S.Africans leaving divisions behind
By CNN's Charlayne Hunter-Gault
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (CNN) -- Ten years after the end of white minority rule, a new generation of young South Africans has the world at its feet.
The country may not yet be the Rainbow Nation that the first black president, Nelson Mandela dreamed of, but it is breeding a new generation that could make it happen.
Young blacks like Nkhensani Manganyi, for example, are confidently taking their place on a stage once reserved for whites only. She is bringing a child into a world without the same worries about the future that her mother had.
Nkhensani is a fashion designer whose memories of life without freedom are still fresh."I saw army troops ... and I was with crowds that were tear-gassed. We had been kicked off buses."
But those images are fading. "Post-1994, there's been a really big psychological change in individuals such as myself, where all of a sudden you are living in a country where things were very possible; a country that is alive with possibilities."
This is the stuff of memory for Nkhensani now and the designs she creates are celebrating a new African consciousness. "For me, it's a conscious brand that is an expression of something far beyond the frivolity of fashion," she adds.
Meanwhile, on the other side of what used to be the country's racial divide, Gary LaGrange has his own ad agency and is also part of the new South Africa. He is an Afrikaner who grew up in a system that favored him, but no longer.
But for Gary LaGrange, it's a two-way street as he celebrates a reality far different from the one he was born to.
"I was raised in a conservative family the conservative Afrikaaner background, that is, I was raised partially on a farm where black people came to the back door."
During his national service in the apartheid army, LaGrange's job was taking pictures of anti-apartheid activists fighting his government. "So we were just doing the dog's work," he reflects.
LaGrange left the country when the black-led government came to power 10 years ago, but South Africa did not leave him. "It's in your blood after three years away, living and working in Miami which is a great place, but I 'm not an American."
LaGrange found that both he and the country had changed. "Yes there's still a lot of problems and that's okay. We'll deal with them too because give us another five years (and) we will get past that too."
Tsidi Bishop is a television journalist and her British husband Chris also works in the media. But in the new South Africa they will not be arrested for being in an interracial union ... as they would have been in apartheid South Africa.
The Bishops and their friends are among many South Africans whose lives are not defined or limited by color.
"In some of the stories I hear some of the hostility we would have got, the looks, the comments, the spitting on the street and you look at it now: people just walk past, nobody even looks twice," Tsidi says.
She is looking forward to a very different life for her three-year-old daughter than the one she had in the poor township blacks were forced to live in.
"Sometimes I'd be very pressed and I'd pull my mother's dress and say, I've got to relieve myself right now. She'd say, 'we still have to walk. Not here. We're not allowed.' She's got so much more freedom."
All of a sudden you are living in a country where things were very possible.
