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.

Lenora’s death made me drop all thoughts of moving “off-campus,” out of the Carlton Center’s shadow.

But I would soon regret that choice. Because the people were coming.

In fact, they were here.

In the last week of March, some 20 jets landed at JNB from New York, about three times the usual number. Each carried on it 250 American immigrants, along with other passengers – men, women, and children.

The flights were raucous, because of the children, and the people coming off the planes were exhausted, squinting in the early autumn sunshine. I’d actually gotten a better deal, I learned. They had to sell all their U.S. assets to Virgin Maverick before signing their employment contracts, which ran for a minimum of 2 years. Still, they would arrive with big balances in the Virgin-Maverick Bank, and many were anxious to go house-hunting right away.

For the near term, dozens of large and small buildings in the CBD had been turned into apartment blocks. Each family drew 250 square feet per member, a generous allowance by the standards of Africa, a tight squeeze by the standards of America.

Most of the newcomers were scientists or engineers. Looking at the list I noticed a lot of biochemistry degrees. South Africa, once the leader in heart transplants, was about to become a center for genetic research.

I had become a one-man welcome wagon, meeting each plane as it landed, handing out packets containing maps and new lives, and speaking loudly in either my southern (Atlanta) accent or the northern (New York) I’d been brought up with. My normal mode of speech worked well for the Californians.

Most came from blue states, but a few came, like me, from Red America. They had either refused to sign the loyalty oath or felt oppressed in their work, unable to continue.

What had been merely an attack on stem cell research was now felt as an attack on evolutionary biology, on the science involved in global warming, on science generally. I heard stories of kids being harassed in school for wanting to learn biology, of public school teachers trying to “save” students known to be agnostic, of valuable programs being shut down, department chairs said, for unexplained “political reasons.”

Some of these people, I learned, were big stars in their fields, and chairs were being endowed in their names at Witwatersrand University, midway between Virgin-Maverick and the suburbs of Sandton. I remembered how schools like the University of Texas had once spent tens of millions of dollars luring top scholars and potential Nobel Laureates to its campus in my youth. Now Wits was getting the same quality for roughly one-tenth that price.

As the week went on I noticed more and more people getting off the planes wearing old John Kerry buttons, turned upside down. I thought at first this was just a reflection of their past politics, or the fact that the southern hemisphere is thought to leave you upside down. (A few kids got off the planes and immediately stood on their heads in the gate area, to the giggling of friends.)

On asking, however, I quickly found this was not the case. This had nothing to do with John Kerry at all. In fact, they were meant to honor the woman whom they called merely “The Lady.”

Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, had done the talk show rounds alongside Mark Cuban the previous week, and rather than using her name Cuban had apparently referred to her, time and time again, as “The Lady of Africa,” or merely “The Lady.” At each reference, I was told, Mrs. Kerry had held herself a little more erect, her head a little higher, until she did indeed look regal. She sounded regal, too, as she might have had she been elected First Lady of the United States. Only different, the people said, quieter, more distant, almost ethereal. “We are following The Lady,” they said in summary.

It must have been a strange performance, and I watched it one night on Larry King, or at least those excerpts CNN had made available on its Web site. Cuban is a tall man, but Mrs. Kerry looked, somehow, twice his height. It was intimidating. She talked about the dignity of Africa’s people, she demanded that this dignity not be insulted, she laid down the law to potential emigrants. And the ones who were coming in, for now, were thoroughly cowed by her. It was almost as though she were a religious figure, and they were pilgrims, but in fact most of the newcomers were atheists, albeit nominal Catholics, Lutherans, or Jews.

My own building, the Sun, had changed radically during the week. Now the old dining room/cafeteria was a hive of noise all day and all night. I took to going back to the Carlton Center for some peace, in a hideaway office near that of Chief Williams. Even this was becoming a poor substitute, because he’d had to hire 10 more men to deal with the monitoring of 5,000 new “citizens,” he called them, and everyone else associated with the Virgin-Maverick project.

I dropped by Debbie Wyatt’s office one day, and found a full staff completely done-in, trying to cope with the demands of 2,000 new real estate customers, mostly tenants, but now with money burning holes in their pockets, looking for bargains in “safe” neighborhoods nearby.

Little did they know, I thought. There are no such places. Not as an American would define “safe.” For all the wealth and optimism brought by the 5,000, they were a mere drop in the bucket next to South Africa’s 46.6 million people www.statssa.gov.za/, nearly 28% of whom were still unemployed despite the best economic climate since Apartheid’s end.

I tried to remember Branson’s refrain, that “problems are an opportunity turned to face you,” but sometimes I would peek out a Carlton Center window facing the south and west, see the shantytowns of townships like Soweto, and despair. We could pull them out one by one, bring them into the light of the world, and watch them pull out two or three more, each, because these were good, good people. But at the same time we might lose a half-dozen, and add a half-dozen more, either newborns or newly immigrated, legally or illegally, from horrors I could barely imagine.

They came from the despair of Zimbabwe, from the poverty of Mozambique, from the Zambia where one-third of them had the AIDS virus. The came from the War in the Congo, the strife in Nigeria, the anarchy of Somalia, or the genocide of Darfur. They saw in Soweto the same thing Jewish immigrants to the lower east side of Manhattan had seen a century before, and lived in much the same condition. Yet President Mbeki continued to insist that all such conditions would be gone in 10 years, that calling Zimbabwe an outpost of oppression was an overstatement, and that the borders could be policed, without any cruelty whatsoever.

If he were a Founding Father, I asked myself, who would he be? Mandela had been Washington and Jefferson rolled into one, the writer and statesman and leader and hero made flesh. Perhaps he was poor, misunderstood John Adams, only without a second party to toss him out. President Mbeki worked hard, he was smart as they came, he was a man of high ideals, and people looked up to him. But did he have the wisdom for his challenge…did anyone?

As each new planeload arrived I took some interviews on a digital tape recorder, which was automatically transcribed to a Word file I downloaded at the Center. I took pictures with my camera phone, and blogged them as well. I invited readers with each new item to add to the discussion, and some of those discussions were becoming extensive – we’d have to move to Scoop soon.

The reality, the enormity of what Virgin Maverick was doing, and was trying to do, came over me like a wave. I guess I just felt a form of post-partum depression, because our dreams were all coming true. We were setting up world-class research here on the other end of the world, an American liberal colony untainted by Afrikaner history, and a real estate boom that the world would envy. New apartment blocks were rising on the edge of downtown, new townhouse projects a few miles to the north, and many of the newcomers lived without gates, just wireless networks armed and ready for anything. A few machete-wielding robbers had found that out the hard way already. More would soon.

There was something else about those planes, I suddenly realized, that depressed me profoundly.

There was no one on them for me.

It was time to do something about that.