On the overnight flight to Joburg, baby in sky cot, three junior Millards all strapped in, the mood was one of alarm. "You mean you are going on holiday with all those children?" asked the people sitting next to me. "To South Africa?" I was sitting next to a pair of thirtysomething Capetonians who were returning home for a family wedding. They were very pleased with themselves, having just done the paperwork for a permanent existence in Southfields, London SW19, courtesy of a British grandparent. Why? The woman told me her mother is now so jumpy in Cape Town that she always gardens with a panic alarm in her back pocket. The man told me that security guards regularly gun down other security guards in Joburg's gated communities. When I explained that my husband wasn't with me, due to a sudden work commitment, they looked at me as if I was deranged. A man is an essential accoutrement when holidaying in South Africa.
I wasn't all that surprised. Scared white people's flight from South Africa has become so familiar that it is almost a cliche. More atypical is traffic going the other way. Yet, bolstered with British pounds gained in the house boom, a dribble of cash-rich South African returnees is gaining ground. Tourism seems to be a key. During our travels we dropped in for lunch with the hotelier Andy Fermor, who traded in a career on British construction sites for a career running Hog Hollow Country Lodge on the Garden Route, his own response to the new South Africa.
Fermor has in effect junked the old manner of South African hotels, where white South Africans inherited a job behind the reception desk and black South Africans were employed only as cleaners and waiters. His small hotel, perched over miles of green forest, is not styled as an ersatz English country house, as are so many on the Garden Route. It is packed with African cultural emblems rather than weedy pastel paintings of elephants in the mist.
More importantly, all his front-of-house staff, his general manager and his deputy manager are black. "They run the show," Fermor explained. "They are in positions of authority, and they are the people our guests meet on arrival." Nor is he some hidden maestro pulling the strings in the background; he may have stumped up the cash to build the place, but parity in the office appears to be what Fermor is working towards. "My management staff go on trips to hotels in Cape Town to check out the competition. They go abroad to market Hog Hollow and, from this year, they are shareholders in the business."
He talks about a "moral duty" to employ black managerial staff, but it is clear that his progressive approach also makes good business sense. While there may still be a paying public that wants to travel to South Africa and hide in palatial hotels filled with canned music, overstuffed armchairs and waiters in sashes and caps, there is also a more politically demanding wave of tourists who do not want to see their rand supporting the status quo ante.
Fermor's hotel is such a testimony to the viability of a reconstructed South Africa that President Thabo Mbeki once dropped in for breakfast. "We went down to the beach and walked together in the surf," said Fermor. "I am a believer in the new South Africa, and I want to play my little role." I told him about the scared couple on the plane. He laughed.
