Reaching for the sky.

• Author: Wines, Michael
• Position: Black students

He lives in a part of the world where so many young people never get off the ground, but 17-year-old James Mokoena wants to be a pilot. He will fly a fighter jet, but not just to wage aerial battles. Africa is full of hungry people and people sick with malaria, he says, and many of them need a James Mokoena to bring them food and medicine.

"I haven't been in a plane," he says. "I want to be in a plane for four, five years, and to know that I am in that plane--me. That I, James, am driving it."

He is standing outside his cement-stuccoed house, a four-room box on a dirt road in Masjaing (mush-a-ENG), a township of about 30,000 in central South Africa, near the Lesotho border. Inside is a single bed for him, three brothers, and a sister. His mother is ill. His father never got past the sixth grade. Everything here seems to shout that James's dream is folly.

WALKING A MILE

Except James himself. Two years ago, having completed his elementary years at the township primary school, he walked the mile from Masjaing to Fouriesburg, the far-wealthier town on the other side of the highway. There, he announced that he wanted a better education than he could get at Masjaing's uninspiring high school, from which few students ever graduate, and that he wished to enroll in the eighth grade.

"I asked him whether he realized there were school fees to be paid, and he said his father would pay them," says Irina Grice, the principal at Fouriesburg Intermediate School. "His father came, but oh, his clothes were torn, and he was very, very poor. But the father said, 'The child chose, and he wants to be in this school.'"

One in three of South Africa's 37 million blacks live in townships like Masjaing, slums built during the apartheid era to keep them away from white people when they were not mining their coal or cleaning their houses.

Apartheid, the government's policy of rigid racial segregation, was abolished in 1991. Today, nearly 15 years later, well over half of those township dwellers over age 15 are jobless. Of those with jobs, about 6 in 10 earn less than $250 a month. The townships are economic and social sinkholes, poverty traps in a nation where the rich-poor gap is among the widest on earth.

ESCAPING MASJAING

Jeremane Mokoena--he calls himself James, he says, because he dislikes his first name--wants out of Masjaing. He wants out of the underclass that apartheid created and into the world of opportunity that apartheid's demise has opened up for other...