Free South Africa another country on the make

The apartheid system is being replaced by the sort of class structure we are accustomed to, a more subtle method of division

OH AFRICA. Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. Fell asleep on the plane with the iPod jammed into my ears. Woke in Johannesburg with Arlo Guthrie’s version of a Tom Paxton song buzzing on my head. I’m going to re-record it and change the word “Chrysler” to “Anglo”.

I am changing my name to Anglo /I am headed for that great receiving line/So when they hand a million grand out/I’ll be standing with my hand out/Yes sir, I’ll get mine.

Thus, humming happily and thinking of all the cars I’ll drive into swimming pools when I am a meaningful rock artist, I arrive. A shallow man in deepest Africa. Well, Oliver Tambo International Airport.

This is my second time in South Africa since apartheid ended. That makes a grand total of two trips to South Africa altogether and, journalistically speaking, that qualifies me as an expert.

My visits have been low key and even though that is how I like it, there is a certain twist of disappointment at not being hailed for my part in a nation’s liberation. The post-apartheid generation have moved on, though. There is no express customs gate for those of us who think we were sound enough during the apartheid days.

We stood outside Dunnes Stores all night. We stood outside the South African Embassy in Trafalgar Square for even more nights and the English middle class liberals coddled us with their mortifying, toe-curling chant of Belfast! Soweto! LondonDerry! One Struggle! One Fight! We didn’t eat the tinned fruit because the man from Del Monte was a bastard . . .

We were once part of an elite commando raiding party designed to disrupt a speech given by the South African ambassador to London in the vet college in Ballsbridge. We scaled walls and busted through doors and burst into the auditorium to save Gotham City from evil. Only to discover all other dissenters had been shown to the hall by the college’s obliging porters. Still. We didn’t play Sun City. We didn’t go on rugby tours.

So when I come here I haven’t quite let it all go. I know I look like just another white honky creeping around half in awe of South Africa’s dusty grandeur, half afraid of its crime statistics, immensely confused by a country I once thought I knew everything about.

And I want desperately to be cool. Yearn for the taxi driver to quiz me about the Soweto Uprising or the Sharpeville massacre and for him to be pleasantly surprised at my smidgin of knowledge. I long for the waiter to ask where I have come from and when he hears, to give me a complicated handshake which makes the other whiteys envious.

One struggle, man. One fight. Listen. Does equality not mean easy upgrades for people who didn’t take the cling peaches? (I’m not saying I want the South African people to give me a pet name like Madiba, by which they know Nelson Mandela – though I have suggested a few “down with the street” tags, Extra Largey Large, Puff Paddy, but just the odd conspiratorial wink would be nice.)

Of course what we politically correct comrades wanted for South Africa was that it would move on. And it has. In its own style and so fast you wonder has it even learned the lessons of its own history.

This week you’re not a white honky, not really, you are a customer, a tourist statistic, a source of income. Free at last, South Africa is just another country on the make. In the city the apartheid system is being replaced by the sort of class structure we are accustomed to. Something harsher and starker but still a more subtle method of division.

So we still speak of black on black crime. And black on white crime. And in these changing times there is white on white crime as a black middle class burgeons and a white underclass inherits old resentments. White on white. It’s like a football result which we old timers root for in a subliminal, relieved way. Just because white on white crime makes you less uneasy. It doesn’t fuel old paranoias and stereotypes. It just adds to the jumble.

There are things which are troubling and complex. Not just the generic shops and the homogenous feel of the place but in the countryside, over 3,000 white farmers have been massacred over the last 16 years, while people have talked of a national expropriation of land.

And whatever the economic conditions and resentments which prompted many of those killings and however many of those dead farmers sympathised with Eugene Terre’blanche, who joined their mouldering ranks a couple of months ago well, you can’t help feeling each death drives another dozen or so of the remaining 40,000 farming families into the arms of Terre’blanche’s Afrikaner Resistance Movement with its swastika-like emblem and extreme views.

And it makes you shiver. Still, we come here with our World Cup, a great and gaudy circus of distraction and surreal controversy. . Everything is familiar in that sense when you get inside the World Cup cocoon. The media centres, the accreditation desks, the press tribunes, the teams insulated from the world in their absurdly opulent hotels. But we want it to be more. We want meaning.

This must be an interesting event for those who also covered the 1995 World Rugby Cup, an event which had the feeling of a last hurrah for the old white rulers. It had its moments, none more moving or forgiving in sport, perhaps, than the exchange between Pienaar and Mandela, but you had the sense from a distance that black South Africa looked on at the white party.

And 14 years later it is the reverse. Those who danced back then now line the walls and watch. Football is the lingua franca of the townships and teeming suburbs and even on Saturday as we sat in our hotel through a 10-hour blackout the mood was lightened by bulletins of Ghana’s win over the USA.

The instinct is to defend everything you find and to be charmed by everything. Vuvuzelas? We proclaim them as a means of expression for a freed people. If the fans of, say, the Dallas Cowboys used them (how ’bout them long horns?) we would propose blanket bombing them into obscurity Progress? Spar shops and chain hotels and a country being colonised by the multi-nationals who backed off for a few years and then came back. All good.

We come here wanting a national representation of those ghastly Up With People troupes with which America used to poison the world in harmony in the 1960s and 1970s. And it’s more complicated and at the same time less complicated.

People aren’t talking politics all the time. They are talking football and figuring out how best to make a buck. It was for Marks and Spencers and Visa Cards and pools in the yard they struggled. Not just those things but the right to have them and the chance to have them. Yes sir , I’ll get mine, sings Arlo Guthrie in my sleepy head. The song that links all us brothers.