tired of mothers rubbing out less visible numbers to protect their children from police searches—are legible now only by the light of police searchlights.

At the entrance to the township, spread out on a table, are rows of sheep's heads, blood still running from their necks and the look of terror from the slaughter still on their faces. Women tending fires cut pieces of meat from the carcasses and skewer them for sale.

A family that cannot afford the mutton buys scores of the sheep's legs. Scraping the hair from the legs, they cook the pile of bones with scant meat over a fire for their evening meal: The air is heavy with smoke and a pungent odor from the fires and the paraffin lamps that come to life, one by one, up and down the rows of tiny houses.

A comrade is taking us through the township, speaking of the struggle, of the land and freedom that have been stolen from his people. As he speaks, I am reminded of the glimpses of this land's beauty that we have been privileged to behold—its vast expanses of beaches, pounding surf, plains populated with ostrich herds and mountains poking through clouds. A sliver of a crescent moon resting one night on the edge of Cape Town's famous Table Mountain urged a stream of tears from me, so tragic is it that some South Africans have robbed the glory of this land from others. What a strong nation this would be if all its wealth and beauty were shared.

As we walk toward our friend's home, the sky turns blood-red. We stop, speechless, in awe of the red expanse that forms a brilliant canopy over South Africa. After a moment, he says, "But they cannot take the sky from us."

IT WAS OUR LAST NIGHT in South Africa, and we wanted to thank Allan and Dorothy Boesak for their generous hospitality. Their four children got their reward the night before when we made "American pizza" for them.

We had asked Allan and Dorothy to pick the place. We found ourselves in a revolving restaurant far above the night lights of Cape Town. One reason for choosing this spot was that the maitre d' is a member of Allan's church, and the waiters longtime friends.

A fuss was created over us the moment we entered the restaurant. Samuel, the maitre d', ushered us to our table, and the waiters hovered over us, holding menus and pouring water and bringing bread. They referred to Allan as "the prime minister."

Everyone else in the restaurant was white, and an awkwardness spread through the room at the treatment we were being given. We had seen this happen before as we accompanied Allan. Workers always hailed Allan warmly, and drivers shouted from their taxis, "Keep it up, Reverend!" As Allan described it, "Blacks always greet me, and whites don't know where to look."

We scanned the menu and made our choices between ostrich steak and roast duckling and kingklip, a delicate Cape fish. Meanwhile, Samuel told us about how hard it is on him to work long hours at the restaurant and commute from the city to his township, making just enough money to make ends meet and barely ever seeing his wife and new baby. As he spoke, a white piano player filled the room with songs ranging from "The Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet" to John Denver's "Sunshine On My Shoulders."

Over the past few days, as we were on the verge of leaving South Africa, I had frequently seen the faces of people flash through my mind—Miriam and Tommy and Eddie and the little blind girl. I had wrestled with despair, struggling to find the internal resources to keep the evil that was so pervasive in this country at bay. There was certainly resurrection hope in many places, but I often got stopped at Good Friday. The thought of how many people were going to lose their lives before this country changed—some of them, perhaps, friends we had made—often brought a convulsion of tears.

But there was one constant for me, one pervasive ring of hope. That was the singing of "Nkosi Sikelel' i Afrika"—"God Bless Africa," the African national anthem. Old people sang it at the end of a Soweto church service and young athletes before a sports celebration; children belted it out at the detainees' meeting and women sang it with pride at the beginning of their first national festival in Cape Town. It is always sung with dignity and strength, and chills run up and down the spine at the swelling affirmation that this is God's land, to be shared by all.

While we were enjoying dessert, I noticed a request card on our table. I asked Allan if he thought the piano player knew the national anthem. Allan laughed heartily, wrote "Nkosi Sikelel' i Afrika" on the card, and handed it to Samuel to take to the piano player. We were just revolving out of the piano player's view, so we listened carefully. Silence. It was what we expected.

A few moments later we heard it, just one finger banging out the melody. It stopped. Then it began again slowly, this time with the harmony added. We started to laugh as the strains of the African national anthem drifted through one of Cape Town's most exclusive restaurants.

Beaming, Samuel came to our table and reported to us and the waiters, "The first time it was me. The piano player said he didn't know it, and I said to that piano player, 'This is how it goes.' He picked it up quick enough." We laughed until we thought our sides would split.

A tiny triumph in an unexpected place. God bless South Africa.