In the late 1990s a new wave of protest began to ripple across South Africa. In the next ten years it would surge, with protesters all over the country demanding the basic necessities of life—from housing, land, and water to electricity, jobs, and basic health care. Demonstrators aimed their barbs at a wide range of local, national, and global targets. In this respect the Cape Town protest of February 14, 2003, was larger than most I attended during those years, with more than 10,000 people in attendance, but its contours were typical of many such events before and after. Marching from the doors of the US consulate in Cape Town and moving up the hill to the doors of parliament, protesters aimed to pressure both the US and South African governments to finally act against AIDS. Young activists, many with little or no personal memories of apartheid—indeed, most must have been just entering school when Mandela walked out of prison in 1990—followed in the footsteps of their elders, toyi-toying through town, singing new words to old liberation songs. Standing in front of the locked gates of parliament, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) speakers called on the ANC government to admit the reality of the AIDS pandemic, reverse neoliberal policies that undercut health care, and—along with the US drug companies, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the US government—provide access to antiretroviral drugs and public health care. Peering over the shoulders of the speakers and protecting the doors of parliament stood the larger-than-life statue of the founding white father of the state: Louis Botha, immortalized astride a charger.