Noel Ndhlovu doesn't want his young nephews to listen as he talks about the time he and some friends firebombed their high school in Soweto, the sprawling black township outside Johannesburg. So the 31-year-old Fulbright scholar lowers his voice to a whisper. The year was 1981, and Ndhlovu and his friends had been refused readmittance to nearby Meadowlands High School after failing final exams. "The logical thing to do was to attack the school and the [unequal] education it symbolized," he says, "so we burned it down. At the time it seemed like a noble thing. In retrospect it was kind of silly."
In South Africa's past, burning down a school to protest apartheid was something people boasted about. In the "new" South Africa, such things are not to be mentioned in front of the children. A decade ago, blacks like Ndhlovu had no rights to speak of and were considered little more than "guest workers" in their own country. Today, Nelson Mandela, the country's most famous political prisoner, is president, former "terrorists" sit in Parliament and newspapers write of a black "Afristocracy" taking its place in a mainstream long reserved for whites.
Yet for every socialist now gracing the society pages, there are millions of blacks without jobs, education or housing. Last April's elections brought an end to the political violence that had racked South Africa since the mid-1980s. But for the vast majority of blacks, not much else has changed. And while companies, universities and political parties compete for a limited pool of educated blacks, the latter's relatives and former neighbors in the country's squalid black townships are left wondering if anything other than the skin color of the power elite has really shifted.
In this climate, many blacks feel South Africa's best long- term hope lies with people like Ndhlovu who have been steeled in the country's long tradition of grass-roots activism. "I could get myself an affirmative-action job, make a fortune and drive a BMW, but it would be a token job," he says. "The real jobs, those where you've got real power and can make a difference, are what one is looking for."
The son of a black policeman who died when he was 2, Ndhlovu came of age in the aftermath of the 1976 Soweto uprising. Like many youths of his generation, he spent his formative years boycotting schools, organizing antiapartheid "street committees" and sometimes in police detention. In large part, the battle was about equal education and equal access to information. After high school, Ndhlovu drifted into journalism and, in 1987, was accepted on probation by the overwhelmingly white Rhodes University in Grahamstown. There, over objections from fellow students, he became the first black editor of the school's newspaper, expanding its coverage to include blacks in the surrounding townships, whose plight the paper had long ignored.
Ndhlovu knew he was an exception in a nation where inferior education and illiteracy ruled. Just how wide the gulf was between himself and most black South Africans became apparent when he conducted a survey six months after Mandela's release in 1990, finding that 60 percent of respondents in rural areas of the black Transkei homeland thought the African National Congress leader was still in jail. National newspapers picked up the survey; it also caught the attention of a U.S. Information Agency official. With his help, Ndhlovu applied for a Fulbright fellowship and then enrolled in the University of Missouri's journalism school.
Ndhlovu intended to join South Africa's antiapartheid alternative media, but the election changed all that. Instead, he has taken a temporary job at the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corp., now making a transition from government propaganda arm to unbiased broadcaster for all South Africans. At SABC, Ndhlovu finds his activist past useful. While other reporters rush off to cover the latest government pronouncements, he spends most of his time in black townships and rural areas, where most of the population lives. In one story, Ndhlovu interviewed disgruntled former ANC guerrillas who said they were prepared to take up arms against the new government unless their demands were met. The story hit front pages -- and provoked an angry response from Mandela.
Yet there is constant tension between the drive to push forward and the reluctance to change too fast: Blacks like Ndhlovu are no longer tokens, but neither do they have the power to transform their country overnight. "The biggest problem," he says, "is that everyone is in a state of change." He might be speaking for all of the "new" South Africa.
