They were shadow people, moving beyond the light of small fires on a winter dawn. There was no hint then that I was about to encounter one of the most extraordinary sights of my time in South Africa.<\/p>\n
In this part of the country, winter is a cold, dry season that burns the veld brown. The ground is hard like flint and when the wind blows across the plains, dust covers the squatters and all that they carry.<\/p>\n
I could hear digging, and coming closer I saw a woman hacking at the earth. Nearby other men and women were doing the same thing. They had old garden tools, machetes, pieces of stone, anything to make holes into which they placed pieces of plastic, tin and wood.<\/p>\n
I asked the woman what she was doing. \u201cWe are hiding our shacks,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n
This was a squatter camp outside Johannesburg in 1994 as South Africa prepared to vote in its first non-racial elections.<\/p>\n
To see that vote in a nation brutalised by apartheid was to witness an awe-inspiring moment in the story of humanity. The first voters \u2013 mostly the elderly \u2013 who quietly cast their ballots pushed history inexorably forward.<\/p>\n
Thirty years later South Africa is a very different country. Democracy has endured. The fear and racist brutality of the past is gone. But there is widespread disillusionment with the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in power since Nelson Mandela became the country\u2019s first black president.<\/p>\n
Back then, the woman hiding her shack told me that her name was Cynthia Mthebe. Her story has stayed with me for over 30 years.<\/p>\n
As the sun rose, the squatter camp gradually vanished under the earth. One hour before, there had been a community of several dozen shacks and flimsy tents. Now there were only people, wrapped in blankets, sitting around fires.<\/p>\n