Cape Town at this time of year is saturated with British visitors. In restaurants, one sometimes hears them several tables away, gloating about the vile weather back home and crowing over what a steal, in pounds, the wine is here. If you meet visiting Brits, there comes an inescapable moment: with misty-eyed concern, they peer over their glass of (cheap) Cape wine, then lower their voice to ask, with funereal delicacy: “Are you optimistic?”
This is neither a metaphysical poser, nor a psychometric test. It is, inevitably, the coded question: now that there is a democratic (read black) government in South Africa, are you quite sure you did the right thing, leaving London?
The statue of Cecil Rhodes may still stand in the Dutch East India Company Gardens in Cape Town, near the parliament, pointing north with the exhortation: “Your hinterland is there.” But today, Rhodes’s natural disciples, the children of empire, are fleeing in the opposite direction.
Last year, an estimated 300,000 young South Africans hied it to Britain, while it is said that soon there will be more South African doctors practising in California than in Cape Town.
The result is that most white South Africans, on learning that I have elected to return, pause in astonishment, then gasp: “But surely you’re going the wrong way!” The shock, sometimes, is as visible as if I had somehow managed to defy gravity. Visiting British tourists often express similar amazement, though naturally in altogether more circumspect fashion.
First I explain that they shouldn’t listen too much to average white South Africans. They have seldom known what was going on in their own country. Most whites here, certainly the English-speaking ones, don’t really want to live in Africa at all; they just want to live in a sunny suburb. Now, rather vexingly, they have a cabinet full of black folk whose names they can’t even pronounce.
Admittedly, our politics are confusing, especially for the Anglo-Saxon mind, which likes a clear-cut, two-party system. The current government is a complex alliance of the African National Congress, the Congress of South African Trades Unions and the South African Communist Party.
The complexity reminds me of the politics when I was living in Italy in the 1970s. Like the Christian Democrats there 20 years ago, the ANC today seems immutable. The “Demo-Christians” were an alliance of very disparate factions, from hard right to far left, all of whom maintained separate headquarters; the ANC is equally hydra-headed. This is an analogy that I make for nervous whites who persist in viewing the ANC as ideologically unified and even vaguely revolutionary. The ANC is as socialist as, say, new Labour – and nowadays its partner, the Communist Party (SACP), hardly dares say boo to a bourgeois.
The central thrust of concerns expressed by many visiting Brits boils down to this: while pleased that the awful apartheid business is over, they don’t want things in sunny South Africa to change too much.
One of the biggest illusions of apartheid was that it deceived white South Africans into believing, for another 46 years, that they lived in a European country. It is a delusion still inadvertently shared by many tourists. They would do well to remember the judgement of Anthony Trollope, who visited the country in 1877: “South Africa is a country of black men – and not of white men. It has been so, it is so, and it will continue to be so.”
But, guests constantly ask, aren’t you worried about corruption? Not as much, I reply, as in the old days when P W Botha produced nuclear warheads at a cost of around £150 million, or when each race group had different administrations and, with the tin-pot Bantustans, the taxpayer forked out for a dozen different civil services, let alone a dozen or so ministers of finance, ministers of police, and so on.
At this point, I like to lob in a little-known statistic for visiting Brits. During the 1980s, as apartheid repression grew bloodier, the number of Tory MPs who visited South Africa on expenses-paid visits grew exponentially; thus, by the end of that decade, the country’s most absurd Lilliputian satellite, Bophuthatswana, was the second most popular junket destination after the United States. Who was worried about corruption then?
By now, my interrogator have usually reached for another bottle of (gosh, it’s so reasonable!) wine. You can still see, however, that gleam of pity in their eyes.
This President Mbeki, determined visitors continue, bit of a control freak, eh? I have a ready riposte: Tony Blair. Then comes the clincher: crime. Yes, I concede, it’s a worry. And here I give the same advice I used to offer visitors in Rome, quoting Juvenal. “It is a careless man,” said he, “who goes out to dinner without making his will first.”
What is to be done with all these patronising visitors? A friend, who has known Nelson Mandela for 50 years, tells me that the old man has a magnificently patrician attitude to his former tormentors: the Afrikaners, he believes, are a backward people who need to be brought along gently. It is my new resolution to treat future unenlightened British visitors, in addition to all that cheap Cape wine, with the same august forbearance.
Yes, but . . . am I optimistic? Ja-nee, as Afrikaners say. Yes-no. Thus I’ve taken to repeating a graffito quoted by one of our leading poets and – the contradictions! – deputy general-secretary of the South African Communist Party. In fact, I’ve adopted it as my motto for this new century: “Leave pessimism for better times.”
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