DIARY
ANTHONY SAMPSON
I
have been back to South Africa as a jour- nalist 12 times over the last ten years; but this is the first time that I've visited with my fami- ly — an interesting opportunity to look at it with the fresh eyes of a tourist. The trip to Robben Island is the most vivid reminder of the transformation. It's now a favourite expe- dition for international tourists, only half an hour by high-speed boat from Cape Town. Ex-prisoners lead them through the grim prison cells and the beautiful nature reserve, and explain how the prison experience helped to educate and unify them, providing a kind of model for the New South Africa. The organisers of the tours say that Ameri- can visitors are the most obviously respon- sive. Chelsea Clinton had read everything about it; the American defence secretary, William Cohen, has just visited a second time. But more interesting are the ex-prison- ers who return as pilgrims to try to recapture their peace of mind. 'Terror' Lekota, once a militant inmate, now a burly minister, told me that he went back there once a year to regain his strength and his roots. Their chil- dren do not necessarily share their emotions. One black ex-prisoner described to me how his 17-year-old daughter — who goes to a multiracial school where most of her friends are white or Indian — resisted visiting Robben Island with her parents. 'Don't you want to see your father's cell where he spent six years?' Why don't you just give me the money instead,' she answered, `to buy some trainers?' It is an ironic outcome for the free- dom fighters; their years of sacrifice and idealism have enabled middle-class blacks to become as materialistic and money-minded as everyone else. But most of them are proud of the multiracialism of the young. One black writer told me how his nephew had thrived in his multiracial school: he had been teasing an overweight white schoolboy called 'Fatty' who suddenly retaliated by calling him 'you bloody Kaffir'. He wasn't at all put out; he only asked: 'What does Kaffir mean?'
The play The Island, which has just been successfully revived at the National Theatre in London, depicts two black prisoners per- forming Antigone in prison as if it were an improbable idea. The programme notes do not mention that Antigone was performed on Robben Island, with Mandela playing the part of Creon. He was enthralled by it, and saw Antigone herself in the role of freedom fighter determined to honour a dead hero. The Island gave many prisoners a sense of sharing the universal culture of Sophocles or Shakespeare, which made them feel part of a larger world.
The confusion between myth and reality is always a problem in South Africa — a country which has always been caricatured — and it is especially hard to demythologise Johannesburg, now proclaimed everywhere as the Capital of Crime. It has always been a violent city for blacks: the first article I ever wrote about it — in 1951, for the magazine Drum which I was then editing — was a long exposé of crime which showed that black Johannesburg had one of the highest mur- der rates in the world. It remains a danger- ous place for blacks, particularly for black women who are threatened by an alarming wave of rapes. But the huge publicity given to crime dates from the early Nineties when murders, car-jacks and rapes extended to white Johannesburgers whose tempting mansions, big gardens and luxury cars were no longer protected by a police state. Parts of the Johannesburg city-centre at night are certainly alarming to tourists, with decaying buildings surrounded by unemployed black youths, like a scene from Blade Runner or Mad Max — an image encouraged by hoard- ings advertising a car-spares company actu- ally called Mad Max. The crowds of jobless immigrants from rural areas and foreign countries find that crime provides the most obvious source of employment and income. But the crime industry has also spawned a lucrative industry of extravagant crime- reporting by foreign correspondents who know that their readers want horrific stories about gunmen, rapists and murders. Some of the scare-stories amaze local editors when they can read them. They note with amusement that the articles by R.W. John- son, the British correspondent who is widely syndicated, are carefully labelled 'not for publication in South Africa'. Downtown Johannesburg is not quite the desolate wasteland it appears. One huge deserted power station with broken windows is a no- go area inhabited by hundreds of immigrant squatters; but only two blocks away is the Market Theatre which has put on many suc- cessful black shows and plays over 20 years, and is now showing a new hit, The Zulu, composed by Mbongeni Ngemi who pro- duced the Broadway hit Sarafirta.
Afor the tourist who travels through the lush vineyards of the Cape, staying in comfortable old farmhouses, he finds it hard to remember that any political change has happened. How to connect and reconcile the extremes remains the continuing challenge for the government. It is in parliament in Cape Town that all the strands come togeth- er. It seems a pity that it is not included on the tourist routes, for it provides a vivid pageant of a young multiracial democracy, with black members in bright robes alongside austere, bearded Muslims and dark-suited Afrikaner conservatives. Six years after the peaceful revolution, the most extraordinary thing about the parliament is its ordinariness, and the apparent ease with which one black president was succeeded by another. At the opening this year President Mbeki made his first major speech, full of managerial lan- guage about growth rates and right-sizing the public sector, while his predecessor Mandela looked down benignly from the gallery as though he belonged to a previous era. Mbeki is a less obvious conciliator than Mandela. As a former exile he needs to establish that he represents the black masses, all the more because he sounds like an Anglophile from Sussex University, which he is. In some ways his life as an exile was a more testing ordeal than Robben Island, as he constantly con- fronted unfriendly governments, including Mrs Thatcher's. But Mbeki seems deter- mined to bury political hatchets: he told me how he had recently enjoyed welcoming Lady Thatcher who had asked to see him with her son Mark — who still lives in Cape Town — and how she had wished his govern- ment well.
The sense of normality in government still seems abnormal to anyone who has watched the roller-coaster of South African politics over the last decade. But Mbeki sees normality as both an achievement and a danger. He cannot allow white South Africans to assume that nothing has changed: the reconciliation, he insists, must be accompanied by transformation. It is only by connecting the contradictory images of South Africa that a New South Africa can really take shape.
Anthony Sampson is author of Mandela, the Authorised Biography, published by Harper- Collins.
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