Cape Town, South Africa, and Greensboro, North Carolina, would seem to have little in common, especially in relation to transnational contention. Settled from Virginia in the early eighteenth century, Greensboro is a small southern city of 239,000 whose main claim to fame is that it was the site of a revolutionary war battle and of a famous lunch counter sit-in in the 1960s. Once the major producer of denim in the United States, its major industry now struggles to survive against foreign competition. Cape Town, on the other hand, is a throbbing metropolis of 2.7 million people that was first settled by white people when the British navy turned it into a coaling station on the route to India.

Although both cities are racially divided, their ethnic compositions are very different: with 25 percent African Americans and a rapidly growing Latino population, Greensboro is typical of small cities in the American South; shaped by the exclusionary policies of the apartheid regime, Cape Town is only 2.6 percent African and almost half coloured and Asian. But the two cities do have something in common, improbable as it sounds: a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”