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    No Country for the Poor
    No Country for the Poor
    No Country for the Poor
    Ebook26 pages11 minutes

    No Country for the Poor

    By Azad Essa

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    For millions of South Africans, Nelson Mandela's passing signalled the end of an era. Returning home to cover the story, journalist Azad Essa finds his countrymen looking a little lost, insecure of the future, even as they celebrate the life of a great man. Essa travelled around his native South Africa to track the mood of the nation. He notes the deification of this global icon despite the muck and grime of the great swathes of poverty that remain in South Africa two decades after the fall of Apartheid. The celebrations reminded him of contradictions he had seen elsewhere: India.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarper XXI
    Release dateAug 5, 2015
    ISBN9789351367123
    No Country for the Poor
    Author

    Azad Essa

    Azad Essa is a journalist with the Al Jazeera Network. He completed a multinational MA programme in sociology in 2005, studying in Germany, India and South Africa, and spent several years in academia before launching his journalism career. He has reported on the scars of the conflict in Kashmir, human displacement in the drought-ravaged Horn of Africa, and on the peculiarities of life in post Apartheid SA. He calls Durban home. This is his first book.

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      Book preview

      No Country for the Poor - Azad Essa

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      No Country for the Poor

      Azad Essa

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      Table of Contents

      No Country for the Poor

      About the Author

      Copyright

      No Country for the Poor

      ‘Nationalism is good in its place, but it is an unreliable friend and an unsafe historian. It blinds us to many happenings and sometimes distorts the truth, especially when it concerns us and our country’—Nelson Mandela, quoting Jawaharlal Nehru

      I

      In the early hours of 5 December 2013, I flipped through the television channels in my apartment in Doha. News had just broken of Nelson Mandela’s passing. I watched as journalists around the world assumed sombre tones, their expressions downcast as they waited for South Africa to wake up to a world where Mandela was no more.

      Then the call came.

      I was on the next flight, or the one after that, as it turned out. I was going home.

      The sense of history threatened to overwhelm me. Nelson Mandela’s passing was more than the story of a man—it was about the end of an era, and the start of another for South Africa, but also the world. One of the last great icons of the twentieth century was no more. And I perhaps was destined to tell this story after all.

      As a young man growing up in the coastal town of Durban, I had long wondered, as many others did, about Mandela’s passing. What would it be like when it happened? How would people react? Where would I be?

      Still, this was not a story I was looking forward to

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