Outsiders turned icons, South Africa’s jacarandas spring into bloom
One of the first years that I watched the jacarandas bloom in Johannesburg, their arrival coincided with a revolution.
It was October 2015, and as the lanky trees burst into a riot of lilac blooms, student demonstrators shut down the campus of the city’s major university, known as Wits, demanding a halt to the rapidly rising cost of tuition.
Within days, their movement had grown from the cause of a few thousand college students into a kind of national reckoning.
