While equality is there on paper, most South Africans feel that whites have a leg up on success. Like all people, born-frees who make it financially want to use their good fortune to help loved ones. For born-frees of color, that means pulling entire families out of the poverty forced on them by apartheid. It doesn't leave much over for themselves. The phenomenon is so pervasive it has its own name: the black tax.

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During apartheid, blacks and coloureds – South Africans of mixed European and black or Asian ancestry – were forcibly removed from the wealthy city centers to their dusty outskirts, leaving the best homes and work for the whites. Though today all South Africans are born into freedom, the legacy of this forced relocation lives on. “It’s not like when 1994 came, people were all given homes and your parents made more money," says Candice Mama, 28.

Unlike their white counterparts, black and coloured born-frees must often travel great distances to attend university or find decent work. Once they do, their wages go largely to help provide for less fortunate family members. "We have to work double-time, because we still have all this damage we need to fix before we even get to where we're going," says 27-year-old fashion designer Cindy Mfabe. "Before I even buy a house, I need to think about my parents."

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The effects are felt down to the cradle. "If you're white, your parents opened a bank account for you when you were young, and they saved money for you," says William Zondi, homeless at 22. High-school dropout Phumlani Gongo, 18, agrees: "When a white child is in his mother's womb, she's already got plans for him, she's already budgeting for him."

Zinhle Mfaba, a 24-year-old college graduate, explains why: "Their grandfathers and great-grandfathers have been working and saving up, while our grandfathers have been fighting. It's like we have to start from scratch." Despite her science degree, Mfaba has had trouble finding a job – a risk she knew she was running from the start of her studies. Youth unemployment has exceeded 50% for most of the past decade.

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At first glance, it looks as if that figure also helps keep the "tax" in place: 80% of jobless born-frees are black. But whites make up only 9% of South Africa's population. That means young whites often pay the price for past discrimination. Legislation meant to rectify the wrongs of apartheid has inadvertently hurt them: they now often lose the race for scarce jobs simply because they are white. "We're evening the scales, and that's something that needs to happen for social reform," says Kevin du Plessis, 28. "But it's sad to hear that many of my friends feel like they're not always being judged on their skills."

‍In June 2019 president Cyril Ramaphosa called the country's sharply rising youth unemployment rate "a national crisis". He was speaking at an event on National Youth Day, which commemorates the landmark 1976 uprising that turned the long, slow tide against apartheid.

South Africa has one of the most advanced economies on the continent, yet unemployment has soared since the end of apartheid. The country's official statistics agency estimated youth unemployment at 52% at the start of 2019; by the year's fourth quarter it had risen to 58%. It is the highest youth unemployment rate in the world.

Like all young adults, born-frees dream of successful careers. They want to be fashion designers, teachers, forex traders, musicians and entrepreneurs. But even with the right qualifications and diplomas, young South Africans struggle to find work. The scarcity of jobs leaves many of them sitting at home, searching for ways to make ends meet. With luck, they find work as house cleaners or nannies, waiters or fast-food clerks. 

Sometimes the best they can find are "piece jobs": rising early to wait at a corner near a busy intersection or major construction site, hoping someone will tap them for a day of hard labor spent hammering, welding or painting. At day's end they're dropped off at the corner where they began, a bit of cash in their pockets. Unschooled jobs like these bring in enough to buy food and other basics, but not enough to move out of their parents' home.

Slow economic growth, a poor educational system and corruption all contribute to the high unemployment rate. “Nepotism is very big here," says born-free Innocent Moreku, 22, who owns a small roadside shop. "People put their families and friends in jobs; they basically buy the jobs.”

LIMBO

Like many unemployed young South Africans, Nonjabolu searches for work in a store or a restaurant. But with the soaring unemployment rate and her lack of a high-school diploma, she fails to find a steady job. After a few nights aimlessly walking the streets, she decides to find a bed in a shelter. She asks around and someone shows her where to go.

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She enters the building, an old two-story flat, and is directed to the main sleeping hall. She finds an empty bed to sleep in, but the bed is without a blanket. Unsure of what to do, she asks the man next to her where she can find one. He looks up and tells her she can have his in exchange for sex. Shocked by his answer, she says no and sleeps without a blanket.

That night she realizes she's trapped in this new life. Her idea of city life in Durban seemed glorious, but now, lying on this bed without a cover, she knows it's anything but. Without money, she has no way to find food or shelter. Her mind starts to race; she feels panic engulf her body. In that instant Nonjabolu misses her mother and her hometown of Pietermaritzburg, but she doesn't want to go back.

That night she makes up her mind: she’ll find a way to get by in Durban.

The born-free generation knows apartheid only through stories, and at times they find its reality hard to grasp. Some are unsure how it affected their parents' or grandparents' lives. Lwando Nkamisa, 26, thinks that's because the trauma is so recent: "Apartheid only ended 25 years ago; many of our parents are still too traumatized to talk about it. They would rather talk about slavery in America, the caste system in India, or racism in Europe, than about apartheid in South Africa. I think they don't want to reopen old wounds.”

While some born-frees still encounter racist attitudes, the majority, especially in larger cities, feel that racism is slowly disappearing with the old generation. Most of them harbor no resentment toward other ethnic groups, and say they either are or could be friends with someone of another color. "In the end we're all South African," says Shane Veeran, 23, who has wrestled with his own Indian descent: too white to be black, too black to be white. "We all bleed South African blood."

Those that don’t have friends outside their own group attribute that to practical reasons that stem from the country’s divided past. “I don't live in a place where I can meet a lot of white people and have white friends,” says Zinhle Mfaba, 24. She lives in Soweto, the sprawling township outside Johannesburg that was once designed to segregate the city's black workers outside the exclusively white city center, and is still largely black.

Kevin du Plessis, 28, started questioning his parents’ racist attitudes at a young age. The vast majority of his social life is still white, but he attributes that to circumstance rather than attitude: “I have a lot more white friends, because in Gauteng province where I live, you don't find that many black kids who speak Afrikaans. It's just so much easier to socialize and be yourself in your own language.”

Though overt racism against people of color is declining, institutional racism is still common. In 2019 an independent commission researched allegations of racism at the University of Cape Town and found there was evidence of a "systematic suppression of black excellence" at the university. And racist attacks do still occur, across the color spectrum: white against black, black against coloured, coloured against Indian, and every combination in between. Though the media report these attacks as the isolated stories they are, many older South Africans feel them as a blanket offensive: all of "them" against all of "us".

Younger South Africans have a chance to end this violent legacy: they have only ever known mixed schools, mixed bars and mixed hospitals. But their parents were raised in the segregated past, and not all of them are ready to leave it behind.

‍Election day, 27 April 1994. People queue in long, snaking lines, waiting for the chance to vote in the country's first free elections. When the news comes in that Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress have won, the country erupts in joy. Apartheid is over. Democracy has won.

The new freedom that came with the end of apartheid was only the start: the decades of racial division, discrimination and oppression were not magically undone. With democracy came the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a court where victims could tell their often horrifying stories of human rights violations, and perpetrators could confess their part and request forgiveness. 

Many South Africans credit the TRC with helping the country to heal the deep wounds of its past and successfully transition to democracy – but the commission also has critics. With forgiveness came amnesty, which to many felt like a sacrifice of justice. Land reform, too, has been slow in coming, and the scars left by forced relocation are felt to this day by South Africans of color.

The ANC has been South Africa's majority party since 1994. To many South Africans of the older generation, it is the country's savior, the party that rescued the state from apartheid. To many in the younger generation, it is the party that failed them. Twenty-five years later, university tuition is still too high, unemployment is off the charts, and crime is rampant. Racial income inequality has actually grown worse. 

"The maladministration, corruption and nepotism in this country are a bigger problem than the racism," says Lwando Nkamisa, 26. "People's racist views don't necessarily affect my everyday life, but the fact that corruption has kept my parents' village from having running water or electricity most definitely does." Nkamisa's anger at government corruption drove him to join the Democratic Alliance (DA), the major opposition party to the ANC. 

But many born-frees prefer the Economic Freedom Fighters, a far-left party demanding immediate land reform. It's a cri du coeur that resonates with young South Africans who feel that Mandela's dream of a rainbow nation, a democratic state without racial division where everyone has equal prospects, has miles to go before it sleeps.