Teatime: Carter and Selina "Gogo" Ndzukulu, matriarch of his host family in Lochiel photo louise gubb © national geographic society

hen Jason James Carter submitted his application to Duke to enter in the Class of 1997, the title of his admissions essay was "My Other Grandfather." After all, what could he tell the review committee about former President James Earl Carter Jr., that it didn't already know? Instead, Jason wrote about his maternal grandfather, J. Beverly Langford, a former Georgia state senator and legislator.

As the grandson of the country's thirty-ninth president, Carter has lived his entire life in the glow of his family's legacy. Born in 1975 in Decatur, Georgia, to Judy Langford and John W. Carter, he has early memories of spending Christmas at the White House. Like all presidential grandchildren since Lyndon Johnson's administration, he left a cast of his handprints in the private garden off the Oval Office. But with the publication of his new book, which chronicles his stint in South Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer, Jason Carter is claiming his own voice.

Power Lines: Two Years on South Africa's Border, published this summer by National Geographic Books, describes Carter's work in Lochiel, a rural village near the South Africa-Swaziland border. Working with local teachers, he helped implement a new post-apartheid curriculum and methodology. But the book is more than a journalistic account of lesson plans and teaching strategies. Instead, Carter writes from a personal vantage point about the lingering, seemingly intractable aftereffects of apartheid. He also balances these stark observations by celebrating the spirit of community and togetherness that he encountered along the way.

Senegalese Semester

"Political scientists and policymakers can analyze apartheid, but those analyses often don't include the personal stories you hear when you actually live in a community," says Carter. "And I don't think you can really be engaged with a community until you feel some sort of connection. So I wanted to demonstrate how recognizable these people are. They wake up in the morning and they try to put food on the table and make a better life for their children. They laugh and they love and they play."

The 1998-2000 Peace Corps trip wasn't Carter's first time on the continent. As a thirteen-year-old, with his grandfather and other staff members of the Carter Center for International Peace, he traveled to East Africa, including Uganda, staying in a hotel that once housed Idi Amin's secret police. After graduating from Duke, he volunteered for a Carter Center-sponsored trip to Liberia to monitor elections. Given first-hand exposure to the dangerous historical currents these countries had endured, Carter says he was initially disappointed to learn that his placement was in the country he thought of as "Africa Lite," a Westernized nation with a comparatively stable political and economic infrastructure.

"My great-grandmother, Miss Lillian Carter, had braved the hardships of rural India as a Peace Corps volunteer when she was seventy years old," Carter writes in Power Lines. "She had been miles from any contact with the First World, had gotten ill on several occasions, and had lost thirty-five pounds. My Peace Corps experience would not test my physical well-being like hers did. And for letting my great-grandmother take the tougher job, I was slightly embarrassed."

As it turned out, rural South Africa proved to be an intensely demanding--and richly rewarding--experience. In contrast to the major metropolitan cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg, Lochiel lacks basic services such as electricity. (The title of the book refers, literally, to the electrical lines that run through, but not to, Lochiel on their way to "First World Africa," writes Carter. Figuratively, the title's historical symbolism is obvious.) Houses are made of wood, mud, and metal, and people carry their water from the river. Because Peace Corps regulations require volunteers to be housed in a location with a lockable door and concrete floors, Carter stayed in an old hotel owned by Swazi National Council member and Methodist minister Elias Langa Ndzukulu and his family. Despite the green slime in the abandoned swimming pool and the aging buildings and grounds, he enjoyed amenities unavailable to other Lochiel residents, such as a toilet and bath with water drawn from a deep well.

Even with such such "luxuries," Carter was eager to shed other people's expectations of what a white American should do. He immersed himself in the traditions and daily rhythms of his new community. During one of his first meals with his host family, he noticed everyone tentatively fumbling with the silverware. Familiar with the local customs, Carter picked up his meat with his bare hands, causing everyone to laugh with relief that they wouldn't have to eat "like white people" so he would feel at home.

More significantly, he had learned to speak Siswati and Zulu, which established his credibility as a truly invested outsider. It also let him eavesdrop on South Africans who were unaware that he could understand their dialect. "I cannot overestimate how important it was that I did this," he says. "Once people realized that I cared enough to learn how to talk their language--and that I wasn't going anywhere--they really welcomed me in." Early in his Peace Corps stay, Carter was included in a meeting with his grandfather, Nelson Mandela, and U.S. Ambassador to South Africa James A. Joseph, now a professor of the practice in Duke's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. When Mandela learned that Carter speaks Zulu, the two engaged in a brief exchange, underscoring Carter's commitment to fitting in his adopted homeland.

Wherever he went in South Africa, particularly in more rural areas, Carter found himself becoming a somewhat reluctant spokesperson for America. Questions ranged from trivial to poignant: Do you have cows? Why don't people in America vote? Do you know Michael Jordan? Is there apartheid in America?

"The more people asked me about America," he says, "the more I realized the power of the idea of America." Inevitably, these exercises in cultural comparisons forced him to examine his status as a white, Western male born to privilege--and that of people who do not share a similar degree of opportunity and status.