These Dreams of You

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The article describes him arriving at midnight at the airport outside Johannesburg to no state reception whatsoever, the government having decided to ignore him. Because no one representing the government is there, the airfield is stormed by hundreds of black South Africans to greet him. A few days later at the Cape Town university where he’s scheduled to speak, the government cuts the speaker cables; he speaks anyway—“It’s from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief,” he murmurs, barely audible, “that history is shaped”—stumbling through his address in his high nasal whisper, to silence that precedes the thunderclap of ovation. He rides in the backseat of an open car, recalling for those few reporters able to cover the story, the vast majority having been denied credentials and travel papers, an image that leaves them unnerved. In defiant response to that image, he stands in the backseat rising from the sea of black faces that grows from day to day and town to town.