Njabulo S. Ndebele, the acclaimed South African writer and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, delivered the commencement address at Wesleyan University in 2004 — the tenth anniversary of South African democracy. He invited the graduates to stretch their imaginations back into history to understand a revolution that defied all expectations. Ndebele described how South Africa avoided a racial war that the entire world had predicted. In a moment of extraordinary clarity, both sides — the white rulers who had enforced apartheid and the Black liberation movement that had prepared for armed struggle — recognized that violence would only produce shared misery. This mutual recognition of vulnerability, Ndebele argued, was the deeper revolution, more significant than any political agreement.