Eight conversations recorded in the Northern Cape and Cape Town in 1998–1999 — four years into the post-apartheid transition, in the final year of Mandela's presidency. Ground-level voices from a small Karoo town alongside a High Commissioner's view from the other end of the telescope: the same transformation, two altitudes, recorded at the moment it was still unfinished.
"The head of the local security police turned out to have one of my records — from when I was a musician. He asked for my autograph and we never had any more visits from the security police." — White South African advocate who founded the first rural law clinic in the country, operating across half a million square kilometres of the Karoo.
A Canadian law intern living in Colesburg's township during his placement at the Karoo Law Clinic. Black Canadian in a rural South African community that expected him to speak Xhosa. His presence and easy confidence unsettled and eventually opened the local white community.
A young man from the Colesburg township on growing up under apartheid, what sport meant as a parallel world, and what the transition has — and has not — changed about daily life in a small Karoo town four years after the first election.
One of the black law graduates brought into the public defender pilot programme at the Karoo Law Clinic — articling in a white Colesburg attorney firm that had never before employed a black member of staff. The institutional change, from the inside.
Two white South African women reflect on their apartheid childhoods — what they knew, what they didn't know, what they were told not to notice, and how that accounting has continued into the years since 1994.
A group meeting with staff of Ikamva Labantu — a Cape Town organisation working on adult education and community development — on what the transition means at the level of day-to-day organisational life in the city.
An autobiographical account from South Africa's High Commissioner to Canada — the arc from the struggle years through the 1994 election to representing the new South Africa abroad. The macro view of the transition, from the person whose job was to explain it to the world.
A formal address to a Canadian audience by the South African High Commissioner — the Constitution, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the civil service transition, regional integration. The national policy level of the same transition captured in granular detail in Colesburg.