Excerpted from the essay collection FREEDOM.
I arrive in Johannesburg, South Africa, on December 2, 2013. My father will join me in two weeks, with my brother to follow a week later. In one month, we will unveil my mother’s headstone in the township where she grew up, one year after her death. Weeks before my arrival, a report detailing unlawful expenditure of taxpayer money in the form of $20 million of “security improvements” to President Jacob Zuma’s lavish compound, is leaked to the press. Nine years ago, the country’s first all-race elections were held and South Africa finally regained freedom from apartheid rule.
Pennsylvania this time of year is frigid and snow-kissed, and even though I am anxious about what will await me on this trip, I am thankful for warm South African weather and all the charms that come along with it. In South African culture, the headstone unveiling traditionally resembles a funeral in scope, usually consisting of a service at the graveyard and repast afterward. As Americans, my father, brother, and I are stumbling into this ritual somewhat blindly, leaving the details to my type-A older cousin, Annemarie. The ceremony will take place on Christmas Day, followed by a traditional lunch. After that, my adult cousins and I will board a plane to much warmer Cape Town on the southern coast, where many of Johannesburg’s residents spend the festive season.
These two weeks mark the first time I have been in this country alone. Throughout most of my life, my family and I have spent summers here visiting my relatives, but this is the first time I’ve crossed the ocean by myself, the first time I’ve been left solely in charge of planning which sights to see, which friends to visit. For the first time, I will have complete control over my own travel. My mother was, for much of our twenty-seven years together, an incredibly fearful person. The 1990s and early 2000s were violent years in South Africa, and as children, our movements were tightly controlled. This is the first time I will experience some freedom on my own, and it doesn’t escape me that it has come at the cost of my mother’s life, and also—perhaps because of this fact—I am both scared and excited.
*
My mother was named Dorothy, called “Dotty” for short. Born in 1957, she was the second-youngest of five children from a middle class coloured—or mixed-race—family from Johannesburg’s western suburbs, where they placed after being removed from the neighborhood of Jeppe by the Group Areas Act, the legislation enforcing racial segregation during apartheid. My mother was the first one in her family to attend college. She was the first non-white student to move into her college dormitory. She became involved in the anti-apartheid struggle there, against the wishes of my grandparents. In 1976, when she was nineteen, the Soweto Uprising occurred, and my grandfather, who worked as an undertaker, buried the bodies of murdered schoolchildren from the nearby black township.
She met my father in Botswana in the eighties, while she was smuggling banned literature back into South Africa. My father was volunteering in the country, a visitor from his US college. After a brief courtship, my mother moved to the States, where they settled in Philadelphia and she entered graduate school.
Growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s, every day I would hear her relay the wrenching events of her workday, unaware how she had heard similar stories from her father as a child—stories of children who were neglected and sometimes abused by parents who were themselves products of a broken system. I didn’t understand where her commitment to these children came from, why she kept at it through the challenges and the frustration. I was too young to understand the concept of injustice as it related to her work.
If she once craved freedom in her youth, she grew to fear it in her later years.
Whenever I hear stories of my mother’s past, the woman she was in her younger years seems unrecognizable to me. America reshaped her. Faced with the choice of assimilation or resistance, she chose the former. Her accent dulled, especially in the company of Americans. She became fascinated with American pop culture. Like many black Americans, her desire for conformity took the form of striving, which she channeled into her children. She kept a tight leash on us—me especially. I was just as rebellious as she was when she was younger, and therefore, we were constantly at odds.
In 2010, at fifty-three, she was diagnosed with late-stage multiple myeloma, a cancer of the white blood cells that normally afflicts the elderly. She kept working, became closer than ever to her South African family. Her mother died ten years before her diagnosis; after her death, my mother became their unofficial matriarch. She was always outspoken and personable, and the role suited her naturally. Even from a distance, she was entrenched in gossip, a confidant for my young cousins and aunts and uncles alike. When she became sick, many of them travelled to America, many for the first time, to help us take care of her and—though they wouldn’t admit it then—to say goodbye.
When she became sick, after I was long gone from her house and living in New York City, she confronted death and the fears that came along with it. We got along better than we ever had, started to finally accept each other’s flaws and appreciate each other as people. We became friends. And then, just as soon, she was gone.
*
I stay with my aunt, who lives on a sprawling property in the wealthy northern suburbs of Johannesburg. She tells loud, dirty jokes in mixed company, to which listeners respond with mock exasperation. She has all of my mother’s charms and few of her hang-ups.
“I’m not over it,” she tells me now, in regards to her sister’s death, and she is so open that I can see all the broken parts inside her.
On my second day, still jet lagged, I wake late, around 11am. On my way to the kitchen, she stops me in the hallway. I can tell by the way she pauses that something has happened. I can’t take more bad news, I think to myself.
She tells me that Nelson Mandela died early in the morning, just a few neighborhoods over, in another upscale enclave called Houghton. She’s been up watching the news for hours, she says.
My cousins and I made plans earlier to gather at my cousin’s house in Fourways. It was supposed to be our first night out together. Instead, we order in Chinese food and drink their good bottles of red wine. They talk about Mandela’s death, what they think it will mean for the country’s future.
Mia tells me about one of her coworkers, a black girl a few years younger than her, who dismissed the fuss their office was making. “So, he died?” she huffed, and went on about her day. We all cluck and roll our eyes, because we remember how things were before. We all live in the shadow of our parents’ apartheid stories. The younger generation—the so-called Born Frees, or those born after independence—are not the same. Mia’s boyfriend is white. Mia has always been hard-nosed, quick tempered, but he has softened her in the way that love does.
After a couple more glasses of wine, Mia looks at me and says with a soft, tipsy smile, “I keep thinking, how lucky it is that your mom gets to meet Mandela in heaven.”
*
The mood in the city is one of restrained mourning. Mandela’s name comes up often in conversation; the radios play a constant stream of downtempo ballads and gospel songs, and in between commercial breaks, they play pre-recorded tributes, always with a conspicuous plug for the station, reminding us who sponsored this deeply emotional shared experience. The mood is not one strictly of sadness. The mourning is respectful, laced with celebration, jubilation even. I see it in the South African flags my family members place outside their houses, in the people who chant and sing revolutionary songs outside Mandela’s home; in the tones of admiration that punctuate any discussion of him. The mix of tragedy and pride; of ululating and flag-waving, hearkens directly back to independence in 1994. That day, my parents took me out of school early so that I could stand beside my mother in the Philadelphia Civic Center as she cast her first vote for Mandela’s ANC Party.
They announce that there will be a public memorial service at FNB Soccer Stadium in Soweto. Dozens of heads of state will be in attendance and the entire city will be completely devoted to it over the next week. I need to go, I tell my family. As large as the service is expected to be, it’s on a Tuesday and the government does not declare a holiday, so all of my family goes to work. I try to organize a ride with family friends, friends of friends; I reach out to anyone who says they may be going.
The roads around the stadium will be closed, and public transportation will be made freely available to and from the site. A new system of express buses and commuter trains is in place, built to support the 2010 World Cup. Before then, transportation was highly dangerous and unreliable. The private mini-buses, called taxis, and PUTCO buses that service most of the black population, are the frequent cause of fatal highway crashes.
My family, though, still lives in the past. They have not yet caught up to the reality that, even though still dangerous, things are better today. Like many, their trauma of years ago, above all else, determines their reality. They bristle when I tell them I want to go. On the morning of the memorial, all of my leads have gone nowhere, and I resign myself to watching the service on TV at my grandfather’s house.
When I arrive, my cousin Faith is on her way to work. Her family lives in an apartment that adjoins my grandparents’ house in the back. Faith is too cool for my family’s hometown: a budding hipster and graphic designer who reminds me of myself at twenty-three. Weekends, she hops warehouse parties and gallery openings in Maboneng, the newly redeveloped arts neighborhood in Joburg’s Central Business District, a place that not long ago was a no-man’s land for the middle and working classes. She encourages me to go by myself, tells me her friends are at the stadium already and they can save me a seat.
Faith and her sisters, Fern and Mia, joke that because of apartheid, they’re all different races. Fern, the eldest, is coloured, because she spent most of her life segregated with other coloureds. Mia, the middle sister, is white, because she came of age when coloureds and whites were just starting to mix; and Faith, the youngest, is black. The “coloured” moniker is an invention of apartheid, created to separate mixed-race people from blacks and pit them against each other. But Faith has cast off those divisions. Most of her friends are black. She is also like me on this account, because even though I could claim multiraciality, I’ve always called myself black. There is no such category as “coloured” in the US, and according to the one drop rule, that’s what I am, and I’ve never resisted it, have always felt proud to be black. It’s one of the things my cousins find most foreign about me.
My uncle drives me to an express bus stop nearby. He speaks to another coloured man and his wife and daughter. He introduces us. He’s asked the man to watch out for me on the way over. Right after my uncle bids me farewell and heads to work, the man taps me on the shoulder. The small pocket on my backpack is open, revealing my keys and cell phone. I smile, try to laugh it off, but I know I’ve exposed myself as a hapless tourist. I try to look more serious.
As the bus winds toward Soweto, it becomes increasingly full of black passengers. After our penultimate stop, the woman next to me shouts a note and the entire bus erupts in song. We ride that way, buoyed by music, up to the stadium hill.
I walk with my fellow passengers and find Faith’s friends quickly. They are all black, stylish as her, friendly, and totally unequipped for the rain. It is one of the coldest days since I’ve been here, and it pours relentlessly. We sit shivering under two umbrellas shared between the six of us. Because of the weather and because people are at work, the stadium never fills as it’s supposed to. Still, the service is stately and jubilant. People wear the yellow, green, and black of the ANC. They drape themselves in multicolor South African flags. Many of them are wearing trash bags to shield themselves from the rain, some have wrapped their boots in plastic shopping bags. They file into the stadium chanting, and when President Zuma is introduced on stage, they boo him gleefully. They cheer Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor, who has become a hero again after leaving office in disgrace, carried out on a wave of populist fervor. Robert Mugabe also receives a round of applause, as does Barack Obama.
This is the first time I’ve gone anywhere in South Africa completely on my own, and I stop to appreciate the moment. I’m independent to a fault, I hate restrictions and I buckle when anyone tries to control me. Here, in this unfamiliar place filled with strangers, I feel blissful. I’m in awe of the size of the stadium, the swelling chants, the euphoria, and the feeling that I am part of something bigger than any of us.
*
Annemarie’s husband is a successful lawyer with a practice in town. Whenever we’re out in public, someone will come up to him and ask for advice. I spend a few nights in their home, an elegant stucco with huge walls of windows that look onto green hills and orange Johannesburg sunsets. They built it a couple years ago at the top of a hill in a neighborhood with a view onto the scenic hills of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. Their house is positioned directly across from a nature reserve, giving them one of the best unobstructed views of the surrounding landscape of lush jacaranda trees and stately manicured lawns.
One day, as we’re pulling out of the driveway, we notice police vehicles across the street at the reserve. A section of the gate is lying flat on the ground, looking like a gap-toothed smile. Before the fallen gate are a squadron of police and private security cars. The officers are dressed in full Kevlar, guns at the ready, gazing into the reserve. Inside, there are more officers running over the hills.
Annemarie’s two young children are in the car with us. They grow excited at the flashing lights; they giggle and squirm when Annemarie pulls up next to a squad car, lowers the window and asks the officer what’s happened.
He tells us there was a home invasion a few blocks over, on the same street that my Aunt Veronica lives on. One of the homeowners was shot, as well as one of the robbers. The rest of the suspects are still on the loose.
As we pull away, Annemarie’s son giddily imitates a police officer with his gun, holds his fingers up to his sister’s face. He pulls the trigger and they both explode in delight.
Annemarie tells me about the time she heard gunshots when she was standing in her bathroom. She dropped instinctively to the floor, and stayed there until her husband came home. Her children laugh uproariously at the story, “Mom, you’re so paranoid!” I urge Annemarie to drive faster.
Later that night, when we’re returning to the house to sleep, I ask Annemarie if she is scared. She tells me she is very security-conscious. She talks about the alarms and the motion-detector beams in the yard. She never actually answers my question.
Crime ballooned around the 1980s to 90s, a consequence of the country’s struggle for freedom—a reason cited by apartheid sympathizers, for why things were better “back in those days.” My family’s conservatism has always chafed, and I certainly don’t tell them that, when it comes down to it, I side with the so-called criminals over them. How could I feel any other way when faced with miles upon miles of informal settlements housing the country’s blacks and coloureds? I recognize it as a postcolonial hangover, a feature of the country’s massive unemployment and politicians’ broken promises. I hate how it shapes every day of my life here. I am not just resigned to this violence, I know it is deserved. Part of me thinks that I deserve it too.
I barely sleep that night. I go to the window every hour or so to gaze across their yard at the nature reserve. The section of gate is still down, and every once in a while a security van passes, lights whirling, throwing yellow onto the yard and into the hills around us.
*
My cousins and I party almost every night. My mother never would have let us behave in this way, but no one else seems to care. I don’t remember my grief when we are drunk and the car is speeding down the highway. We drive with the windows down and blast music, the smoke from my cousins’ cigarettes flooding my face. I sit in the backseat, feeling the warm rush of South African air, feeling happy to be alive. So we drink and play roulette with our vehicle. My mother continues to be dead. I drink until there are no discrete words echoing in my head, only the loud thumping of the radio; a thick veil of sadness.
*
On the day of the unveiling, Christmas Day, my brother, father, and I wake early in the morning for church. We dress solemnly in our separate rooms. I opt for a bright purple kimono I bought in downtown Johannesburg instead of the black dress that I first wore to my mother’s funeral.
Before I head out the door I swallow a lorazepam—a low dose prescription I have for flying—as Annemarie instructed me last night. I’m exhausted and hungover when I wake up, and the lorazepam makes it impossible for me to stay awake. I feel like I am wrapped in cotton all day, comfortable and insulated to everything around me.
After church, we regroup at my grandfather’s house, and then drive to the graveyard together. There is a tent set up around the plot where my grandmother is buried, a few plastic chairs underneath. Fittingly, it is raining and cold, the worst weather since the Mandela memorial. A new stone stands just in front of my grandmother’s, covered in black cloth. My brother and I take a seat just in front of it. My father reads a Bible verse. They remove the cloth, and there is my mother’s name. As many times as I’ve seen it on funeral programs and obituaries, I’m always jarred to be confronted with it in this context. It is the worst part, the moment my grief hits me hardest, when I have to remind myself my mother is dead. My mother is dead.
Thanks to the pill, I don’t cry as much as I thought or had feared. I float through the ceremony, hugging the twenty or so relatives assembled at the grave, and I doze off in the car on the way back to my aunt’s house. I fall asleep in my room until lunch, which I eat outside by the pool with my cousins, wearing tissue paper crowns from our Christmas crackers. We pack what’s remaining to pack and then we’re driven to the airport.
*
It is our second-to-last night in Cape Town, after which I will return to Johannesburg for two more days, and then my father and I will leave on a plane back to Philadelphia. I meet my family friend, Celeste, and we decide it will be good to let off some steam, just the two of us.
Plus, we have a lot to talk about.
Celeste chooses a nightclub nearby in the neighborhood of Greenpoint that is nicely outfitted but surprisingly small. It feels intimate and deceptively friendly. Celeste and I are in our element. We sit next to a massive VIP area that takes up half of the club, outfitted with couches and tables. Early in the night, a group of young men in collared shirts shake bottles of Moët and spray them around the room, rap video-style. The waitresses wipe up the tables after them. When some of it sprays on me, I scream at them playfully. One of the men looks at me and smiles, then hands me an entire bottle as an apology. I’ve always been amused by the stereotypes of African poverty for how incomplete they are. Africa is not a monolith but a land of extremes: the poor do not exist without the rich.
Celeste is the person I’m closest to in South Africa, and I often think about what things would be like if we lived in the same country. She wonders this too and regularly floats the idea of moving to the States, but it never happens. She is very beautiful, plus an air of gravity and wisdom—born of a hard life—that is magnetic.
We let some men buy us drinks and accept none of their advances. I have a boyfriend at home, who I will leave shortly after I return from this trip, and Celeste is still going through breakup trauma after leaving her boyfriend of five years. We laugh once they’ve left our orbit and swap stories of tacky clothes and bad breath.
At the end of the night, as the club starts to empty, we wander over to the VIP section. We dance on the couches with girls who must be models, they are so thin and beautiful. We cross paths with a caramel-skinned man with a big paunch. He is dressed flamboyantly, in designer sunglasses, with big rings on his fingers. He is effeminate and effusively friendly. I sense no romantic attraction and there is none whatsoever on my end, even though he shows instant interest in us.
He tells us his name is Maurice. Celeste tells him she used to live in Australia with her boyfriend, and he says he has an office there. When I tell him I lived in New York, he tells us of his apartment on the Upper East Side. He doesn’t respond directly when we ask him what he does for a living.
When the lights come back on, he stays put while the rest of the revelers file out, and the black-uniformed crew comes in to clean up the mess. The staff is attentive to him, and for some reason, doesn’t ask him to leave. Instead, he orders us more drinks and they bring them to us with a smile.
He tells us that he’s staying downtown in the Westin. Celeste elbows me excitedly as he tells us about his trips around the world; shows us a video taken up-close of Obama behind the scenes at Mandela’s memorial. I lay down on the banquette because the room is spinning. I tell Celeste I think I should go home, but she doesn’t hear me. She pulls me off the couch and we follow him into a cab.
The staff at The Westin is also attentive to him. He leads us up to a nicely equipped room that is strewn with luxury goods—a Tom Ford watch here, Gucci shoes there. The room continues to spin and I get into the lone king bed, tuck myself under the covers. He sits in a chair by the window and Celeste dances excitedly between us, blissfully drunk. I haven’t seen her this carefree in so long. It makes me deeply happy, even through my haze I can recognize that.
There is a large-screen plasma opposite the bed tuned to CNN, and as the sun rises our conversation thins, becomes dull, and Celeste announces she’s leaving to have a cigarette.
The door barely clicks closed and things happen in a seeming instant. I don’t remember him walking over to the bed. I am on my feet, in his arms, and his tongue is in my mouth, aggressive, hungry. I can feel his teeth on my tongue. He tries to pull my dress over my head. He doesn’t ask if I want to do any of this, never pauses to assess my willingness. The fact that I am too drunk to stand on my own is ignored—nay, discarded.
“Wait,” I manage to say, carefully as my drunkenness will allow. I don’t say, “stop,” I say “wait,” which is gentler, because I don’t want to risk how he might react if I reject him. I don’t need to think through these actions; my body performs them automatically, as a means of survival. As his hands find my breasts I wonder how far I will have to go to escape without violence. My mind makes a quick calculation: if he’s capable of this, he’s capable of much worse. I shut down—my eyes close, my mind stops protesting—in preparation for what is about to happen.
Then the door opens and Celeste re-enters the room, accompanied by a man from the desk. When he hears them, Maurice darts back over to his chair. Celeste couldn’t remember the room number, and the front desk wouldn’t give it to her (hotel policy) but they would escort her back.
Adrenaline coursing, I stumble out of bed and whisper to Celeste that it’s time to leave. She’s still giddy, excited by the big hotel room and its mysterious occupant; it takes her a while to grasp my urgency. When she does, we run out of the room without a goodbye, and in the lobby the staff hails us a cab.
On the ride home, I tell her what happened. She tells me that the people at the desk told her the man’s name wasn’t Maurice. They couldn’t tell her what his real name was, but it wasn’t that.
We cry together in the back of the cab, and she holds me. When we get back to the house, the sun is blazing bright and the rest of the cousins are still fast asleep. Celeste and I decide not to tell them; it’s too much, this latest drama, and they’ll only blame us for it. We’re women, we shouldn’t have gone out by ourselves and gotten so drunk. Celeste shouldn’t have left me alone with a strange man. We know that none of them will place the appropriate blame with the person who deserves it.
The sun is rising on another ludicrously beautiful day in Cape Town; we see the water, and all the beautiful buildings that dot the coastline. I say nothing. It’s easier to carry this thing on our own.
*
Before long, it is my last day in South Africa. I have Annemarie take me to Soweto, which is a thirty-minute drive from my grandparents’ house. We drive to Vilakazi Street, to the modest Mandela family home which has been turned into a museum. Vendors peddling screenprinted shirts bearing the departed leader’s face line the blocks leading to the house. We barter with them for souvenirs, and my cousin chides them, “I’m from here, don’t try to take my money!” She tells them she knows they’ve made a killing since he died. They are sheepish, smiling in return, stop short of saying that this hero’s death has been good for business. Good for them, I think.
Mandela’s home is an old matchbox, identical to the many hundreds of modest four-room brick houses built by the government to house poor, mostly black residents. Many more were supposed to be built, enough to house all the people who need them, but it never happened.
Instead, more mansions are built and the informal settlements grow.
Mandela’s house is tiny on the inside and decorated with awards and curios from all over the world, including some from Pennsylvania. Soweto looks very different from how it’s pictured in photos from Mandela’s days—many of the houses have been expanded with extra floors and wings, with gaudy security fencing and fancy cars in the driveway.
Annemarie tells me that, even though she grew up only thirty minutes away, this is her first time in Soweto. This is not uncommon for coloured people of her age, for whom Soweto will always be synonymous with battle. Annemarie was a young child when the Uprising happened, not much younger than the students who were shot at and killed that day. Through the 1980s, Soweto was ground zero for anti-apartheid political violence, with frequent armed skirmishes taking place in the streets. For them, the divisions of apartheid remain alive as ever. She thanks me, laughing, for coming all the way from America to bring her here.
Annemarie was raised by my grandparents, which in effect made her and my mother sisters. They were extremely close, and as a result, Annemarie is something of an aunt to me. She tells me that my mother used to hang here all the time back when she was in college.
“She’d come on a Friday, drink till she fell off her chair in one of the shebeens, and then call us to come get her.” Annemarie mocks holding an invisible phone to her ear, imitating my mother. “We’re getting raided!” She yells into her finger, and we fall out laughing.
Soon, my mind goes back to what happened to me in the hotel room. Ever since it happened, I have been fighting off the thought of it constantly. I think how angry our families would be at Celeste and I if they knew. I think that the chances that the same thing, or worse, happened to my mother years ago, seem very high. I wonder, if we’d had more years together, if she would have told me.
In this moment, I can see my mother as a young woman. I can see her wandering the dusty red streets of Soweto, ducking in and out of houses, chatting with the people in her confident way. In my mind’s eye, she looks just like me. She is curious, intelligent, and trailed by the threat of danger. For most of my life, my mother was the authoritarian, my foil. But today, I see her as another version of me, and I wonder why it has taken me so long.
It will take me years to face what happened to me that night in Cape Town. I will become scared to return. But I will never stop loving these people, this land, the life that I am able to live here thanks to what happened in these streets, the blood shed over so many years.
I think about the interminable nature of struggle, how oppression recedes and returns, how it must be fought constantly.
“Freedom” by Zinzi Clemmons, from FREEDOM (Viking, June 9). Copyright © 2026 by Zinzi Clemmons.
Zinzi Clemmons is the author of What We Lose, which was a finalist for the NBCC John Leonard First Book Prize and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, she was raised in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an American father. A cofounder of the literary journal Apogee, she lives in Northern California, where she serves as director of the creative writing program at the University of California, Davis.
