Member-only story
What Freedom First Felt Like
It’s easy to take democracy and racial integration for granted, but in South Africa in 1995 we weren’t that jaded.
* A repost of a 2021 story, when no-one knew me or read my stories
Just the other day I ran into Setle again. Same old Setle, same job, same company. Looking at his kindly, humorous face again after twenty five years, I was immediately transported to that beautiful Saturday in March in Johannesburg, when we went to watch the soccer out of town.
I almost didn’t make the trip.
Out of the blue that week, Setle came to stand by my desk at work. He brought with him a silence that carried definite significance. The silence settled around my desk and over me. It was clear that he meant for me to put everything down and listen. I sighed in that composed, inaudible way that people sigh, and put on the fixed face that they do when they have neither the time nor the choice to refuse. I put everything down and listened.
Setle spoke with a sense of occasion and theatre. The coming weekend, he said, South Africa would play Malawi at the FNB stadium in Soweto, or the South Western Township. The HR department had made some tickets available to whoever wanted to go. Am I in?
He paused after every second or third word for effect. His face changed from saying nothing, or as little as possible, to one more or less yelling “surpri-i-i-i-se!” It was remarkably effective as an oratorical device. I could feel my own face, until then immobile, mimic his every expression. I closed my gaping mouth.
“What? Of course!” I said. I hoped I was sounding enthusiastic enough. I felt it, but I knew I had a bad tendency to look like everything but. But Setle was sold.
This was big. Let me explain.
Setle is black, and I’m not. It hadn’t occurred to me that one might go to the soccer, as soccer was more or less a black sport then, just as rugby was a white sport. And even if I had thought of it of my own accord, to actually be invited was a glorious happenstance and an enormous honour. I didn’t know of anyone in my (white) circles ever befalling such a thing.
