Some days are unforgettable, and so it is that Meisie Ndlovu and John Henshall both recall what they were doing 10 years ago on April 26, 1994, when South Africa won its freedom.
Henshall stood in the broiling sun in his all-white suburb, part of a 3.2km line of voters electing a first democratic president. Ndlovu stood in a line in her all-black town, listening to neighbors exult that democracy meant free food, forever, for everyone.
Henshall was skeptical that black rule would be as bad as some neighbors feared. Ndlovu was skeptical that it would be as good as neighbors predicted.
"I didn't believe it," she said, laughing. "I said, `This government is going to be poor.' I said, `I am not educated, but I can think.'"
As it turned out, they were both right.
This is a tale about the Ndlovus, black and striving, and the Henshalls, white and coping, and what a decade of democracy has brought them and their country.
The two families are not acquainted. Indeed, they are separated, like most blacks and whites here, by huge racial and economic divides.
But if a lesson can be drawn from a decade of multiracial democracy, a transformation hailed for its almost miraculous absence of rancor, it is that families like these are far more alike today than before 1994 -- both in aspirations and fears.
The happy and the wary
For Ndlovu, a plump, round-faced woman with a quick laugh and unruly hair pulled in braids, there is no mistaking what 10 years of freedom have done. Just look at her toolshed.
Set behind her brick home just outside Soshanguve, a city of 146,000, the shed is 3m by 3m, a listing shambles of rusted corrugated iron and sheet metal, unexceptional but for this: Before it was a toolshed, the Ndlovu family lived there for five years.
Under apartheid, Ndlovu was an illiterate black domestic in a white household. Today she runs her own construction company, laying asphalt and building fences on freeway projects. Her three-bedroom home has new living-room furniture and a carved wood door.
Her old shack sits in the backyard, a dilapidated reminder of the past. Her 17-year-old daughter calls it "scary." Ndlovu refuses to tear it down. "I like that house," she said. "I suffered in that house."
There is also no mistaking what a decade has brought John and Liann -- Li for short -- Henshall. Just look at Kyalami Estate, the idyllic suburb they and their three children call home.
Sixteen kilometers north of Johannesburg, theirs is an American-style community, studded with tennis courts, parks, lakes and community centers, unexceptional but for this: It is enclosed by a 3m brick wall, crowned with an electric fence.
Eight kilometers west is the Diepsloot squatter camp, 11 years old and 86,000 impoverished people strong -- Ndlovu's toolshed, replicated by the thousands. The Henshalls, whites who prospered in a decade of black rule, feel for Diepsloot's residents. Not unreasonably, they fear them, too.
"We believe that if you employ your own police force and you live behind the right kind of wall, you stand a chance," said John Henshall, a bluff man with an embracing manner. "We're happy inside our walls."
Outside the walls, they are wary. Says Li: "How good can life be if you have to live in fear?"
Something to lose
A decade after apartheid, many analysts say South Africa has stepped back from the racial precipice. The real worry now, they say, is not the racial gap, but the gap between the haves, of any color, and the have-nots -- what President Thabo Mbeki calls two economies "without a connecting staircase."
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