The Man Who Sold America by Joy-Ann Reid

Author:Joy-Ann Reid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

What America Can Learn from South Africa

“In my country we go to prison first and then become president.”

—Nelson Mandela

IN DECEMBER 2018, MY HUSBAND AND I TRAVELED TO SOUTH Africa. The trip—my first to the African continent—was a gift to myself for my birthday. The previous two years had been emotionally and physically draining, as my country became almost alien, with Donald Trump and his political party warping every conceivable norm in their pursuit of a particularly thuggish brand of power. Frankly, I didn’t want to spend my birthday in his America. So, in September, I bought two tickets to Johannesburg and reached out to friends of my father, to let them know we were coming. A month later, I was invited to participate in a small way in the Global Citizen Festival’s South Africa edition, which would be broadcast on MSNBC.

My father was Congolese, but he spent much of his adult life living and working in South Africa, even during apartheid. He worked in the mining industry by day and slept in Botswana, where Africans had more freedom, before returning to the Congo later in his life to run an environmental NGO on his ancestral land. This was penance, I suppose, for what his profession did to plunder Earth. His best mate growing up is now an official in South Africa, and this trip was a chance to meet this extended family, get to know a faraway place, and maybe see a lion and an elephant in person (we saw elephants, leopards, and more, but sadly, no lions).

It turned out to be the trip of a lifetime. I’ll never forget the breathless feeling of walking out onto that stage in FNB Stadium in Johannesburg alongside Rev. Al Sharpton, who is utterly revered in South Africa as a man who fought for black freedom in New York at the same time that black South Africans were fighting for Nelson Mandela’s freedom as well as their own during the last throes of the apartheid regime.

Everywhere I went in South Africa, from Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, where Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela were among the dissidents jailed in the deep underground prison; to breathtaking, hilly Cape Town, which looks like a version of Beverly Hills; to Langa and Soweto townships, where the poverty is as biting as any I’ve seen in the world but where art, entrepreneurship, and hope also flourish, I was greeted with “welcome home.” It felt good, and it felt like a known quantity, for better and for worse.

When the three of us who were traveling together—two black Americans (myself and my producer, who had come down to work on “Global Citizen” with Rev. Al Sharpton and me) and my husband, the Queens-raised black Brit—received ugly stares from white patrons in a Cape Town boardwalk restaurant and knowing glances from the black waiters, we immediately understood what that was. This was America, down under.

South Africa is like the United States in so many ways. The physical beauty of the

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