Two weeks after South Africa's third democratic elections, the country celebrated Freedom Day: April 27 marked both a decade since the end of apartheid as well as Thabo Mbeki's second presidential inauguration. The celebration featured local performers, foreign dignitaries, and a military display unlike anything the country had seen before. But beyond the pomp and circumstance, there remains a pressing question: how can a nation founded on activism now turn that energy toward its most urgent problems?

For more than eighty years, the African National Congress (ANC) was a political organization fighting the apartheid government. Today, as the country's ruling party, it is the government. In the apartheid era, the ANC and numerous other political organizations worked toward the singular goal of dismantling the white-supremacist regime. Now activists have divergent agendas. A laundry list of pressing issues — such as unemployment, AIDS, education, housing, and crime — all vie for limited resources.

A record 80% of eligible voters showed up at the polls last month, with 69% casting ballots for the ANC. Mbeki's results show that despite some controversial stances — such as pondering whether HIV causes AIDS, and refusing to condemn Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe — the people still have faith in Nelson Mandela's successor. Today's potential activists don't have the same incentives to rally and organize — to rebel with focus and purpose — as in the apartheid era: the people have the right to vote as well as freedom of movement. And although activism is no longer banned, motivating new or disillusioned participants is tough.

Nothing More Constant Than Change

Richard van Wyk, now a 32-year-old legal insurance salesperson, still goes by the moniker "Trotsky" because of his radical approach as a student leader in the mid- and late-1990s. "Everybody can see the changes," says Trotsky. "We accept them, and we love them. Every time I see an ANC minister on the TV, I say, 'yeah! We fought for this.' "

"There was not a lot of choice," says Trotsky about deciding whether or not to fight the regime. "It was easy for us to rally against the system. I really wanted liberation before education. Now I'm liberated and a student doing a college correspondence course. I can educate myself."

"Many of us didn't have a teenhood," says Paulus Julies, who works for the ANC as a regional organizer. "We didn't date or write love letters, or play rugby, all the things that a kid in their teens do. We were sitting in meetings, planning, picketing. A big part of your life was taken over. You'll never that get that time back."

Times were that people made sacrifices to be in the struggle without any reward — there were no counselor, ministry, or mayoral posts as possible incentives. Instead, real involvement meant big sacrifice.

"Nobody's owed anything [by the ANC]," says Julies. People "went in with their own will, made a commitment to serve the people, even if it meant dying, going to jail, or torture."

A less dramatic fallout at the time was youth sacrificing their education, either of their own volition or by default when boycotts and states of emergencies shut down schools. It's not surprising that many kids — especially those whose parents had no high school education — were not able to pass their final exams after missing months of classes.

Malcolm Abrahams directs the Community Technical Initiative's two-person office in Grabouw, a farming community near Cape Town. Abrahams sums things up when he describes educators as "confused and frustrated with the changes. Teachers are already trained in one methodology, and retraining is seen as an additional burden. After 1994, teachers said, 'We're done with the struggle. We don't want to struggle anymore.' "

This Is Now

Khunkulwa Mzito has taught home economics at Gugulethu Comprehensive Secondary School in one of Cape Town's oldest townships since 1990. The school was legendary for student uprisings in the apartheid era, but now she says students are more focused on learning skills that may help them get a job.

In Mzito's classes, gender equity is the most tangible change from a decade ago. When she began, boys were not allowed to take her class, but now girls comprise only a small majority. The matric [high school diploma] rate has been steadily improving for years, and now hovers between 40 to 45 percent; a few go on for further studies, but not many. Still, she says, "matric won't help students get a job."

"Some of our people have already come to economic freedom," says Trotsky. "Not some, a lot. In the old South Africa, you couldn't even have a business. A friend of mine made 20,000 rand last year out of selling beer illegally at a shebeen [an informal watering hole]."

Despite a growing black middle-class (not to mention high-profile business and political elite), unemployment still rages at 30 to 40 percent nationwide. (Statistics vary widely depending on how much of informal or unrecorded work happens.) Part-time and low-paying jobs are still the norm, leaving even those with some work chronically short on money to pay for food and utilities like running water and electricity.

Healthy debate remains within the ANC about how well the people have been served during the past ten years. Concrete changes have been most dramatic for people whose most basic physical needs were not met: more than a million Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) houses have been built at no cost to the recipients. In 1994, one of the ANC's major promises was to construct those solid structures during Nelson Mandela's five-year term, but it took closer to ten years to deliver.

"The only thing that's changed for me is the right to vote," says William Fisher, a liberationist-cum-attorney born and raised in Belhar, one of Cape Town's "coloured" [mixed-race] townships. The day-to-day circumstances for his poor black clients haven't improved either, he says. As a long-time ANC activist, he's quick to point out that his criticisms are an important part of making the party accountable.

In addition, says Julies, "people join the organization with certain interests, specific agendas. I don't see the camaraderie that you used to have. We used to say that we're comrades, more than brothers, that we'd die for each other. I don't see that anymore. The new breed only want to benefit form the fruits of the organization. People only have to pay 12 rand [per year] to join."

Still, April's elections indicate that the people believe that the ANC can and will deliver — even if things take longer than optimists hoped.

When Trotsky looks back, he says he wouldn't want things otherwise. He predicts that the generations that came of age in the 1970s and '80s "will become better leaders than [those from] the '40s and '50s, Mbeki and [deputy president Jacob] Zuma. Most of [the current older politicians] came out of exile or jail. They didn't know the situation on the ground. We will become the real leaders of South Africa some day — and that will take 15 or 20 years' time."

In the meantime, Trotsky plans to increase his involvement by recruiting youth. "All of us are politically free," he says. "But my people are still not free."