South africa

The death of Winnie Madikizela Mandela has come at a delicate time for South Africa. The country’s new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has taken over, yet politics remains in a state of flux. Jacob Zuma’s corruption trial, set to take place in June, will see an airing of dirty laundry sure to paint the country’s political class in a bad light. Yet Mandela’s death has seen South Africa’s leaders try to outdo themselves in a different exercise: giving the most nauseating panegyrics to “Mama Winnie”. At Mandela’s funeral today, these tributes – which ignore the darker side of her legacy – are sure to continue if her memorial service this week is anything

Last time I was in South Africa I spent two weeks deep in the Karoo, that desiccated wasteland in the Northern Cape which is home only to a handful of jackals, the occasional springbok and supporters of the Afrikaaner Resistance Movement. I had been visiting Orania, a smallish town in which no black people are allowed. Set up by the son-in-law of Hendrik Verwoerd, its existence now is very grudgingly protected by the South African government under regulations which preserve minority cultures — ah, the irony. I was doing a documentary, the gist being: ghastly, ghastly, racist white people. I have to admit that I, as a white supremacist bigot,

In recent years, living in South Africa has been a bit like having cancer. The malaise eating us from within was corruption and there seemed to be no cure, which is why there was no dancing in the streets when our dreadful president, Jacob Zuma, was finally eased out of office on Valentine’s Day. For me, it felt as if the entire nation was hobbling out of hospital after a long and painful stay, almost too weak to walk, but very surprised and grateful to discover that it had somehow survived. So I didn’t dance in the streets. But I did spot a local ANC leader standing in the sun

First we had Rhodes Must Fall, now it’s the turn of Science Must Fall. Students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa have taken issue with the science faculty — or science in general, to be more exact. The issue? Science as it is currently understood is colonial and ought to be abolished. At a meeting on the pressing issue, students gathered to air their grievances with some claiming that witchcraft holds just as much merit as Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity— they are both ways of explaining the world: ‘Decolonising the science would mean doing away with it entirely and starting all over again to deal with how we

 Cape Town South Africa has just seen her most encouraging election results ever. The general election of April 1994, which brought full democracy, was important in itself but its results were a foregone conclusion — the black majority voted for the ANC, as expected. The local elections this month were different and immensely hopeful. There has been a large vote against the ruling party, the ANC, bringing an end to the great curse of post-colonial Africa under which the people keep voting for the ‘liberation’ party however corrupt and incompetent it is. The ANC still won 54 per cent of the votes, but this is the first time its share

I went back to see my old house in Cape Town last week, and they’d put a cage around it. Otherwise it was unchanged; broad, plantationish and oddly ill-suited to the slim, cluttered suburban street on which it sat. Yet the whole thing, from the eaves where our little flat was to the porch where we all used to sit and smoke, had been wedged into a box of bars. As though it were about to go diving with sharks. This was where I lived for the best part of a year, about a decade and a half ago, and not really for any good reason. Ostensibly I was following