Waiting to Exhale
It’s 1995, and South Africa’s democracy is one year old. The air is electric with the promise of change, a new dawn where possibilities seem endless. Nelson Mandela has just celebrated his first year in office as the first black and democratically elected President of South Africa. The country is buzzing with optimism, and so are we—my girlfriends and I, young, ambitious, and eager to seize the future. I was 19, in my second year of varsity, and life felt like an open highway to success. Nothing, it seemed, could go wrong.