One performance at the Robben Island Museum and the two Midwestern trips are still the only times the men have performed together in public. But they have vowed to bring their music to a wider audience, ideally performing their songs and sharing their stories in other U.S. cities, other countries and, most importantly, withinSouth Africa.

“Youth has a way of moving on, moving fast and ignoring their parents,” says Spitz, co-founder of Groundswell Educational Films. “Kids in South Africa are big on MTV and American music and their own hip hop culture. Like kids anywhere, they’re not real keen to look back.”

Shezi, 50, lives in the cottage on Robben Island that was once home to a prison guard. He works for the Robben Island Museum, tracking down and filming former prisoners for the museum archives. Sithole, 50, who previously worked as a museum guide, is now unemployed and lives in a poor township outside Durban. Nxumalo, 49, who was imprisoned for 13 years, lives in an upscale, formerly white-onlyDurban suburb. He works for a company that builds roads in rural areas.

Spitz sees the men’s current situations as a microcosm of the way life has played out in post-apartheid South Africa, where most blacks still live in poverty and isolation. “Ordinary people in South Africa still live under economic apartheid,” Spitz says. “Of these three guys who fought and sacrificed years of their lives for freedom and the chance to participate in their own country’s economy, one is a rich man, one is unemployed and one is a cameraman.”

Spitz and Dube hope their documentary will help educate U.S. youth about one of the world’s more recent legendary struggles against racism and oppression. At Chicago Academy High School, a student asks, “What did y’all do to get put in jail,” seemingly baffled by their stories of covert military training in neighboring African countries and charges of treason.

“We could no longer fight with guns and spears. We had to form modern organizations to fight white people as equals,” says Sithole. “The tribes, which used to all be separate, united against a common enemy, since we knew we couldn’t defeat the white people on our own.”

The group’s recent three-week midwestern tour included visits to a handful of elementary schools, high schools and cultural centers in Chicago and East St. Louis, Ill., along with performances at the University of Illinois at Chicago and St. Sabina Catholic Church on the south side of Chicago, known for its social activism.

Asked whether Chicago, one of the country’s most segregated cities, reminds him of the apartheid era, Shezi declines to pass judgment. “To make a big comment like that is difficult, because it’s like looking through a window without seeing the other parts of the room inside,” he says.

But in regard to East St. Louis, a 97 percent black city where 35 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, Shezi couldn’t help but draw a comparison. “That’s a real problem of infrastructure,” he says of the city, where the singers visited an elementary school named after Mandela. “It has some similarities to our situation.”

Shezi hopes that stories about the struggle against apartheid can help inspire young people in East St. Louis, Chicago’s west side and other disenfranchised areas to stand up for their own rights.

“Struggle is like a flower: If you don’t cultivate the soil, it will not bloom,” he says. “We need to go to the schools, we need to continue this infinite process where we educate each new generation.”