South africa

Last time I was in South Africa I spent two weeks deep in the Karoo, that desiccated wasteland in the Northern Cape which is home only to a handful of jackals, the occasional springbok and supporters of the Afrikaaner Resistance Movement. I had been visiting Orania, a smallish town in which no black people are allowed. Set up by the son-in-law of Hendrik Verwoerd, its existence now is very grudgingly protected by the South African government under regulations which preserve minority cultures — ah, the irony. I was doing a documentary, the gist being: ghastly, ghastly, racist white people. I have to admit that I, as a white supremacist bigot, was a little more equivocal about the issue than the rest of the crew, which is perhaps why the programme never got on TV.

In recent years, living in South Africa has been a bit like having cancer. The malaise eating us from within was corruption and there seemed to be no cure, which is why there was no dancing in the streets when our dreadful president, Jacob Zuma, was finally eased out of office on Valentine’s Day. For me, it felt as if the entire nation was hobbling out of hospital after a long and painful stay, almost too weak to walk, but very surprised and grateful to discover that it had somehow survived. So I didn’t dance in the streets. But I did spot a local ANC leader standing in the sun outside the general store. I hobbled over and shook his hand. ‘Comrade,’ I declared. ‘Well done!

Sport is a serious matter. If you have any doubts on that score, shed them now, because this is to be a South African year. The South African cricket team comes to England in the summer to play four Test matches, three one-day internationals and three Twenty20 games, and as they do so they will ask a million questions — not only about cover drives and reverse swing, but also about the way to make a society, about the way to redeem a society, about idealism versus practicality, about short-term advantage versus long-term goals and about the nature of justice. There is an argument doing the rounds. It goes like this: South Africa should be banned from participation in international sport because of the government-level discrimination against white athletes.

First we had Rhodes Must Fall, now it's the turn of Science Must Fall. Students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa have taken issue with the science faculty -- or science in general, to be more exact. The issue? Science as it is currently understood is colonial and ought to be abolished. At a meeting on the pressing issue, students gathered to air their grievances with some claiming that witchcraft holds just as much merit as Isaac Newton's theory of gravity— they are both ways of explaining the world: 'Decolonising the science would mean doing away with it entirely and starting all over again to deal with how we respond to the environment and how we understand it.

 Cape Town South Africa has just seen her most encouraging election results ever. The general election of April 1994, which brought full democracy, was important in itself but its results were a foregone conclusion — the black majority voted for the ANC, as expected. The local elections this month were different and immensely hopeful. There has been a large vote against the ruling party, the ANC, bringing an end to the great curse of post-colonial Africa under which the people keep voting for the ‘liberation’ party however corrupt and incompetent it is. The ANC still won 54 per cent of the votes, but this is the first time its share has fallen below 60 per cent.

I went back to see my old house in Cape Town last week, and they’d put a cage around it. Otherwise it was unchanged; broad, plantationish and oddly ill-suited to the slim, cluttered suburban street on which it sat. Yet the whole thing, from the eaves where our little flat was to the porch where we all used to sit and smoke, had been wedged into a box of bars. As though it were about to go diving with sharks. This was where I lived for the best part of a year, about a decade and a half ago, and not really for any good reason. Ostensibly I was following my girlfriend, now my wife, as she kick-started a travel journalism career by writing guidebooks.