NOTE: This is part of a continuing online novel. Here is the Table of Contents.

The America Diaspora is a sequel to The Chinese Century.

But there is exciting business afoot here.

Branson’s plan for Virgin-Maverick depends heavily on better connectivity, and while there are fiber lines around the country he quickly chose to add his own. One of the first contracts he signed was with a Chinese outfit, Shenzhen Huawei, to deliver a new high capacity fiber line from Durban.

Huawei bought its cable from Lucent, which still dominates the Chinese fiber cable market. They brought in Tata from India as construction engineers. Their plan is ingenious, in a way, and now coming to fruition.

It is, simply, to lay the new cable under an expansion of the N3, the main route between Joburg and Durban, adding a lane in each direction. The road is very popular, especially during the summer months, and added lanes are a popular idea, certain to be heavily used. The use will mask the cable, which is buried two feet under the footings for the roadway, in a trench laid in the dirt.

It seems to be done in one fell swoop, the trenching followed by the cable lay, followed immediately by the work on the new road bed, then the steel framing, and finally the concrete. Even as the cable rolls into the city from Heidelberg, traffic is already using the new roadway at Harrismith.

The route itself is listed as 547 km, which comes to about 340 miles. Sounds long, but it’s really less than the drive from my old home in Atlanta to Fernandina Beach, on the Atlantic at the Georgia border. And it covers most of the east of the country.

Still, it’s a haul, and I’m surprised to be the only reporter covering the new roadway’s entry into town. Branson doesn’t want much publicity on what he did under the roadway, in hopes that will protect the project from vandals and who-knows-who-else. Who can blame him?

Instead we have a strange collection of black men in suits, black women in Zulu costume, and Johannesburg city fathers, both white and black, welcoming the new link to the sea, and urging the workers to immediately head back south for the other lane. (That’s Branson’s back-up line. It may never be lit, but then again maybe it will be.)

I’m sitting at my desk in the Carlton Center when the fiber gets turned on. Suddenly really big Web pages are happening, like wham, like bam! I’ve got full-screen fast video downloads from anywhere, all of a sudden. It’s like my desktop has truly become the world’s largest cable set-up.

Words can describe it, but I wonder, how long will words really be useful? Won’t everyone care only for video files? Won’t they want to see it, to hear it, even smell it?

Before I can get far along this path the smartphone in my pocket rings. I press the Bluetooth microphone on my ear to answer. It’s Lenora D’Estiang, a New York renovator brought in by Debbie Wyatt. I asked her to check around for a place to which I might bring the family, and she says she’s found one.

It’s a great little place in Parktown North, she says. It’s got five bedrooms, three baths, a pool, and it actually costs less than the place I left in Atlanta. Virgin Maverick could buy that from me, sell it at a profit, and we could be in the new place by America’s summer, the cool of the South African winter. It even has a pool.

What about the commute? What about crime? I ask.

It’s real, she says, and I can hear the shrug of her shoulders over the phone. There’s a gate and a high fence around the property. If we don’t spend time off-campus and get into this world, we’re just another Randburg.

I hear my own voice on that. So I agree to go by with her. She says she’s there now, waiting on me. I tell her I’ll get there as soon as I can, and hang up the cell, then place it on the desk.

Before I can turn back to my desk there’s another call. This one is urgent. It’s Mma Ramosawa, reminding me I have to get to her opening. To OUR opening.

I race out the door, run to the Sun building, and check one of the Virgin Maverick Toyotas out of its garage. I start the car’s GPS mapping system and enter an address near the Johannesburg Airport.

Within moments the screen lights up with a route, and a voice comes on telling me where to go. I’ve programmed it so it sounds like Jenni, my wife, only it doesn’t have her wry sense of humor. As she tells me where to go my eyes well up in tears, so I change the voice to that of a computer, which sounds like the voice that used to run the trains in the Atlanta Airport. It’s mechanical, has no memories or reality, so I can stand it.

The drive takes about a half-hour. All drives in Joburg take about a half-hour. It’s much like Atlanta or many other American Sunbelt cities in that way. I find myself at a nondescript warehouse just a few miles from the Airport’s entrance. Mma Ramosawa is there to greet me, waving me into a parking place which, I notice, has had my name stenciled onto the pavement. Her eyes, I notice, are shining.

A small crowd has gathered before the entrance. Some of the people look Motswana, others just like local black businessmen, black suits, thin dark ties, white shirts. There are a few men wearing what are now called “Mandela shirts”. There are two other whites, tanned, young, local. Salesmen or engineers, I figure.

The moment I stand before them Mma Ramosawa begins speaking. She talks of her pride in our work, her pride in me, her pride in her people. She describes what we will be building here, assembling servers, and application systems that use wireless networks as a platform for reducing water use, for saving energy, for maintaining security, for keeping our aged healthy in their homes, for 1,001 other things. She says this work is important to the whole world, that it will make South Africa a leader in technology. And then, to my surprise, she introduces me and hands me a pair of scissors.

“I really don’t know what to say,” I stammer. “This is Mma Ramosawa’s work. This is your work. This is your company. I am privileged to be a small member of your great team.” Then I see a ribbon stretched across the door, reach out and cut it. Applause rains down on me and we go in.

A young black woman greets us from a desk. It is a large reception desk, the kind you might find in a law firm. There is what looks like a PBX on it, but I notice it has no wires. I look up, and see the silvered letters above the woman’s head, reading Always-On Technologies Ltd.

Beside it are two photographs, one of Mma Ramosawa, under which are the words “Our President.” The other is of me, with the legend under it “Our Founder.”

I’m truly dumbstruck. All this has happened too fast. I was a journalist, in Atlanta, writing about this stuff and much more, seldom heard and never taken seriously. Now, a few months later, I’m a founder. No, a Founder.

I wish Jenni were here to see this, I think. I choke back several sobs and smile at the people around me. Mma Ramosawa sees my joy and beams like a schoolgirl who has scored a good mark on a test. I hear the sound of clapping, a few cheers. She reaches me and gives me a great hug.

“This is too much,” I stammer. “Really.”

“No,” she says, shaking me very hard. “Come in and see.”

It is a whirlwind tour. There are offices behind the foyer. As I expected the two white men work there, but so do several blacks, both men and women. Mma explains how she wanted the engineers and salesmen working together, the salesmen making the introductions, the engineers creating the specifications, and the salesmen then managing the relationships. “For a time most of our installations will be special purpose, one of a kind,” she says. “That will change, and we will be ready when it does.”

Behind the offices is a large open warehouse, a full blast of the African heat, which even here, in the equivalent of September, takes my breath away. The metal roof of the warehouse traps heat despite the efforts of spray-on insulation below it. Stark, round light fixtures are hung from the ceiling, revealing a short production line. Behind it are rows of shelves, electronic parts, mostly from China.

“Most of the workers here have college degrees,” she explains, “but I deliberately brought in helpers who don’t. They will be trained, not just to do the work but to manage the work. Each one of these we hire can bring 10 or more people out of the townships into a home with real running water and electricity,” she adds.

“How much do you pay them?” I ask.

“It is far less than what you Americans call minimum wage. We have different minimums here for different industries. We are covered by the wholesale and retail minimums. The average pay is R3,000 per month.”

I do a quick mental calculation – that’s under $100/week! “If it is spent wisely, it is a great thing. Unemployment throughout South Africa is 30%,” she concludes.

“Thirty percent!” I marvel. “We had 30% unemployment at the bottom of the Great Depression.”

“Yes,” she says. “And South Africa is a shining beacon of prosperity to the rest of Africa. Not only for its low unemployment, but for the high wages we are able to pay. COSATU and the ANC have pushed for a minimum wage, and most employers oppose these rates bitterly. But if our workers can’t live on what they make why are they living, eh?”

“You sound like Henry Ford,” I say. She beams. “When Ford opened his Model-T factory he mandated what he called a living wage, and a 40-hour week. He wanted the people working at his plant to be able to afford his cars.”

“Exactly,” she says. I hold my tongue on the rest of my thought, that Ford eventually fell behind other automakers, pressed down on workers hard, and wound up responsible for some of the worst labor riots of the 1930s.

We tour the plant and all the workers nod to us. Much of the work involves combining various sensors, and packing the results alongside CDs of software. There is a giant shrink-wrapping machine, I notice, but the person manning it is also an inspector, checking the contents of each application pack, asking hard questions, sometimes sending the men back for more parts or more testing.

We come out of the blast furnace, and I find a buffet has been spread out for us. There are rice dishes, meat dishes, bread, salad, sodas. It is untouched until I fill my plate. Then, all at once, a long line forms, and I realize with some embarrassment the display was for my benefit.

Mma Ramosawa has no plate. Instead she leads me down a hall to a large office, her office, where I notice a small table with two chairs. Before one chair is a metal cover, which she pulls off to reveal her own plate of food. In the center of the table is a pot of bush tea. She pours me a cup, and we talk about business, I enthralled by her grasp of markets and the subtleties of technology, for well over an hour.

When I finally leave the building it is late afternoon. I am full, in my heart, in my stomach, in my spirit. Only my bladder is empty. I noticed Mma Ramosawa’s facilities were spacious and modern. I am content.

I return to the Sun building. I park the car. I go upstairs. I turn on the TV, and lie on my bed.

I don’t usually watch the local news, but that’s where the channel was set. As in every American city, there’s a set with two people, one of them a black woman, the other a white man. There are graphics on the screen, and then a handover to a helicopter reporter.

“We are over the Parktown North neighborhood,” the reporter says, “and you can see, down below, the remains of a Toyota car, where police have pulled the body of a woman, identified now as an American, Lenora D’Estiang, who works for a company associated with Virgin Maverick.”

And my heart plummets, from the heights to the ground. She had been waiting for me all day. I’d left the Carlton without my cell phone.

Did I kill her?