Vusi. Vusi Thembekwayo

      Why the fastest slave wins the race;

      lessons from the vampire economy; and

      the truth about the shape of the world

      He charges down the track in a blaze of colour – green for the land, gold for the sun, black for the colour of who he is and what he is better than anyone else in the world at doing: a black man, running for his life.

      His arms cut the air like blades, his legs pump up and down like the pistons of a steam locomotive. He is a machine, made from flesh and blood. He is as human as you and me, but when he crosses the line, he turns into a god. He stands with his feet planted firmly on the ground; he leans back; he angles his right arm, taut and strong, in an archer’s grip, and he points to the heavens, from where he draws his fire.

      His name is Bolt. Lightning Bolt. Usain Lightning Bolt. At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, he ran the 100 metres in 9,81 seconds, to become, once again, the fastest man on earth.

      You and I, as human as we may be in our limitations, as godlike in our ambitions, will not easily wrest the title from him. Just as we are unable to out-lightning Bolt – and I speak for myself here, your abilities may vary – so are we unable to out-think Einstein, out-box Muhammad Ali, out-­sing Beyoncé.

      But all of us are capable of striving, and striving begins with asking the big, nagging questions that have bothered us from when we were young: how and why? How, in this case, did Bolt get to be so unstoppable, so unbeatable? And why, as it turns out, is he only one of a whole breed of super-sprinters to have emerged from the island nation of Jamaica?

      To begin with, we learn from Bolt that excellence is a moving target, that you pursue it with grim discipline and daily rigour, in the knowledge that there will always be someone in your shadow waiting for you to stumble and fall. We learn that he became a winner, and the only athlete in history to strike gold in the 100 metres in three consecutive Olympics, because he couldn’t picture himself not winning. ‘I don’t want to come in second,’ he once told an interviewer. He had to overcome, he had to push himself further, drive himself harder, because he has been afflicted since childhood with a weakness that would otherwise have held him back: scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine. But the happier accident of his birth was that he was born a Jamaican.

      So many elite sprinters come from Jamaica (Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Asafa Powell, Nesta Carter, Elaine Thompson, Veronica Campbell-Brown, to name just a few) that scientists have long wondered whether there is something in the air, some­thing in the water. A study by researchers from the University of the West Indies found that the answer may be more down to what’s in the earth. The high percentage of aluminium in the Jamaican soil can encode a gene known as ACTN3, which promotes the development of muscle fibres in a way that generates ‘strong, repetitive contractions’ – the rhythm of the runner in motion.

      But there may be another, deeper reason why the race here is to the swift and strong. And that is race itself.

      If we travel back in time, faster and faster, through the ages, to the middle of the sixteenth century, we will see the spiral of DNA echoing the curl of the ocean waves on a voyage from the shores of West Africa, across the raging Atlantic, to the tropical lull of the Caribbean. The cargo on board was human. When the ship docked, the survivors were yoked at the neck, shackled at the feet, and set free only to slave in the plantations, from four in the morning until sunset, hacking and harvesting sugar cane in the cloying heat. Those who survived the journey, those who survived the toil, were the strongest, the fastest, the hardiest. They went on to build the nation. To see a Jamaican athlete break­ing the tape on the track today is to see the human spirit in surge, to taste the sweetness of victory, like the sugar in the marrow of the cane.

      And what of us, here on the southern tip of that bloodline? What of the ships that came to our shores? What of our toil, our survival, our race to the finish? Let’s contemplate that with the words of another great Jamaican ringing in our ears: ‘Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.’ Bob Marley was saying that we alone must own responsibility for our freedom, for our redemption. But we can do that only if we remember what it means to be free.

      I grew up in the township of Wattville, near Benoni, on the East Rand of Johannesburg, between the freeways and the mine dumps that always made me think of upturned bowls of yellow mealie pap. Oliver Reginald Tambo, then secretary general of the ANC, lived in Wattville in the 1950s before he went into exile. And he is buried here today, along­side his wife, Adelaide, in the shadow of the airport that now bears his name.

      I was an in-betweener. I was born in 1985, when apartheid – the institution, if not the idea – was in its death rattle, on the cusp of the new dawn. I remember seeing soldiers in the township, in their dusty, malt-brown uniforms, cradling their rifles, eyeing us with a mixture of suspicion and fear. I remember seeing the armoured vehicles, lolling in the dips of the dirt roads like monsters rising from the swamp. I remember running, laughing, to join a big march in Dube Street, not knowing who was marching, or why.

      But mostly I remember my grandmother’s chickens. She kept them in her backyard. (What township Gogo didn’t?) One day, the chicken coop was dirty, so she took the chicken out and tethered it by its leg to a tree. She left it there all day. Then, in the evening, she said, ‘Vusi, go and untie the chicken and put it back in the coop.’ So I undid the knot and slipped the rope off the chicken’s scaly leg. It was free. But it just stayed there, frozen in place, resigned to its fate. I shooed it, pushed it, shouted and clapped it towards the coop. It feebly flapped its wings and clucked, but carried on scratching around in the narrow, invisible circle that had marked the limits of its world. Sometimes, when the rope has been cut we don’t realise that the rope has been cut.

      I hate the idea that I, because I am a black man, must blame somebody else for my disadvantage. I hate the notion that I, because I am a black man, must lack the means to take control of my own destiny. I can step outside the circle. I can fly. I think of those slaves, those survivors, wrenched from their villages and their families, forced into bondage in a faraway land. I think of the gift of speed and stamina and courage they would bequeath to the generations that followed.

      What is our gift, as South Africans? It is the gift of opportunity, born from struggle. It is the gift of possibility, born from sacrifice. We come from deprivation, from lack, from want, from three and a half centuries of dominion and four decades of subjugation by a minority in our own land. We come from having nothing. That is our gift: that we have nothing to lose.

      We have learnt over the years to live on very little, and that is why we are so good at dreaming of living on a lot. I must have been the biggest dreamer in all of Wattville. I remember the day my big dream swam into focus, from the blurry half-imaginings of my boyhood, into the crystal-­clear colour and noise of unbridled ambition. That dream rode in on whitewall tyres, mag wheels and the roar of a V8 engine, competing with the boom-boom thump