Students at Frank Holele Preschool and their families create paintings of the South African flag during a parents’ day event in October 2004 at the educational facility in Bendel, South Africa.

It’s sometimes difficult to really understand why I’m here.

I get up every morning, take a bucket bath with two scoops of water, gather my daily teaching materials, and trudge to school through two miles of thick sand.

Through the peak of the mid-morning heat, I move from classroom to classroom, hoping to catch teachers on their breaks, trying to convince them, indirectly, that they have an impact on the lives of children. I cringe as a teacher strolls into the room after her tea break and pinches a misbehaving child in the arm. She repeatedly insults him for being noisy while she was out of the room. He squeezes his eyes shut to hold back tears, wondering why the other children didn’t get equal punishment. Historically, wrong answers have been met with physical and emotional punishment, so I try to work with teachers on methods of discipline and praise.

I encourage them to allow conversation in the classroom, and show them that peer teaching and learning are important ways for children to gain the critical thinking skills necessary for participation in a changing society. Living with their uneducated grandmothers after being orphaned by AIDS, many of these children are responsible for chores that leave them little time for schoolwork. Many have fathers who work for the mines, live far from home, drink irresponsibly, and cannot put food on the table.

Often, teachers become the mothers and fathers to these children who lack responsible, loving, supportive figures in their lives. While I encourage them to praise and support their students, their confused faces remind me that providing for their own families is the real reason they are working, the reason they trudge through those mounds of thick sand. Many of them will not hesitate to tell me that they wish they could go home, and some days, in frustration, I wish they would. But before I lose hope, I must remind myself that the people I work with have lived a history of hearing that they are worthless. They have been handed scraps from the white man’s table, causing a work ethic of “the minimum is enough.” The legacy of apartheid has destroyed the spirits of the people, discouraged them from working to improve their lives because of an ingrown belief that they are unable to do so.

It is 2004, and I am witnessing South Africa as it marks 10 years of democracy.

In 1982, when my friend Isaac was 17 years old, he worked as a gardener in a suburb of Pretoria. After working many hours to create a manicured lawn with vibrant colors — a lawn he knew he would never have — the mistress would call him for lunch, holding out two dirty dishes filled with cold food scraped from the bottom of a pot. She placed one dish in Isaac’s hands and the other on the ground for the eager and drooling guard dog. With his head bent in respect, Isaac was obliged by law to say, Thank you, Madam” in Afrikaans, even though his own language was Setswana.

Once she was satisfied that he had taken his first bite of food, the mistress walked back inside, shutting the wooden door in front of him. Isaac quietly dumped the remains of his food into the hungry dog’s dish and glanced at the sky. The sun indicated that he had two more hours of the workday left, and he picked up his pruning shears. When the sun finally reached the horizon, Isaac closed the gate behind him, and breathed a sigh of relief to be returning to Soshanguve township, to his family. Fellow workers quietly greet on another on the street, falling into their comfortable lilting language and stride, leaving their day of work behind. Occasionally, Isaac speaks of his mistress, and how he wishes that a humble request for a different dish would not get him fired. Most often, beneath their hunger pangs, they proudly discuss their families, their friends, and the best place to spend their daily wages on vegetables for the family dinner.  

In 2004, I went on vacation with my co-worker and friend Salome, spending four days in the township of Mahwelereng in Limpopo Province. Previously, I would have been breaking the law by setting foot in the township, but for 10 years the democratic constitution has granted individuals of all skin colors the right to move freely around the country, to live where they choose, and to vote for the country’s president.

In Mahwelereng, Salome introduces me to her friends, and as one of the first white faces to spend a night in the township, I am greeted with smiles, waves, generosity, and kindness. I spent an evening with her in the local tavern, sitting with friends in a circle of dirty chairs. The run-down building had cracking wall paint, and when the wind blew, a smell of stale urine emanated from its side. In spite of the surroundings, everyone was smiling, with teeth glowing in the dingy lights. One person was dancing to the crackling stereo in a torn Target polo shirt, and others were leaning against the wall telling jokes and holding their stomachs in laughter.

At first, my skin color brought glances of surprise and hesitation, but as I continued to chat in Setswana and reached out to slap the hands of friends, more people began to approach me to shake my hand. As I grasped the soft vaselined hands of the young, and the rough, callused hands of the old, I asked myself, “Why am I greeted with such warmth?”

Even though I am American, and not South African, I share the skin color of the oppressor. Because of a past where skin color alone determined one’s place in society, South Africa’s black citizens have every reason and right to be angry at people like me. Instead, these people accepted me as one of their own. In admiration of their acceptance and their ability to forgive, I asked many of them the same question: “Why?” One man with deep wrinkles at the corner of his eyes grabbed my hands and squeezed them tightly. He held his chin high, as he looked deeply into my eyes and said in Setswana, “Kate, by seeing you here, I think I know what democracy really feels like.”

After that night, I pondered that answer, and that man who lived through many years of apartheid and 10 years of freedom. What should democracy “feel” like? Policy states that Isaac, Salome, and the residents of Mahwelereng deserve to be treated as equals. This equality must mean that Isaac should have just as much right as his former employer to own a manicured garden, to use the same toilet as she does. Isaac’s children have the right to a quality education — equal to that of their white peers — and his family deserves access to running water.

If the people of South Africa live in a democracy, why does Salome live only feet from her neighbor, while lush gated compounds exist right across the street? When she visits a gas station equipped with a porcelain toilet, she is pointed to a fly-infested latrine — the “non-whites only” label peeling conveniently from the rotting wood door. Isaac’s children attend a school where they must share textbooks and climb over each others’ desks as the teacher struggles to locate a stub of chalk. His oldest boy is discouraged from looking for a job, because his family needs him to harness the donkeys to the cart every day in order to fetch water from the village tap.

Policy states that the country is a democracy, freed from the terror of apartheid. In response, the world smiles and congratulates. But when will this democracy begin to offer basic human rights to all of its people?

These citizens of South Africa want to be heard, to feel human in the eyes of their government and fellow citizens. Until their human rights are met, the policies of democracy will only succeed on paper. The children of South Africa must be taught that equality can be achieved. They must be taught critical thinking skills that will give them the ability to overcome a fate that was pre-determined by the color of their skin. In a country with a history of fierce discrimination, the only way to achieve true democracy is to embrace the fact that we are all people, and to recognize that each person deserves basic human rights. In South Africa I was reminded that equality and freedom must never be taken for granted. Our blood is all red, we all laugh in happiness, we all cry in sadness, and we all dream.”

In The Fray Contributor