By Ron Allen, NBC News  

The anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela has pretty much completely withdrawn from public life. His health is a matter of constant speculation, rumor and mostly worry. There have been a couple of scares in recent years.  But on Wednesday, he celebrated his 94^th birthday, in a country where life expectancy is just 52: the latest remarkable accomplishment in one of the most remarkable lives of our times.

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We traveled to South Africa in late February for NBC News. There was word Mandela had been taken to the hospital, but not much detail beyond that.  Turned out it was what doctors described as a minimally invasive procedure for an enduring stomach ailment. You could almost feel the world let out a big sigh of relief.

 

The trip gave me a chance to explore a place I rarely visit.  It’s long been one of my favorite countries to explore: inspiring, intriguing, and one of the most beautiful places you’ll ever see. 

South Africa's transformation

My first trip was almost 20 years ago, back in 1993. Apartheid was ending and soon segregation would no longer be mandated by law. I wanted to witness for myself what was left of such an incredible and notorious system of oppression.  Mandela was about to complete the journey from prisoner to president.  Fully democratic elections were about to happen. I’ll never forget that first morning when all South Africans were allowed to vote. The lines stretched for what seemed like miles into the morning haze. The “Rainbow Nation” was being born.

South Africa has come a very long way during the past couple of decades. But it certainly still has a long way to go. It is the largest economy in Africa, but not among the fastest growing on a continent talked about by economists as the next Asia, with many of the world’s top 10 fastest economies. About a third of South Africa’s 50 million people still live in poverty. Unemployment is about 25 percent, and double that for the black population, especially young people.   

We were especially curious about the so-called “Born Free” generation. Young people born since the early 1990s and the end of apartheid. Those born since Mandela became president are now young adults.  And they’re testing Mandela’s dream of equal opportunity for all against their own dreams. 

“The world is my stage. I can express myself the way I want to and have no limits,” said Tiisetso Lepelle, 17, a student from Wordsworth High School. She and her classmates were visiting Constitution Hill, near Johannesburg: a museum, court, and cultural center located in what used to be a prison notorious for its treatment of political prisoners.

'It's about me, and what I want'

Constitution Hill tells the story of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy. But the next chapter of that story is all about Tiisetso and her classmates' generation. Many of them have expectations and a sense of optimism their parents, or even their older siblings, never dreamed of.

We asked what matters most in her country.  “It’s not about color. It’s about me, and what I want,” she said with confidence.

Over at Wits University in Johannesburg, we found a different take on things.

“I think there’s still a lot of racial tension,” said Alex Willis, an 18-year-old woman from a mixed race family. “I think that our children’s children, or our children’s children’s children might kind of get to see the day where that’s not an issue,” she added.  Alex, who is Caucasian and Indian, told us she doesn’t see a lot of mixing of people of various backgrounds and she sometimes feels like the odd person out.

Interestingly, her 20-year-old white classmate Michael Jordan, who she’s dating, saw things differently. 

"I think apartheid was terrible and I think we’re going to have the scars of those wounds for a long time," he speculated. "I think the majority of our attitude is, 'Let’s not dwell on the past because by doing that you can only stumble, you know, if you keep looking backward.'"   

South Africa is still a complicated and evolving society where race plays an enduring role in who gets what. For the most part, black South Africans control the government while whites control the country’s wealth and business.  It’s a stark divide that’s still so strikingly visible.  Whites live in the suburbs lined with high walls protesting their homes. Blacks live with much less. But there’s a small emerging black middle class: we saw one bustling shopping mall in the township of Soweto that could have been a small urban center with a large minority community in the U.S.  

And that’s what so many of the “Born Free” generation who we met aspired to, and more importantly expected, in their lives: success and self-determination. As they become adults and set out to make their mark on their country and the world, they’re determined not to let South Africa’s history hold them back.

 

By Ron Allen
NBC News correspondent

“They are never going to send us to West Africa!”  That’s what I said, a few times, with know-it-all certainty, to producer Amber Payne when she asked if I was interested in working on a couple of feature stories she was looking into in Sierra Leone. I’d been to Africa dozens of times, to cover civil wars, natural disasters, famines and floods. But go there to cover something positive and uplifting? It took a while to get my head around that.

I’m glad I did.

Amber kept pushing. We did our homework. And suddenly, we were off to do three “Making a Difference” stories for NBC Nightly News.  First, a story about a Sierra Leone-born NFL player named Madieu Williams, and the amazing humanitarian work he’s doing.  A fresh new group of Peace Corps recruits was beginning training there. That turned into  a great story, too.  

And finally we went to a place called Bunce Island, where a history Professor named Joe Opala, an expert on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, was trying to protect and preserve a very important piece of American history that’s literally slipping into the sea.

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I’d never been to one of the old slave trading fortresses, like Cape Coast Castle in Ghana or Goree Island in Senegal,  popular destinations for heritage tourists. Bunce Island is different. It is raw and undeveloped. It hasn't been turned into a tourist attraction, not yet at least. Tens of thousands of slaves were shipped directly from Bunce Island, off the coast of Sierra Leone, to South Carolina and Georgia, giving it a unique historical importance for black Americans.  It’s a tiny island, no bigger than a few football fields, virtually untouched since the slave trade ended in the late 1800s, a place where it’s been said that, “history sleeps.”

Bunce Island feels haunted.  The fortress is crumbling. The walls are over grown with thick vegetation. However, with a bit of imagination and a brilliant guide like Joe Opala, you can easily understand and visualize the horrors that happened there. So many men, women and children were bought, sold and shipped across the sea like animals.

I felt anger. Any human being would. But I made a conscious effort to look forward, not back. I thought about the survivors. I thought about how powerful the human spirit is to have endured such a wretched institution. To this day, I find inspiration in all of that.  That spirit that lives somewhere in all of us.

And that’s where we first heard the story of Priscilla, a ten-year-old girl, kidnapped and shipped to Charleston, South Carolina in 1756. We followed the breathtaking paper trail she left behind all the way to Thomalind Martin Polite and her family, who live in Charleston today.  It’s an incredible family tree, spread over more than seven generations, pieced together with an astounding collection of “property records” kept by the family that owned Priscilla, and some 4000 other slaves, the Balls.  A descendant, writer Edward Ball, found Priscilla while working on his book “Slaves in the Family.”

When we first approached Thomalind and her family about an interview, she respectfully, and firmly declined.  She and her husband Antwan have two young children. They both work in the Charleston public school system and they just didn’t want all the attention that national media about their family story would bring. Very refreshing, but not exactly great for us. So we gently and patiently pressed a bit more. 

It took many months.  They finally agreed after several emails and lengthy phone calls about our trip to Bunce Island, and our discussions with Edward Ball and Joe Opala. Thomalind and Antwan also agreed to share with us the amazing footage from their “homecoming” trip to Sierra Leone and Bunce Island a few years ago. The government there had learned about their story, and Priscilla, and invited Thomalind and her family to come and celebrate.

We’ve worked on this story for many many months.  Most TV news stories are done in a day or two, or less. But this story kept growing and getting deeper.  And most fortunately, Rock Center launched a few months back, giving us a nice window to tell the story.

Like many African Americans I’ve often wondered, “Where did I come from?”  It’s an especially weird feeling to travel in Africa and tell people you’re an “African American.” People there, who have close ties to family and tribe, look at you as if to say, “Can you be a little more specific?”  

I know that my father’s side of the  family is from Macon, Georgia. My mother’s side is from a little town in North Carolina called Yanceyville, population about 2,000.  I’ve heard stories over the years about distant relatives, but never investigated it all for myself.  A couple of years ago, I was working just across the border from Yanceyville in Danville, Virginia covering a campaign 2008 event with then Senator Joe Biden.  I met someone in the crowd who offered to introduce me to some folks in Yanceyville who would know the history of the community. I never made the time to follow up. Perhaps now I will?

There’s an old saying, that if you know where you’ve come from, there’s really no limit to how far you can go.  I think that’s what this yearning to know one’s family story is all about.  It’s been a remarkable  journey from Sierra Leone to Charleston with Priscilla, the Martins, the Balls and Joe Opala.  Especially since it’s a trip that I just knew would never happen.

Editor's note: Our guide, Joe Opala, shared the following links for readers interested in learning more about Priscilla's story.

Slave Girl's Story Revealed Through Rare Records

Yale: Priscilla's Homecoming

Sierra Leone to South Carolina: Priscilla's Homecoming

http://www.charlestonmag.com/pop_archive1.html">Long Journey Home

By Ron Allen
NBC News correspondent

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes a chance encounter can lead to a story that continues for a couple of years.

I hadn't been on the ground in Haiti for long after the earthquake-- which struck two years ago on Jan. 12, 2010 -- when a producer handed me a piece of paper with a name and phone number on it. Brian Williams had met a young pastor on a flight out of Port Au Prince, who had literally begged him for help. There were about 50 children in a life or death situation. They had survived the quake and been evacuated to a makeshift shelter, where food and water were running out. They were getting little help, because there was so much tragedy and mayhem everywhere.

What's more, many of the children were in the process of being adopted by American families. Some of those parents had flown to Haiti and were desperately trying to get their "almost-adopted" kids out.

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All of this hit me at a deeply personal level. My 3-year-old daughter Siobhan was born in Ethiopia. We adopted her when she was just a few months old. I've spent a lot of years covering conflicts and disasters around the world and I've always been struck by the countless number of children I've seen living in such desperate circumstances. I didn't go looking for this story in Haiti, somehow it found me. It all felt a bit odd at first, and so close. But after mulling all of this with a few colleagues, I pressed on. And I'm glad I did.

We ran into a man from Nashville named Mike Wilson. He was frantically trying to rescue two little girls, Tia who was 5 and Naika then 6. Wilson and his wife, Missy, had been trying to adopt them for a couple of years. We followed Wilson for a couple of agonizing days, as he shuttled between the American embassy, the airport and the shelter where his girls were staying.  The problem was that the girls were not American citizens, so Wilson couldn't bring them to the U.S. On top of that, Wilson had no proof he was adopting the girls. All of the paperwork was buried under the rubble. Hundreds of American families faced the same dilemma.

It took about a week, but eventually, the U.S. and Haitian governments allowed about 1,100 "almost-adopted" children to leave Haiti, fly to the United States and let their new parents finish the paperwork later. While that certainly sounds like a reasonable thing to do, it was in fact an extraordinary humanitarian gesture that's been compared to rescue airlifts of children during times of war. International adoption is closely monitored because of concerns about fraud and illegal child trafficking.

Since then, we've kept in touch with the Wilsons, a bustling and busy family, now with 5 children. Tia and Naika are adjusting remarkably well to their new life in the suburbs of Nashville. These days they pretty much seem like typical American kids. But of course, they have an extraordinary life story and the Wilsons have a unique connection to Haiti.

The Wilsons work for a Christian non-profit group that does a lot of work in Haiti. They've returned at least a dozen times since the quake, often leading dozens of volunteers recruited from across the United States. Our story on Rock Center is about the journey the Wilsons took during the quake and since then. We met them in Nashville and in Haiti a few weeks back, to see some of the work they're doing. We think its an important story, because these days Haiti, still struggling to recover, isn't in the headlines much. And that's the point and the problem.

Editor's Note: Wat Ron Allen's full report, "Naika and Tia," from Rock Center with Brian Williams: