These Substack entries contain conversations with ordinary people. They aim to give a portrayals of the new South Africa - with a blend of affection and regret. Feel free to pass on the link to any (former) South Africans.

The town of McGregor is the epitome of a Western Province dorp: a dry rocky landscape ringed by blue mountains, a Dutch Reformed Church, clusters of white-painted buildings, a general dealer in a near-empty main street, a sense of isolation and slow living.

But some things had changed. SUVs were parked outside restaurants and I noticed art-and-craft shops, those reliable indicators of middle-class money on the move.

Some of the restaurant tables were occupied by tourists. These were ‘swallows’, a species I’d heard about but not yet seen at close range. Millions of seasonal migrants from England, Germany and the Netherlands have decided that southern Europe is too crowded, and chosen this corner of South Africa as the place to spend half of each year. It’s warm, beautiful, and cheap. A four-bedroom Georgian villa in McGregor probably costs about the same as a bed-sit in Birmingham, and the climate is incomparably better. I was told these swallows head north again each April.

Leaning on a front gate with a ‘Beware of the Agapanthus’ sign, the man looked as though he’d time on his hands, so we chatted. He was a retired plumber and bore a remarkable resemblance to General Smuts.

Was he a long-time resident of McGregor?

‘Nope. Retired here. Escaped five years ago.’

Escaped from where?

‘Jo’burg. Got out of the place as soon as I could. Forty years in hell was enough for me.’

So did he now live in paradise?

‘It’s OK. Nice and quiet. Don’t think I’d call it paradise though.’

What sort of problems did the town have?

‘Oh, drink, drugs, the usual. The young chommies drink way too much. At last count this town had thirty-two shebeens. Buy a drink and you’ll be offered methamphetamine. Plenty of it around.’

So why didn’t the police move in? I’d noticed five police vehicles parked outside the station just around the corner, surely an excessive number for a small town.

Ironic smile. ‘The police prefer to let sleeping dogs lie. They prefer to deal with more serious problems.’

Such as?

‘Not long ago a donkey-cart driver was fined for not stopping at our stop sign. Our police took a firm line on that.’

Houses were smaller and poorer in the eastern half of McGregor. Thin dogs nosed in the gutters and children stared at us from doorways. As the day’s heat lessened, groups of young women strolled along the roads in twos and threes, arm in arm, being eyed by men hanging around on street corners. An experience like this would have been impossible in apartheid times pre-Mandela, when palefaces like me were not allowed to wander around areas designated as black or coloured ‘locations’.

A battered-looking man fell into step beside Jeannie and I. He smelled of alcohol.

‘Naand meneer. My naam is Errol.’

‘Gidday Errol.’

‘Can meneer please buy my boat? I made it in prison. I made six in two years.’

It crossed my mind that a two year sentence implied that he probably hadn’t been convicted of homicide.

‘Please it is only one hundred rand for you special price eighty rand only.’

‘OK Errol. Show me your boat.’ I pictured a model of a fully-rigged galleon. We stopped outside a house where a huge woman sat breast-feeding at the doorstep.

‘You fetch it please’ I said, preferring my chances in the road to being mugged behind closed doors.

Errol re-appeared. His blocky little boat had two stick masts and was covered with thick layers of varnish. ‘The only tool they allow me in jail is sandpaper’ he apologised. Clearly there are limits to what sandpaper can accomplish.

I explained that his model could not possibly survive months of rough travel, offered him twenty rand for showing us his boat, and thanked him for his trouble. Errol seemed pleased with twenty rand and with the possibility of re-selling his varnished block of wood to some other visitor.

At a street corner we encountered three attractive young women, carrying clipboards and wearing identical tee-shirts with a logo.

‘Wat maak julle?’ I asked.

‘We’re getting stories from the old people’, one replied in English.

More discussion. It turned out they were being paid to collect oral histories before the older generation faded away. They weren’t sure if the results would ever get published, but it seemed to me a creative use of underemployed young talent

McGregor is a town where time has stood still, an historic gem far removed from the dangers and fears of the new South Africa. But I suspect that for many of its inhabitants it’s a place of poverty and alcoholism, a place where Errol and his friends can’t earn a proper living.

We set out before dawn to explore nearby Vrolijkheid nature reserve. We walked quietly along a dusty track in the low morning light, savouring the sharp aroma of desert shrubs and the drum-beat of dove calls. At our appearance a mongoose skidded to a halt then rushed away in panic. A scattering of quills showed that a porcupine had passed this way in the night. A pair of ostriches raced away from us, raising puffs of dust with each giant stride. A group of springbok watched from a distance. Five huge spurwing geese flew off with ponderous wingbeats when we approached their waterhole.

This karoo-like landscape was full of life. Death, too. A faint scent of something dead floated in the air. I bent down to examine predator shit in the dust. It was from caracal, the fur and crunched-up skulls revealed it had been eating mice.

This reserve wasn’t Africa of plains covered with big game. It was just an area of dry rocky hills but it sharpened my senses in a way I hadn’t felt for a long time. I’d almost forgotten the feel of places like this, sharpness coming from experiencing the boundary between safety and danger, and being in a place that reminds us that humans are only one part a world far bigger and older than ourselves.

By nine the sun had burned away the morning’s freshness, so we visited the conservation research centre nearby and chatted with a senior scientist. He told us that rainfall had decreased. The land was hotter and drier than before. Game farming was in vogue, but in order to attract European tourists and their lovely money, many farms had been heavily overstocked with wildlife; and the landscape was becoming badly damaged. Conservation was a low priority for the Government. Funding was being cut back year by year. This man loved the land and believed in what he was doing, but his pessimism ran deep.

View from the top of Table Mountain. Lion’s Head on the left, Robben Island in the distance.

Seen from the top of Table Mountain, human problems fade into insignificance. Layer upon layer of mountains recede into the distance: Helderberg, Cedarberg, Winterhoek. Gaze westwards and you look out over a few million square kilometres of cold Atlantic. Robben Island floats like a biscuit in the blue of Table Bay. Its name is from the Dutch word for seals.

This little island became famous as a prison for political dissidents, none more famous than Nelson Mandela. A big chunk of his autobiography ‘Long walk to freedom’ deals with the tedium and brutalities of his eighteen years on Robben Island.

If prison authorities had been less stupid they’d have realised this island provided a perfect training-ground for the assembled revolutionaries. Mandela tells of one guard so lazy that once he’d marched his group to the quarry for rock-breaking duties each day, he ignored the prisoners completely and left them to their own devices so long as they caused him no personal trouble. Mandela and his companions used the opportunity to discuss politics, even organised their own university complete with lectures on ANC history and Marxist theory. In a few cases they made progress with the political education of white guards. In his autobiography, Mandela describes how he explained to one guard the ANC’s goals of equal rights and redistribution of wealth. The guard’s response: ‘It makes more bloody sense than the Nats.’

One chore for prisoners was the task of collecting piles of kelp that lay along the shoreline. Mandela describes the panorama of Table Mountain and the meals of crayfish he was able to harvest. Today, Robben Island symbolises the triumph of freedom over tyranny, and thousands of tourists take the ferry ride to the island to admire the view and be shown Nelson Mandela’s cell.

A whole stack of Nelson Mandela biographies have been written, mostly dealing with his part in the Struggle, his years of imprisonment, his political skills. Tom Lodge’s wonderful 2005 biography looks to Mandela’s boyhood to find the source of the man’s qualities, and shows how Mandela’s self-assurance and empathy were shaped by his upbringing. Given the name Rolihlahla (troublemaker), he followed the usual life of a herd boy from the age of 5 to 7, and his autobiography ‘Long Walk to Freedom’ (1994) paints a nostalgic picture o that place and time. Then his father died, and Rohlihlahla Mandela was adopted into a Xhosa royal household where life was governed by protocol and concepts of honour and virtue.

The young Mandela was groomed for leadership, which helps explain his aristocratic dignity and emotional self-control. Just as important, during his twelve years at mission schools and at Fort Hare University he experienced only positive encounters in his dealings with white people, and no personal humiliations. As a result he never developed the resentment that affected many of his contemporaries. In fact he later wrote in his autobiography ‘I became something of an Anglophile’.

Lack of bitterness helped Mandela survive during his 27 years of imprisonment and then deal with the incredibly difficult job of rebuilding the country and becoming South Africa’s guiding genius. He accepted white Afrikaners as people of Africa, and at his request the presidential home was re-named Genadendal: Valley of Mercy. Afrikaners were soon in awe of Mandela, and he in turn treated them with courtesy. Many used his respectful tribal name, Madiba.

Astonishingly, he appointed as his personal private secretary Zelda la Grange, a young Afrikaans woman who went on to work for him for 20 years. It was, as South Africans say, a hell of a thing. After the president’s term in office ended, Zelda continue to work with him as as executive spokesman for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the gatekeeper whom everyone from Bono downwards had to woo if they hoped to have an audience with Madiba.

I wandered through the Mandela Museum at the Victoria and Albert waterfront, looking at displays of the apartheid years. The exhibits included photographs and stories of The Struggle, the pass laws, imprisonment without trial, the migrant labour system, destruction of family life, grinding poverty. The museum brought back realities that overlapped with my own past, but at the same time the experience was remote. I watched a visitor hold her hands to her mouth, her expression shocked. A pair of young museum employees chattered noisily and without pause, ignoring glares from visitors. Mandela-reverence did not rate with them.

One item jarred: the Mandela Museum’s repeated statements that freedom fighters were killed by the authorities, but that ANC operatives merely eliminated black policemen and suspected informers. I doubt that being eliminated is much more comfortable than being killed.

The road snaking around the side of Chapman’s Peak is both spectacular and dangerous – which makes it a handy metaphor for South Africa in general. At the northern end nestles Hout Bay, a curve of white sand with a picture-perfect fishing harbour sheltered by surrounding mountains. Previously this was a valley of spacious homes for the well-off, a genteel place where one could keep a pony for one’s daughter.

I now had to revise my preconceptions and align myself with modern realities. The mountains remain, but Hout Bay has developed into a microcosm of the new South Africa.

Mega-homes surrounded by razor-wire and high-voltage fences filled the valley, with tides of poverty lapping at the security gates of the rich. True, some of the wealthy homes now had black owners – a sign of changing times – but in the crowded townships that had spread up the hillside, every face was black. Huts were built of plastic sheeting and corrugated iron. The stink of sewage was everywhere. Clusters of unemployed young men sat and stared at passing traffic with the stare of pissed-off young men with too much time on their hands. In the cliché language of tourist guides, South African townships are often described as ‘vibrant’, but the day I visited Hout Bay nobody was vibrating.

We sat beside the shoreline and ate fish and chips in the company of seagulls. Hout Bay needed a rethink. The privileged sleepy hollow of forty years ago had developed a tangled mess of problems.

I wasn’t alone in my dismay. A few weeks earlier a feature covering the situation had appeared in the Mail and Guardian, so I use some of their interviews and quotes here.

Hout Bay’s problems began years ago when more people moved into the area than could be employed by the fishing industry. Most built ‘informal housing’ – the euphemism for shanties – in an area known as Imizamo Yethu, now home to 18,000 people.

‘This is probably the only place in the world where I can literally sit with my feet in human shit and my back against my R2000 shack, and look up to the mountains and across the valley onto a 3 million rand home and think: I live in a lovely place,’ says Priscilla Moloke. She was born in Hout Bay, runs a tiny shop at Imizamo’s Mandela Park, and has all but given up hope of owning land.

Conditions are horrible. Homes leak. Teenagers use tik (methamphetamine), few finish their schooling, many break into houses to steal. In 2004 Hout Bay suffered 754 crimes and 17 murders. All are affected: rich and poor, black people and white people and the coloured fishing community on the other side of the valley.

As black folk see things, land ownership in Hout Bay is central to the problem. At a recent ANC rally at Imizamo, a trade union leader urged people to take land from the wealthy. Local landowners see this as race hatred stirred up by lunatics.

The mayor of Capetown said that accusations of race hatred were false and there was simply not enough land, with a shortfall of 6,000 homes but physical space for only 2,000. The provincial administration promised that residents would be given title deeds to the land they already occupy, but the promise had not been kept. More people continued to arrive. In 2004 the Archbishop of Cape Town held meetings to address the development of Imizamo Yethu township. Mr Luthando Dolmiza, Communist Party Secretary, quite reasonably said ‘Hout Bay is extremely polarised because the difference between rich and poor is so stark. How can there be no racial tension?’

In the run-up to the 1994 elections, Mandela and the ANC promised that everyone would be given a rent-free home, with free electricity thrown in. Since then over two million basic homes have been built nationwide - a great achievement. However shantytowns continue to grow, sometimes hundreds of homes appearing on bare ground within a few days. The electorate clings to the ANC 1994 pledges, even though there’s little hope that Mandela’s ideals will be fulfilled any time soon.

Part of the problem lies in the sheer numbers. In the 1970s South Africa‘s total population was supposedly 15 million, but in truth there had never been a proper census so the number was no more than a guess. In 1994 the estimate was upped to 40 million. The 2007 total was estimated to be over 48 million, then 64 million in 2026, but those numbers exclude the millions of illegal migrants living on the fringes of society.

Whatever the true figures, there’s no doubt that the population had exploded. It had been raining babies. New homes and shanties were crowded into places that only a few years ago were far beyond the city limits, such as in the windswept valleys above Simon’s Town. In my absence the population had quadrupled.

In the M&G report on Hout Bay, Priscilla Moloke was given the last word. ‘I don’t know if the whites want us to leave. I’m going nowhere. Here I can walk to the beach and it’s a beautiful place. If there are too many of us, ask some whites to leave.’

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Kirstenbosch is perhaps the loveliest of the world’s great botanic gardens, a marvellous blend of human design and natural grandeur. Flowing down the eastern flanks of Table Mountain, its lower reaches have formal avenues, giant trees and clear mountain streams. We arrived to find lawns filled with the gladsome cries of a child’s birthday party, complete with balloons and a father organising complicated find-the-parcel games along winding stone paths. Kirstenbosch it is about as close as you can get to heaven on earth.

Down at the visitor centre a cluster of students and teachers – part of an environmental education course – lounged on the steps while discussing habitats. Black and white students chatted with no trace of self-consciousness. During South Africa’s grim apartheid years this kind of gathering would have been impossible. Blacks were told to study here, whites over there, and never the twain shall meet. In my own past the rare occasions of social mixing featured a blend of guilt and what the-shit-can-we-talk-about awkwardness. And now? Relaxed conversations about ecology. What a marvellous place this has become, I thought yet again.

It may not be immediately obvious to the casual visitor but Table Mountain is home to mind-boggling plant diversity, with more than twice as many native species as exist in all Britain. Plonk yourself down on any patch of ground and you’re likely to have several dozen different kinds of greenery within reach. Ericas, rushes, irises, and proteas dominate a vegetation type known as fynbos. Nature has been extravagantly generous in this one small corner of Africa, with around twenty thousand endemic plant species in the Cape Floral Region.

We wandered through Kirstenbosch enjoying its rich diversity, but also in search of a piece of history dating from 290 years before apartheid became cemented in place.

In April 1652 a group of men splashed ashore in Table Bay. Their leader, Jan van Riebeek, was an employee of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie - known more snappily as the VOC - which had been established 50 years earlier as a rival to the London-based East India Company - making these two businesses the world’s first multinationals. Jan van Riebeek’s instructions were to establish a halfway station for VOC ships on their long haul around Africa to and from the spice islands of the east.

These spice-trading voyages were much further than a route via the Suez isthmus, but – and this may sound familiar – at the time there was Trouble in the Middle East. The new arrivals at the Cape were strongly advised to forget any colonial ambitions. Just grow cabbages and turnips so VOC ships could stock up at the halfway point and reduce the rates of shipboard scurvy, meaning that fewer dead sailors would have to be dumped overboard. It was business, that’s all.

Trouble was, people already lived around Table Bay, smallish light-brown folk whom the Dutch called ‘Hottentots’, a word that I discovered had recently become severely non-PC; so the original tribal name of Koikoi has been re-instated. The Koikoi home team was not thrilled. They were cattle farmers and not inclined to give up their grazing rights - but they were dealing with men who firmly believed in European superiority. Also, some of the newly-arrived Dutch quite liked living in warm and spacious Africa, so disobeyed the VOC and argued against returning to the Netherlands after their contracts expired. Cattle were stolen, spears thrown, guns fired, people killed. So van Riebeek ordered a physical barrier to be built, enclosing a few square miles for the VOC and providing a formal boundary to their tiny territory. This included planting a hedge of ‘bitter almond’ trees - although to be pedantic these were indigenous African trees, not almonds. The aim was to keep brown people out and Dutch cattle in. Historically this barrier became a forerunner of apartheid.

It failed. At Kirstenbosch a section of the hedge remains as a monument to futility. I climbed through its dark and gloomy tangle and found that its branches presented no great barrier to an average human or enterprising cow. Perhaps it was more solid back in the 1660s. The hedge is now a reminder that keeping races apart is a dumb unworkable idea.

There is great pleasure in returning to places you haven’t seen for decades and finding some details exactly as you remember. I wandered around Rondebosch sniffing out traces of my lost youth. Black and brown students thronged the pavements, all dressed in the height of cool and with jeans worn as low as anatomically possible. Mingling with mixed-race crowds in this place was a novelty to me, because during my time here (Another time? Before-time? Once-upon-a-time?) students had been whiter and roads less crowded. I was in a time-warp. To everyone around me this was life as normal, but for time-traveller me it was a transformed world.

Across the road and veiled by oak trees stood the golden sandstone walls of St Paul’s Church, once my grandmother’s place of worship. Jeannie and I strolled up to have a look. A ragged man was sleeping on the front steps and a small boy led a blind man along the path.

Neither the blind man nor the sleeping drunk seemed likely to spring into mugger-mode, but away from the reassuring presence of crowds I found myself walking faster and glancing around in what was supposed to be an alert-yet-confident manner. OK, it sounds pathetic, but such was the effect of dire warnings I’d absorbed about life in the Republic of Paranoia.

Anxiety seeps into almost every corner of South African life. African warmth is being chilled by fear of human predators. Personal security is a dominant concern, and even casual acquaintances felt the need to educate us with a catalogue of gruesome stories. In one conversation a man asked Jeannie: ‘How many friends of yours have been raped or murdered or carjacked?’ then followed up with, ‘In my case, twenty.’

We were strongly encouraged to learn local habits. The safety list was lengthy. Never walk near any clump of bushes, never stop your car where groups of young men congregate. Always lock doors, always keep car windows closed, never use commuter trains unless in a group of ten or more, walk as little as possible and never alone, never let any stranger approach too closely, be careful when entering a house on your own. When you have to be away from your car walk rapidly and with resolute confidence. Always be aware of what is happening around you, never do anything that could provoke a reaction, always make provision for a quick getaway. After a few days in the republic, glancing over my shoulder became an involuntary reflex, like brushing away flies in outback Australia.

Razor wire now dominates urban landscapes. This horrible stuff hadn’t even been invented last time I looked, but now the country has vast lengths of it. Great shiny coils of razor wire now surrounded almost every business and factory, lined the top of suburban walls, and snagged legions of plastic bags that flutter in the wind.

Back on Rondebosch Main Road we dived into a coffee shop. As sooner as the cups were placed in front of us – we were the only customers – the owner left the shop without a word of explanation, locked the door from the outside, and vanished.

Bafflement. Had we caused offence? Was this some kind of trap? (Paranoia, see?) We searched for an exit. None. A tiny storeroom out the back, no telephone, no way of opening the door. Then I turned over the sign hanging on the door: Out To Lunch. A-ha, so the owner was careful, not malicious. But how long did her lunch breaks last? What if she was overtaken by amnesia, aneurism, apoplexy? Had we arrived in a land where it’s normal to lock customers in shops for their own protection? I recalled the guide-book warnings applied to many popular features at the Cape: ‘It is advisable to visit this attraction only as a group.’

Long after the novelty had worn off, the coffee-shop owner returned, unlocked the door without explanation or apology, checked the till, and said we were free to go.

The climate of paranoia unsettled me but had become second nature to South Africans. I found it draining. For the first time in my life I found myself being reflexively suspicious of strangers. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, and soon led to self-doubt that I might be carrying within me some reservoir of racist tendencies, now that I was surrounded by dark-skinned strangers whose motives might or might not be hostile. Crypto-racist or bleeding-heart liberal? I was assailed by doubt.

Anxieties about my own prejudices were eased by an encounter a few days after arriving. In order to ‘protect my sources’ – a journalistic pomposity, but necessary in this case – I will be vague about where we met. The man is officially classified as coloured mixed-race. His skin was brown and his face bore the imprint of ancestors from several corners of the world. I will call him Karl. Exposing his name and opinions to public view could harm his prospects. Yes, I know that sounds paranoid.

Karl was educated, ran his own business, battled financially, was coping with a divorce. He had a lively sense of humour and could charm the birds out of the trees. Karl is the sort of person you could happily sit down and have a beer with, someone who’d always be welcome in your home. But his summary of race relations was worrying. Our discussion in Afrikaans ran as follows.

Was life better in the new South Africa?

‘For some yes, but for most of our people life is no better than before. Maybe worse.’ (By ‘our people’ he meant his own coloured mixed-race population.)

What about black people generally?

‘Oh I get on with them.’ He paused and considered his words with care. ‘But some blacks are hard work.’

And what about white people in his area?

A wry smile. ‘The boers have learned to be polite now. But the NGK Church is still for whites only.’

Surely that isn’t allowed?

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘No. But what can you do? I could go there but it doesn’t feel like my place so I go to the VGK Church nearby where it’s mainly coloureds. I suppose we are all a little bit racist.’

Cape Point istockphoto

Escaping the burdens of history we headed to Cape Point, windswept haunt of tourists and baboons. The Point is a slender blade of rock jabbing southwards, a sharp divide between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. Up at the viewing area high above the lighthouse the whole place has an end-of-the-earth feel, with stomach-churning drops to the sea below.

And what a sea! Great swells came rolling in from the west and exploded against the cliffs. A full gale tore at me, fresh and lively after screaming across a few thousand miles of southern ocean, doing its best to blow me away.

Coward that I am, I cringed behind the stone walls that lined the viewing area and moved like an orang-utan on valium. Fear of heights is surely the most rational phobia of all. Fear of spiders? Phooey. Birds? Irrational. Only height and gravity have the potential to smash your skull like a rotten pumpkin and scatter vital organs across a wide area. Spiders simply lack the strength.

Peering over the cliff I looked down at the razorback ridge that led to the Point itself. As the gale redoubled in fury, I crept back to the car-park, where we encountered two Australians who entertained us with travel stories, alternating like practised TV newsreaders.

‘I tell ya this place is great. We’re havin a ball gettin all over.’

‘Yisterdie it was divin with sharks, y’know, great woites.’

‘Jeez mate, they put us in this cage and drop us over the side and y’know the bars are this bloody far apart!’

‘And it’s got no bloody top! And this great woite swims by and my legs are stickin out! Tell you I was shittin myself!’

‘So everybody charges the other end of the cage and it tips and my legs are stickin out even more!’

‘Yeah, and the bloody sheila that supposed to do the video was too busy yakkin and she missed it!’

‘Yeah! Jeez I was pissed off!’

‘Y’know on the woine tour those mountains they’re bloody amazin! They go straight up I tell ya.’

‘So this Cape Point? Right. Done. What’s next?’

‘It’s supposed to be some kinda National Park. Where’s the bloody animals?’

I suggested they visit Kruger or Kaligadi a thousand kilometres to the north.

‘Right mate we’re off. See ya!’

On the western side of the Cape Peninsula is Kommetjie beach, a four-kilometre curve of white. We visited to enjoy a sunset walk along the beach and feel sand between our toes. The place was almost deserted, which meant being alert to the possibility of a mugging.

A group approached us. We relaxed. It was a middle-aged white woman. Ash blonde, with two black girls aged about six and eight years.

‘What you doing?’ demanded the older girl.

‘Just looking at the sea.’

‘What’s your name? Mine’s Amanda.’ Her accent was expensively-educated South African English.

‘That’s a nice name’ I said.

‘Don’t go in the toilets. They smell.’

‘Thank you. We’ll remember that.’

‘Amanda, people don’t need to be told these things’ said the embarrassed mother.

‘Your children?’ I asked, unable to hide my curiosity.

‘Oh yes.’ Clearly she had given the explanation many times before. ‘My own are in their twenties now, so my husband and I thought why not adopt a new family? There are so many orphans needing homes.’

I commended her daughter’s confidence and we parted company.

The custom of middle-aged white couples adopting black children – some of them AIDS orphans – is not rare in the Republic. A couple of my own friends have done just that. Their girl is thriving. These adoptions are good-news stories without compare, tales of grace and goodwill.

During my travels I found that race relations had improved almost beyond recognition. Most black people seemed forgiving and patient and not at all interested in revenge. At a personal level I found the country transformed. Jeannie and I enjoyed open conversations with people in a way that had been impossible thirty years ago: Marta, Jonathan, Pieter, Thabiso and a hundred others; all were friendly and frank in their opinions.

We encountered the kindness of strangers and witnessed black and white and brown people interacting like normal human beings. Amazing! They talk to each other, they are respectful, they make eye contact, sit alongside each other at restaurants. Astonishing! Black, brown and white mingle without any fuss. Revelation! Given that South Africa had never been famed as the home of tolerance, this turnaround was hugely encouraging. I was surrounded by evidence of humankind’s adaptability and good sense.

Compared to the bad old days, this goodwill is a wonder to behold. The old master-servant relationships had vanished. The sullen resentment, the arrogance, guilt, suspicion, servility, edgy who-steps-aside-for-who dominance situations – all gone, dead, buried, perhaps forgotten. I’d half expected to find this kind of change, but to actually experience it was liberating. It was all so deliciously normal.

Does this transformation mean that racist views have vanished? Not exactly. Racist rednecks still exist but they keep a low profile. And here’s an example from media-guy Eric Miyeni’s book The only black at a dinner party: ‘It’s almost like the white people have a built-in mechanism to reject, ridicule, belittle and be disgusted by black people. As a result, black people find themselves being doubly disgusted by and hateful of the very same whites.’

Er, thanks Eric. But please clarify. Are you talking about most white and most black people? Or only a few? Or did you just make that up?

I came across men and women of all skin colours who live in fear of violent crime and who complained angrily about ANC corruption and incompetence, but can truly say that I never once heard anyone regret the death of apartheid. In fact the most concise words on the subject of apartheid were spoken to me by a white Afrikaans woman in Ceres. ‘It was a terrible mistake and it went on too long and now we’re all paying the price.’ Yep, that sums it up.

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A glimpse of life in South Africa in Before times, and a brush with history. The photo above was taken on Rondebosch station in 1969. Signs such as these had all vanished by 1995.

In 1966 I was a graduate student at the University of Cape Town, living in a boarding house in a tiny dead-end street with the impressive name of Rustenberg Avenue, in a room so small and dingy that only students considered it fit for habitation. Hendrik Verwoerd, chief architect of apartheid, was Prime Minister.

In August a new tenant moved into a room recently vacated by me. He was a Greek by the name of Dimitri Tsafendas. To the dozen or so students he was a middle-aged loner with whom they had nothing in common. He was treated politely and kept at arm’s length. There wasn’t much “Hey, Dim, how’s it going?” – although he had impressive linguistic abilities and claimed to speak ten languages. He had a job as a messenger at parliament.

On the morning of 6th September he left for work with, as was soon to become clear, a sheath knife concealed on his person. As the bells were ringing for a parliamentary session to begin, Dimitri Tsafendas walked up to the seated prime minister and stabbed him in the chest, to the great astonishment of everyone in general and no doubt Dr V in particular, in the process setting an all-time standard for no-frills low-budget assassination. Verwoerd fell, gurgling out his last moments and creating unpleasant stains on the carpet.

Within hours, ten percent of the country was in mourning, ninety percent quietly rejoiced, and police stormed up Rustenburg Avenue to interrogate the students of Aldor Boarding House.

Their responses ran something like:

“Who, me? I know nothing about the man, never spoke a word to him.”

“Tsafendas is a weirdo, but I never guessed...”

“I mean, uh, we knew he was strange, but, I mean, I swear none of us ever believed he would.…”

“If only we’d acted on our suspicions and told the police.”

It’s not easy to say this kind of stuff without allowing a smirk to spread across your face and while you’re thinking “he had it coming”.

The situation was no joke. The South African judicial system was at that stage carrying out dozens of executions every year, all for offences far lower down the scale than Prime Ministerial assassination. This was clearly a hanging case if ever there was one.

Students at the University of Cape Town had never been renowned as loyal supporters of the apartheid government. A whiff of conspiracy could have led to an Aldor-ite dangling at the end of a rope, but after a few days it became clear that students were not only stupid (a fact long known) but also innocent of conspiracy to murder (a fact grudgingly conceded), and police left the inhabitants of Aldor Boarding House in peace.

Soon it became obvious to investigating psychiatrists that Dimitri Tsafendas was barking mad so he was declared unfit to stand trial. He died in prison more than twenty years later and is now regarded as a Hero to the Cause.

When apartheid ended in 1994 I could have stepped forward and claimed “Yes, it was me. I put Tsafendas up to it. Told him to stick a knife into Verwoerd.” But I never thought of this at the time. Stepping forward could have earned me a position in post-apartheid South Africa, perhaps even designation as a minor Hero to the Cause.

I did not think, so am not.

Nelson Mandela was at that time three years into his life sentence. As a banned person he could not be quoted or even referred to by the press, which in effect imposed an iron curtain of silence. Eventually news of the assassination reached the political prisoners on Robben Island. In his autobiography ‘Long walk to freedom’ (in chapter 68), Mandela later wrote: “Although Verwoerd thought that Africans were lower than animals, his death did not yield us any pleasure…. It (assassination) is a primitive way of contending with an opponent.”

In the 1990s, President Nelson Mandela re-entered the assassination narrative in a way that reveals something of his depth of character. He had a sympathetic correspondence with Betsie Verwoerd, widow. When they finally met at an official function, he gently helped her through her prepared speech – as she had mislaid her spectacles.

Next week: back to the 21st century.

In the bright light of morning I wandered along the Simon’s Town jetty and watched a seal glide through the clear water, fully at home and in no hurry at all. A waterfront cafe became an opportunity to see South Africans being their normal non-racial selves. What a fine place, I thought. I bought copies of the left-leaning Mail & Guardian, together with the Cape Times and a few tabloid papers, then settled down to educate myself about the state of the nation.

Bad move. My reading over subsequent months leads me to offer this advice to anyone visiting the country: if you want to enjoy yourself, do not read a South African newspaper. Even a casual glance could shatter the illusion that South Africa is fair and just, and that it moves on a higher moral plane.

On the positive side South African papers are now completely uncensored, which is a vast improvement on Before-time. Back then, Big Brother looked over every editor’s shoulder. Nowadays, After-time newspapers pull no punches, and get away with savage criticism.

Several papers covered fraud perpetrated by white-collar creeps. One current story involved an investment group with the blandly reassuring name of Fidentia, headed by a podgy-faced young CEO with one of the most reassuring names in criminal history: Mr J Arthur Brown. Fidentia had been entrusted with investing the entire two billion rand assets of the Union of Mineworkers’ Provident Fund, a fund held in trust for the benefit of widows and orphans and accumulated over many years from contributions made by poorly-paid men who sweated deep underground and died young.

Fidentia, whose top executives rewarded themselves a modest monthly R26 million, had within two years managed to lose most of UMPF’s two billion rand. No apologies. Just ‘you gave it to us and we spent it’. Mr J Arthur Brown was in prison awaiting trial. One paper ran a story about a deceased miner’s orphan children, now destitute and living without hope. I was filled with a desire to stuff my copy of the M&G down J Arthur Brown’s throat .

The paper that astonished me most was the Daily Sun, a tabloid packed with exclamation marks and screaming headlines. Dead babies found in dump! School stabbing chaos! Burned and raped! Teacher killed in front of her horrified class! Death by devil-doll! Witch-hunters be warned! Cop’s evil plan backfires! (Took out life insurance on a friend, then shot him.)

I’m not suggesting that the Daily Sun gives a balanced view of life, but it sure opened windows on a world previously unknown to me. The most striking feature of these reports became clear only after I’d bought several issues. Almost every story is a one-off. No back-stories, no follow-ups.

South Africa’s abundance of shocking violence means there’s no need to rake over yesterday’s stories. Today, school stabbing chaos. Tomorrow, fifty new murder cases to choose from. There’s no such thing as a slow news day in the Republic.

Weeks later it occurred to me that the Daily Sun could be part of a white plot, making up stories in order to discredit the ANC. I made inquiries and was told that the owner, a gentleman said to carry a long-barrelled pistol at all times, vigorously defends his team’s journalistic integrity, claiming that every story is taken from police reports, and that all his writers are black Africans with Xhosa and Zulu and Tswana names. Anyway, who am I to disagree with a man who carries a long-barrelled pistol?

One story disturbed me more than most: Why I had sex with a dog! A man in Mothutlung was arrested for copulating with his neighbour’s dog, named Sport. Confronted by police, the man defended his choice of partner, explaining that his preference was a responsible form of safe sex that conveyed the dual benefits of protection from AIDS and saving on condoms. So far, so bad. But the response of Johanna Moholo, Sport’s owner, gave a glimpse through the gates of hell. Her quoted words: ‘How can he rape my dog like that? There are plenty of girls outside.’

The contrast between idyllic landscapes and nightmare headlines was giving me cognitive whiplash. Rapid switches from scenic beauty to dead babies in a dump felt like listening to Mozart while viewing a chainsaw massacre.

So what did I find? Has South African society truly changed since the days of apartheid? The answer: yes and no. The After-country is a blend of miracle and madhouse.

It’s exhilarating, but has a culture of extreme violence. Life is cheap.

It welcomed Mandela with open arms, but now ignores his example.

Apartheid laws have vanished, but inequalities have worsened.

The land is beautiful, but the slums are horrendous.

The constitution is female-friendly, but there’s an epidemic of rape.

Delight and despair are close companions in the new South Africa and anyone who lives there damn well needs to laugh, or else go mad. I mean, in what other country can you find road signs announcing ‘Dung beetles have right of way?’

And so it came to pass that after three decades absence I returned to South Africa for several months travel. The idea was to wander dusty back roads, stay with local families in small towns, meet friends from the past, talk with strangers whom I could not possibly have met in the past, discover the feel and flavour of the new South Africa, and find how much influence Mandela still had in the land of my birth. I hoped that as a returning exile I’d be a time-traveller on a quest to discover the Rainbow Nation’s soul, and to compare life Before with life After.

After what? I was intrigued by the varied names used for South Africa’s renaissance. Officially the anniversary of the first open election is ‘Freedom Day’, but the transition itself doesn’t seem to have a formal title, which is odd. I never heard it described as ‘Independence’. On various occasions I heard the events described as The Transition, The Hand-over, The Change-over, The End of Apartheid, Liberation, The Beginning of Democracy, The Struggle. But whatever labels are used, one thing is clear: the past is divided into Before and After.

Even the timing of After-ness is uncertain. Did it commence with the first open elections in April 1994? Or with Mandela’s inauguration a few weeks later? My pick: the precise symbolic moment was 3.30 pm on 11th February 1990, the moment when Nelson Rohihlahla Mandela walked through his prison gates towards a media scrum.

I visited in 2007. Capetown airport was a mess of reconstruction, overcrowding, jackhammers and noise. I was almost breathless with anticipation and apprehension, choked with half-remembered Before details of vineyards, mountains, home.

A black man in a suit strolled up to me. (Beware of suits, says the legend.) ‘Can I help you?’ He took pity on ignorant me and explained the basic features of Telkom phone booths and helped me with alien coins.

And so it went. Black and brown and white people offered directions. The car-hire lady was a model of patience and helpfulness. I began to relax. All those rampant-crime stories and tales of visitors being mugged on their first day, surely they were wild exaggeration.

We found our way to leafy Rondebosch and encountered a set of problems. Security gates remained closed and intercom buzzers unanswered. The suburb I’d once known now revealed a sinister face: high walls, electric fences, armed-response signs, guard dogs hurling themselves at locked gates.

So we fled south to Simon’s Town and found an excellent B&B. That afternoon, guineafowl emerged from the nearby mountainside and ran around like demented polka-dot cushions.

Next morning we woke to a sun-dazzled paradise of mountains and calm blue sea, the kind of vision that had lain buried in my memory for decades, and the reason I’d brought Jeannie here. Everything was going to be all right. The land was as dramatic and lovely as Before. So began our first full day at The Cape of Good Hope, a name redolent of peace and prosperity, conjuring up images of cheerful citizens, cosy cottages, snug harbours – a region of sunny optimism where warm welcomes are guaranteed.

Simon’s Town is a place of mellow stone, Victorian villas, rusty old anchors, a tiny mosque and buildings with names like Admiralty House. Above the Lord Nelson bar is a panel listing all the commanders of the Cape Station since 1797. On our second evening, Jeannie and I walked down the steep hill along a succession of twilight lanes, trying to ignore all the security warnings we’d been given.

In the reassuring haven of the Lord Nelson I asked the lady behind the bar if she had any advice on street-safety around town.

‘Oh, it’s safe,’ she replied. ‘The navy protects us. We’re not like other places.’

Even after dark? ‘No problem. I think.’

Next day I noticed a worrying detail. A ‘24-hour armed response’ sign outside the police station announced that its premises were protected by Chubb Security. That was a concern. If police lacked confidence in their ability to protect their own building, how much capacity would they have to protect me?

The last time I walked these streets, every public place was dominated by symbols of apartheid. Signs had been everywhere: on every beach, bus, toilet, park bench, and post-office counter. Whites Only/ Slegs vir Blankes. Only for Non-whites/ Slegs Nie-blankes. Separate entrances for post offices, separate seats on buses. And now? Not a trace. Not even one single overlooked park bench.

The winds of change had blown away separate-beach signs in the 1980s. Other signage vanished soon after 1990, so that when museums woke to the historical value of apartheid’s artefacts they were hard to find. Apparently the general relief at Mandela’s leadership plus the prospects of constitutional normality were enough to overpower piddling concerns like souvenir-collection. I wondered if a few whites-only signs lay hidden at the back of dusty store-rooms, but bringing them out now would be like displaying swastikas in Berlin.

Imagine this. Imagine a country ruled by grey-suited old men, every one of them obsessed with skin colour, believing that dark-skinned people need to be kept as far away as possible, poor, voteless, and subject to a thousand humiliations.

That was South Africa from 1948 on, a paranoid system headed for disaster. So I left. Packed up not long after Steve Biko’s murder in 1976 and escaped to free and orderly New Zealand. Living in the old South Africa meant having your conscience battered daily while watching your beloved country being dragged into conflict by secretive grey-suits. I was a rat leaving a sinking ship.

Outsiders who suggested it was an exceptionally dumb idea to keep most of your population as second class citizens were dismissed as ignorant. ‘You have no right to meddle in our internal affairs’ was a stock response of the grey-suits.

But miracles happened. With a country teetering on the edge of civil war a new leader of the grey-suits gazed into the abyss and changed his mind. Within five tumultuous years, apartheid was dismantled, democratic elections held, Nelson Mandela became the most respected leader on earth, and South African was promoted from pariah to rainbow nation. You could hear the collective sigh of relief across the world.

Many of the events leading up to the 1994 elections were tragic and some were farcical. Some of the most bizarre involved a white supremacist with the improbably perfect name of Eugene Terre’Blanche, a demagogue who founded a neo-Nazi party and aroused in his volk a conviction they should fight to the death against a black takeover.

But insane good fortune lent a helping hand. First, while leading a rally through the streets of Pretoria, Mr TB fell off his white horse, an event whose symbolism was not lost on the public. Second, an investigator spied on him in flagrante with one of his female followers, and reported that Terre’Blanche had a significant number of holes in his underwear.

This presented him with a challenge. Never before has a demagogue been forced to defend the integrity of his underpants in public. He proved unequal to the challenge. The man’s reputation and power base withered away – presumably along with his libido – and the counter-revolution fizzled out. If he’d chosen to wear fully functioning briefs, South Africa could’ve been plunged into civil war. On such events hinged the fate of a nation.

Things became even better. Elections were held, the ruling clique handed over power to the black majority in a sort-of-voluntary way, Nelson Mandela became President, and for the next five years his calm wisdom and moral authority helped guide the country through a dangerous transition. The country’s future didn’t rest entirely in Mandela’s hands. Many others combined to create moral leadership, in particular eternally cheerful Desmond Tutu, who initiated the TRC – the truth and reconciliation commission.

In a rational world, everyone should still be wandering around smiling their heads in wonderment, calling out to each other the good news that South Africa had earned given a fresh start in life, and that black and white now live together in harmony. Well, sort of.

Utopia it is not. Fear still haunts the nation, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that bad news travels better than good news. In the view of many outsiders, Africa remains the natural home of conflict, disease, corruption and poverty. Great wildlife, shame about the politics.

According to Afro-pessimists, African cities are inhabited by a feral underclass eager to shoot you for your cell phone and pounce on any driver foolish enough to stop at traffic lights after dark. If you believed all the rumours, any visitor will be lucky to escape being stabbed, shot, beaten, burned, mugged, road-raged, carjacked, or (for the privileged few) eaten by lions. So it goes

And yet, and yet.

Like anywhere else, most people are good, reasonable, friendly, fair-minded, law-abiding. South Africa remains a dramatic land of wide horizons, flaming sunsets, blue-dome sky, African music, African laughter, resilient can-do attitudes, boundless open space, jackals calling in the night, and the intoxicating aromas of rain on hot earth – the blend of a thousand details that call us home to Africa. I wanted to mingle with people who understood that ‘just now’ rightly means ‘in the near future’ and not ‘in the recent past’. I wanted the primal pleasure that comes from wilderness evenings in the company of elephants. I wanted to see for myself whether the country had experienced a genuine change in mindset and was now guided by Mandela’s example, or whether there had simply been a regime change with enmity lurking beneath the surface like crocodiles.

Also I’ve never been able to listen to Black Mambazo or read the opening lines of ‘Cry, the Beloved Country’ without tears coming to my eyes; (‘There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills…’)

Africa is in my bones.