South africa

Home The last British combat troops turned over Camp Bastion in Helmand to Afghan forces and withdrew from Afghanistan after 13 years and 453 deaths. Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, spoke of ‘whole towns and communities being swamped by huge numbers of migrants’. He later withdrew the word ‘swamped’, but David Blunkett, a former Labour home secretary who used the word 12 years ago, said: ‘I believe that both Michael Fallon and I were right to speak out.’ This came after Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, responded to an idea of David Cameron, the Prime Minister, that European Union migration could be renegotiated; she said: ‘Germany will not tamper with the fundamental principles of free movement in the EU.

Having just turned 13, my boy Ferdy doesn’t really do early mornings. Indeed, during the summer hols we rarely glimpsed him before noon and then only fleetingly whenever he chose to assemble himself a triple-decker jam and Nutella sandwich and flee back upstairs to his darkened room and repeats of Top Gear on his iPad. I saw more of our neighbours’ kids than I did of our own. But there Ferdy was at 5.30 a.m., bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and raring to go. ‘Come on, daddy, for heaven’s sake shake a leg, everyone’s waiting!’ I hardly recognised the boy. We were staying at Phinda Forest Lodge in KwaZulu-Natal, south-east of Johannesburg, for three days’ safari and some father-and-son bonding, and it was time for the first early-morning game drive.

Thank god for the Commonwealth Games: at least they gave us a brief respite from football transfer stories. Instead of having to read about an 18-year-old defender being bought by Overambitious Wanderers for the GDP of a medium-sized African nation, we could delight in Norfolk Island beating South Africa at lawn bowls, Kiribati and Nauru winning medals in weightlifting or Sri Lanka sharing a rugby pitch with England and Australia. It was a reminder of the brotherhood (and sisterhood) of sport and made me nostalgic for the days before the money men took over football, rugby and cricket. (Yes, especially cricket: have you noticed we don’t have a drinks break any more but a Buxton hydration break, and tea is now the Yorkshire Tea interval?

When the editor of this special suggested I might try some wine for him (did he need to ask twice? No!) it’s fair to say that New World wines weren’t my first pick. ‘How about Eastern Europe?’ I said, with an eye to Macedonia. Or failing that, Germany? It’s far too long since I’ve tasted Frankenwein and you can’t get the best stuff here for love nor money. I was perfectly game for English wine. But nope. Everyone else had got the Old World stuff first; it was the New World for me, and I am one who feels subconsciously that things have been going downhill since 1492. Private Cellar, who supplied my case, were keen I should try a couple of South African growers. This brought a different set of preoccupations into play.

Depressed and demoralised after the defeat of his nation of farmers in the second Boer war, Eugène Marais, an Afrikaner patriot, lawyer, naturalist, poet, lifelong morphine addict and journalist, went to live with a troop of baboons in the then remote Waterberg area of South Africa. He camped in their vicinity and was gradually accepted by them and afforded a place in their society. His books about his experiences, My Friends the Baboons and The Soul of the Ape, have subsequently made his name as the father of the scientific study of the behaviour of animals. In The Soul of the Ape he proposed a theory of the evolution of the human psyche that runs approximately as follows. Man and all the higher primates are in a state of bewilderment. Why?

You can bet on all manner of scummy things on Paddy Power: when Fergie and Andrew will remarry; how Julian Assange will leave the Ecuadorian embassy (odds for him leaving in a diplomatic bag are currently 20/1). Now you can also bet on the outcome of the Pistorius trial. I’ve got a fiver on the Blade Runner getting off. I jest. But given the extensive coverage lavished on the trial so far, is it any wonder that people are starting to have a flutter. The scrutiny has been astonishing – with live television and radio broadcasts available for anyone who cares. South Africa even has a 24-hour TV channel devoted to coverage and commentary of it.

The Duke of Cambridge deserves credit for bringing his influence to bear on the growing tragedy of the elephant, whose population is being decimated by poaching. But his advisers should have been quicker to dissuade him from one aspect of his campaign: the threat to dispose of his grandmother’s ivory collection. That Africa’s elephant population is in peril from poachers is not in doubt. Of a total of 400,000 living in the wild, around 50,000 were illegally killed last year, way beyond the numbers which the population could naturally withstand. The future is looking bleak, too, for wild rhino, 1,000 of which were poached in Africa last year out of an estimated total of 25,000.