The Cafe de Move-on Blues E-Book

Christopher Hope

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 405

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize,2019 'Hope writes with extraordinary exuberance and invention.' - Literary Review In White Boy Running, Christopher Hope explored how it felt and looked to grow up in a country gripped by an 'absurd, racist insanity'. In The Cafe de Move-on Blues, on a road trip thirty years later, Christopher goes in search of today's South Africa; post-apartheid, but also post the dashed hopes and dreams of Mandela, of a future when race and colour would not count. He finds a country still in the grip of a ruling party intent only on caring for itself, to the exclusion of all others; a country where racial divides are deeper than ever. As the old imperial idols of Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger are literally pulled from their pedestals in a mass yearning to destroy the past, Hope ponders the question: What next? Framed as a travelogue, this is a darkly comic, powerful and moving portrait of South Africa - an elegy to a living nation, which is still mad and absurd.

Leseprobe

The Café de Move-on Blues

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

NOVELS

A Separate Development

Kruger’s Alp

The Hottentot Room

My Chocolate Redeemer

Serenity House

Me, the Moon and Elvis Presley

Darkest England

Heaven Forbid

My Mother’s Lovers

Shooting Angels

Jimfish

SHORT STORIES

The Love Songs of Nathan J. Swirsky

Learning to Fly

The Garden of Bad Dreams

NON-FICTION

White Boy Running

Moscow, Moscow

Signs of the Heart

Brothers under the Skin: Travels in Tyranny

POETRY

Cape Drives

Englishmen

In the Country of the Black Pig

FOR CHILDREN

The King, the Cat and the Fiddle (with Yehudi Menuhin)

The Dragon Wore Pink

The Café de Move-on Blues

In Search of the New South Africa

CHRISTOPHER HOPE

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2018 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Christopher Hope, 2018

The moral right of Christopher Hope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

The illustration credits on p. 307 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-059-9Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-523-5E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-060-5Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-061-2

Map artwork by Jeff Edwards

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Georgie, wherever he may be

Contents

Preface

Part 1   Empire of Dreams

Part 2   Saldanha Man

Part 3   The Kimberley Line

Part 4   Knitting Socks for Mr Hitler

Part 5   The War of Mandela’s Ear

Part 6   The Battle of Rhodes’ Nose

Acknowledgements

Preface

This is an account of a journey around South Africa. It is a search for understanding of who ‘we’ are and what we thought we were doing there. People like myself, and those from whom I came: English-speakers, descendants of European settlers, or ‘Whites’ – to use the weary, inevitable classification, and thus ‘South Africans’, of a certain sort. It was a search unlikely to succeed because the country is one where the more you know, the less you understand, but that in no way lessens the need to go on looking. It began in April 2015, when a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, the imperial fortune hunter, was attacked on the campus of Cape Town University. I happened to be there at what proved to be the start of the statue wars.

With each passing week, effigies across South Africa were assaulted, strung with placards, toppled, and daubed with paint and other ordures. The variety of statues targeted was surprising. Besides British imperialists and Dutch colonialists, they included Black revolutionaries, an Indian pacifist, KhoiSan icons, several stone elephants, three monarchs, one tiny rabbit and a horse. Not only statues but paintings, photographs, books and libraries were torched, lecture halls trashed, teachers threatened and assaulted. Race came into it, of course – in South Africa it always does. Many, but not all, of the iconoclasts were Black and most, but by no means all, of the statues assaulted depicted Whites.

It was about this time that I came across an account, given in James Fenton’s wonderful little book On Statues, of an attack that took place on the sacred images and icons of churches in Bruges, during the French Revolution. Fenton quotes an observer:

The Heads of the statues taken from the Town Hall were brought to the marketplace and smashed to pieces by people who were very angry and embittered. They also burned all traces of the hateful devices that had previously served the Old Law, such as gibbets, gallows and whips. Throughout these events the whole market square echoed to the constant cries of the assembled people: ‘Long live the nation! Long live freedom!’

(John W. Steyaert, Late Gothic Sculpture: The Burgundian Netherlands, Ghent, 1994)

Using these mute assaulted statues as navigation pointers on my map, or windows through which to see the forces at work, I travelled the country. South Africa does not allow much realism, it makes itself up as it goes along, is a work in progress, and it demands you read through to the real drama beneath the surface. It is often surreal, sometimes unhinged and always unexpected. The journey took me to most of the provinces in South Africa, and sometimes to places where, though to anyone else there was not much to see, I had lived and worked and where bits of my life lay buried or hiding, waiting to be rediscovered and where memories welled up in me. These were intensely personal memorials, invisible to others but as solid to me as anything in bronze or marble.

A number of people who spoke to me asked me not to use their names; a few asked me not to take notes; and, in one case, I was asked not to remember what I had been told because I was ‘an inappropriate repository’. Yet people wished to talk and once started they did not stop. Not since I spent time in the former Soviet Union have I found people switching between two ways of talking: private truth and public pretence; kitchen-table confidences and official fictions. Censorship, once so familiar to many of us under the old regime, was making a comeback. But this time we were doing it ourselves. Ideas, phrases and sentiments were on the banned list once again and words were weaponized. That is why I have altered the names of everyone who spoke to me and, sometimes, their genders.

Above all, I wanted to look again at the people who made me who I am: Whites who settled in South Africa and believed that they were at home there. If ever freedom was won in South Africa, so went the dream of Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela in the dark years of racial hatred, the country would at last belong to all who lived there, with no account paid to colour and creed.

What the fallen statues seemed to say was that this dream was dying. A quarter of a century into the new democracy, I found race and colour to be more divisive than ever. The war of words had never felt more violent. Black people were more and more unforgiving; Whites were angry and baffled, redundant or demonized, their choices narrowing to psychic withdrawal, or the Great Trek in reverse, as they faced up to loss not just of power but of meaning and substance, of being slowly but surely moved on, and out.

The truce that followed the accession of Mandela, when the old adversaries love-bombed each other with ‘rainbows’, was over. We had now a proxy war, where each side attacked the other’s sacred idols because these were next best to the real thing. It was a way of getting at those you wanted removed but were not yet quite prepared to attack outright. In that quintessential South African fashion, we set out to hunt the hostile others, and kept meeting ourselves coming the other way.

Even so, I believed that what I found was so peculiar to ourselves that no one would wish to follow our example. Our statue wars, I believed, were a result of our intense but lonely obsession with graven images of colonial, imperial and, above all, ‘White’ oppression. Ours had been a long hard night of racial madness where every waking hour was spent reinforcing ethnic difference and distance, ethnic exclusivity, tribalism, partition, separation and apartness. Over decades we built walls and fences and frontiers with the sole aim of keeping others out or ourselves in. But then, surely, we had been crazy – and more than crazy? The old fascination the Nazis held for some of our rulers had been not just horribly cruel, it was so embarrassingly passé. Other people, in other saner countries, would never succumb to such antediluvian racial dementia.

Then it began happening elsewhere. In the United States people supported their president’s desire to build a big wall along the Mexican border. In Britain, in the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union, the idea of borders and boundaries and patrols to keep ‘them’ out carried the day. In Charlottesville, Virginia, apprentice storm troopers, trying hard to march in step, and denouncing Jews, looked like clones of South Africa’s very own home-grown neo-fascists, in similar badly designed khakis, and smudgy imitation swastikas on limp flags, led by Eugene Terre’Blanche and his Afrikaner Resistance Movement, way back in the eighties and nineties of the last century. Next, statues of Confederate generals from the Civil War began coming down in what one American commentator described as ‘a war against the dead’. From London came a call for the fall of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.

It all seemed suddenly familiar. It also gave me the alarming feeling that what we had tried to do back in the bad old years, and failed at so lamentably, had not been behind the times at all; maybe we had been way ahead of the curve.

Christopher Hope

The experiment of a White race in Africa is by no means assured, and unless we mend our ways, we may go the same way in the South as the Roman and the Greek, the Carthaginian and the Vandal in the North

John X Merriman (1917)

White people have no right to be here and the White man who says he has got a farm here must roll it up, put it in a train and spread it in the land that he comes from

Pastor Ngobeza (1921)

Part 1

EMPIRE OF DREAMS

1

It’s not often you watch an angry crowd lynching a statue. But that was what I saw, by chance, one autumn morning in 2015. I was in Cape Town, driving along the boulevard that runs below the main campus of Cape Town University, when traffic ground to a halt and I spotted, high above me, surging crowds on the campus. I left my car on the roadside and walked up the hill to the university, to find squadrons of students mobbing the large statue of a seated man, who seemed to be wearing a mask.

The masked man I knew to be Cecil John Rhodes. He was shown in pensive mode, reminiscent of Rodin’s Thinker, seated on a plinth, gazing into the distance. I knew something, too, of what lay behind the animated scene. Rhodes had come to be seen by Black students not as genial lord of all he surveyed but as diabolical looter-in-chief.

For weeks there had been demonstrations and threats by demonstrators to unseat the bronze imperialist. His effigy had been jeered, reviled, smeared with human excrement and now the removal truck was on the scene. Behind the wire fence, rigged to protect the memorial from the angry students, workmen in shiny hard hats clambered over the plinth and began securing cables around the statue’s base. The crowd chanted, clapped and punched the air in a weird blend of riot and ritual. But then, in South Africa, weird was where we began from, and what started out as crazy often became the new normal. Throughout the tumult the statue remained, as statues will, imperturbable, its eyes fixed on the far horizon.

If you followed Rhodes’ line of sight, then, in crucial ways, his gaze traversed, as did his life, the history and the tragedy of South Africa. He looked out, firstly, over the plush green and wooded suburbs, nestled on the skirts of Table Mountain and, for the most part, still home to Whites. Further out lay the dusty Cape Flats, where Coloured people had lived since being banished from the city by the old apartheid regime, in one of its manic spasms of ethnic cleansing. (‘Coloured’, like ‘people of colour’, ‘mixed race’, ‘brown people’, and recent, and strongly resisted, attempts to label ‘Brown’ people as ‘Black’, are deeply suspect terms, hard to define and by no means settled. But they are all we have to go by.) A long way further off, discernible through field glasses, lay the Black African townships, and the sprawling shacks and shanties of the more recent arrivals in the Mother City, often incomers from the Eastern Cape.

Rhodes attacked, Cape Town, 9 April 2015

The gaze of the seated Rhodes ranged further still, unhindered, all the way to the jagged peaks of the far-away Hottentots Holland mountains, looming gauzy blue as if scissored from the sky itself. There was something proprietorial in his look and that was hardly surprising because Rhodes once owned not only a large chunk of Table Mountain, massed behind him, but huge swathes of Africa to the north and he had designs on the rest of it, from the Cape all the way to Cairo.

Cape Town has always been good at deceiving the traveller and, mostly, the traveller liked being taken in. I think that’s because Cape Town has always been good at fooling itself. Among its illusions has been the belief that it was a place apart: liberal, laid-back, ever so slightly superior, beautiful and remote. I once compared it to a ballet shoe on a boxer – a shapely bit of almost-Europe strapped to the foot of not-quite-Africa.

Cape Town was always a city of illusions, a town with form, as well as a string of aliases: it once called itself the ‘Tavern of the Seas’, and the ‘Fairest Cape’ – none of these disguises were convincing, except one of the oldest, which is not used any longer: ‘The Cape of Slaves’. That last name stung too much to stick for long and it was not to be mentioned in polite company. But that was truly Cape Town, during the great slave period from 1652, with the arrival of the first White colonists, until 1834, when, to the consternation of slave-owning colonists, the practice was abolished by the British. In that period more than sixty thousand slaves were imported from places relatively close like Mozambique, Zanzibar, Madagascar, Angola and Mombasa; and from distant India, the Moluccas, Thailand and Japan.

Cape Town had many faces, many guises: a Dutch fortress, a British colony, and home to a Parliament where every new turn of the apartheid screw was solemnly voted into law. Cape Town called itself ‘the bastion’ of Western Christian civilization. That was the boast of our old masters and we had the laws to prove it, all of them made in Cape Town by a supine but dedicated band of zealous racists who were not merely pleased with their handiwork, they were noisily proud of it.

I first lived there back in the sixties, an exile from the Highveld, when the city had a quiet and rather dowdy charm, lying as it did under its beautiful, preposterous sawn-off mountain. Capetonians equated topography with virtue; because their mountain was imposing, solid and shapely and they were its disciples, so too must they be saved by living in its shadow. Sacred landmarks and good looks translated into a kind of dreamy superiority.

Coming as I did from ‘up North’, the rough country beyond the Vaal River, I got the feeling, which was, perhaps, shared by many up-country visitors, that I had fallen among fundamentalists, hill worshippers so proud of ‘their’ mountain that to hear them talk you’d think that they had built it. Their belief, unstated but pervasive, was that here was God’s own capital, together with His holy mountain, and He dwelt on the green slopes in a suitably named suburb of Bishopscourt, spoke only to Capetonians and they spoke only to each other. This was the kind of parochial pantheism that Cecil Rhodes shared, the belief that high mountain places were home to, and reserved for, very special beings.

When I fly into Cape Town I see in the distance the kempt and shapely houses of Constantia, Kenilworth and Newlands climbing the mountain slopes. I glimpse oaks, seashore, whitewashed Cape Dutch gables and vineyards. Table Mountain towers and beyond it, looking out to the Atlantic Ocean, the mansions of Clifton and Camps Bay where the feel is faux-Mediterranean, the villas pure Sorrento, but the sea temperature is Arctic and the south-easterly wind is so pugnacious that I know people who must move into their cellars at night to get some sleep.

And then the plane dips down to the airport and below I see the endless squatter camps and shanty towns of the Cape Flats, where drive-by shootings and gangland slayings are so frequent they rate barely a paragraph in the papers. There is nowhere else I can think of that provides a more dramatic ground-plan of the way things have been, and still are, in South Africa: the rich on the hill, the poor on the flats and, midway between the two, the airport. No matter how often I fly in it’s something I never get used to – a city so improbable that it should stand as the primary symbol of a country every bit as improvised, a tale made up as people went along, a story told by a tragedienne with a terrifying sense of humour.

As I watched angry demonstrators assaulting the bronze simulacrum of a Victorian imperialist with their fists, I asked myself why Rhodes, and why now? This brooding figure was so entwined in the history of South Africa that it was impossible to understand the country without knowing something about the man. But familiarity bred forgetfulness. His statue had been such a familiar piece of furniture on the campus for over eighty years that very few passers-by gave it a second thought. He was just there, a permanent presence, unseen, much as Capetonians seldom looked up at the mountain towering over them. But the timing of the attack – and its target – made little sense. What was the point of digging up the past like this? From a faint but persistent memory, the arch-imperialist was, once again, centre stage, just as he’d been when he had moulded Southern Africa to his will. The crude yellow mask someone had painted across Rhodes’ eyes gave him the look of a blindfolded reveller from some strange carnival, a feeling reinforced by the crowds, dancing and chanting around the silent figure.

The mood of the students was a blend of protest and party-going that made it hard to know if they were furious or having fun, or in rehearsal for a piece of theatre. Cape Town University is slotted into the slopes of Table Mountain, on a series of terraces that made natural stages. What was playing out was an epic spectacle with a cast of hundreds. Some students commanded the stage, while others, in orderly rows in stone seats, played the part of the audience.

But there was no script, no director and the actors in this public act of exorcism had to improvise; baying, whistling and covering the face of the masked man with plastic bags, and slapping him repeatedly. All of them would have known that this lump of bronze felt no pain, but they suspended their disbelief and played their parts as priests of the tribe, solemnly punishing the transgressor.

Cecil Rhodes’ statue being removed from University of Cape Town

One of the students had a plastic bucket that contained, I soon realized, human excrement, and with this he slowly and solemnly laved the statue. It was provocative, it was even shocking, a man with a plastic bucket of shit publicly assaulting a hated idol. But if he meant to be deeply disrespectful, there was a problem because sacrilege was easier said than done. To be really effectively profane, to blaspheme on a Baudelairean level, you needed to know, and to take seriously, the religious beliefs of your enemy. I had the feeling that there were very few in the watching crowd who understood the role of the bucket-bearer.

What I’d been witnessing then was not a morality play or even a ceremony of exorcism; it had really been a festival of ignorance. Because very few in the crowd had the first idea what was going on even though the drama of it all made compelling viewing. The audience was split anyway, divided by that familiar spectre that bedevils South Africa, and it was not Rhodes, it was race. Because race, in the new democratic South Africa, far from being relegated to the past, was now more ubiquitous than it had been in the old days of apartheid, even if the word made people uncomfortable and which, until very recently, few mentioned without having an attack of the vapours. Race was never spoken about, nor was tribe, nor colour, nor identity. Such things were not to be mentioned and our old familiar angst had been replaced, rather suitably, by a new amnesia. In fact, the obsession with race and all that went with it was one of the very few things that in the new South Africa had not changed at all.

When the flimsy plastic noose was produced, and looped around Rhodes’ neck, it seemed excommunication was to be followed by execution. It made me think of medieval punishments: of the village stocks, the pillory, the gibbet at the crossroads, or public executions in Iran, where hanged men dangled from construction cranes and crowds looked on. As the crane hoisted Rhodes slowly into the sky, the audience raised their phones or held up opened iPads, like prayer books, in front of their faces, and photographed, firstly, the masked and dangling man, then each other and then themselves.

2

Iremembered an assault on the statue of Rhodes that had taken place some years earlier. An anonymous scribbler, searching for words to sum up what made the arch-imperialist so detestable to so many in Africa, and so admired by others, had scrawled on the plinth: ‘Fuck you and your empire of dreams’. I liked the ‘empire of dreams’ bit. In a land where words had been corrupted and emptied of meaning by the linguistic vandals of the former regime, any lyrical lift was welcome. And ‘empire of dreams’ was apt because it caught the vast, mad vision of Rhodes. It was also rather forlorn because no one had less use for poetry than the great empire-builder. His prodigious ambition might be summed up in another four-letter word, better fitting than the obscenity the scribbler had chosen: that word was ‘more’. And had Rhodes been asked, ‘More of what?’ I think he would have replied, simply, ‘Of everything.’

That was another notable thing about the crowd. The White students were relatively few, unsure and timorous, while Black students were more numerous and more confident. They made up the centre of gravity with Whites clustered around them like iron filings on a magnet. As Rhodes was winched into the air and hung massively overhead, a mix of demonstrators, Black and White, climbed onto the plinth but Black students made the running; they literally called the tune and, not only did their anger seem real, they seemed to know what they were angry about.

Such anger was never really accessible if you grew up White in South Africa, spoke English and lived anywhere near the diamond fields of Kimberley or the gold mines of Johannesburg. To English-speakers and people of Anglo-Saxon stock, what Rhodes did and what he stood for was exceptional but never scandalous. It was his amplitude that you felt, even if you were hardly aware of the man. Rhodes was not just there, he was everywhere. His ways and values we took in with our mother’s milk, without a second thought. Rhodes was ingrained in us, a way of seeing things, a point of view; he was the mirror we looked into and saw ourselves.

Rhodes was held to be the apotheosis of British acumen and ability, whether you knew much about him or not. After all, he owned and ran the mines and the mines made the country what it was, in the view of its Anglo-Saxon settlers. Rhodes was the weather, an all-encompassing background hum, rather like the hiss of cosmic radiation left over from the Big Bang; his presence persisted and filled the settler universe where English was spoken. Rhodes’ mark might be detected in the names, customs and thought-patterns in colleges, mining houses, sports teams, scholarships and ‘founders’ days in English-speaking schools across the country. It was Rhodes the indefatigable entrepreneur whom his English admirers celebrated, the sportsman, diamond magnate, jolly good fellow. In my family, living as we did in Johannesburg, ‘on the Reef’, everyone worked, in one way or another, ‘on the mines’. Rhodes was revered as a man who ‘made a mint’, sent clever boys to Oxford on scholarships, and elevated sport into a religious obsession.

Although Rhodes never married and had no children, he had myriad heirs and most White English-speakers accepted as natural and unexceptional the fact that we were they. This familial connection was to be hastily repudiated when, very recently, Rhodes was found to be a monster – but denial and amnesia have been traditional refuges for English South Africans. For a long time Rhodes, the irrepressible racist, was glossed over. I don’t think I ever heard anyone ever mention that side of him. To understand why this was so one needs only to follow the money.

Freshly arrived in South Africa, in 1870, just seventeen, this parson’s son from Hertfordshire, with weak lungs and little money, made his first fortune as a fruit farmer. He moved to Kimberley and its diamond fields and made much more money. But it was when Rhodes contemplated the reefs of gold buried deep beneath the Transvaal veld that he saw such treasure it made even his head spin. And he knew it all belonged, by divine ordination, to the Empire and to himself – not always in that order – and he made it so. By the end of his life, Rhodes had infused with his presence and power huge tracts of sub-Saharan Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope to Lake Victoria.

‘What have you been doing since I last saw you?’ Queen Victoria is said to have asked Rhodes on one of his trips to London.

‘I have added two Provinces to your Majesty’s Dominions,’ came the reply.

And then, no doubt, he headed off to add several more.

But to Black students on the campus in Cape Town, Rhodes was beyond the pale. Rhodes may have been inspired, and greatly enriched, by Africa but he had no time for Africans. Disturbing signs of his lifelong distaste came as early as 1890 when, as Premier of the Cape Province, he backed what became known as the ‘Strop Bill’, or the ‘Master and Servant Act’, which gave White employers the right to whip their servants, as and when they chose, and which liberal critics dubbed his ‘Every Man Wallop His Own Nigger Bill’. It was an inducement to assault so blatant it shocked even some Boers, never shy about walloping their workers, who felt that this time Rhodes might have gone a little too far.

But going too far was Rhodes’ way. He was to show himself an exuberant racist, even by the standards of the times, backing laws forbidding Africans to move freely, restricting what land they might own, regarding them as not quite human. Rhodes laid the foundation of apartheid, and his messianic belief in White superiority was built on by successive regimes, well into the late twentieth century.

Law-making brutalities aside, Rhodes personified what was most insufferable in the colonial adventurer and a trait that went beyond conquest or greed or cruelty. It nested in the effortless assumption of exclusive power, guaranteed by guns, founded on money and backed by God. Rhodes was not the first settler to exhibit this dementia but he took it to a new level. In the history of European settlement in Africa, nothing stands out so clearly as this characteristic insanity.

Settlers, vagabonds, adventurers, explorers, freebooters, soldiers, missionaries and remittance men arrived on a continent that already had names, peoples and realities of its own but this seems never to have occurred to the new arrivals. They assumed that Africa was whatever they wished it to be. It provided limitless sunshine, loads of servants, endless sport; a world to be made up as one went along, where you might be a farmer, a fortune seeker, a fool or a hero, sometimes all of them, all the time. Where you might make a fortune or, better still, Africa somehow owed it to you to make your fortune for you. This folie de grandeur was instant and incurable. Settlers from Europe – Portuguese or French or Dutch or British – all caught the fever; they had no sooner stepped ashore than they took leave of their senses. The Africans they encountered, when their presence was registered at all, were, at best, children to be helped or scolded, or slaves or fairly interesting savages to be saved or civilized or shot.

Rhodes was merely the most alarming example of the condition. It was palpable in his conviction that the English ‘race’ had a divine mission to uplift and humanize those it conquered and in his belief that missionary virtue would, and should, turn a profit. Pax Britannica was at its most benevolent when it was at its most bankable. Money and morals were so entwined it was hard to tell them apart and Rhodes summed up his winning imperial formula precisely: ‘Philanthropy plus five per cent’.

It took an Irishman, Frank Harris, to point out the fatuity of this sort of thinking. After a meeting with Rhodes, who told him that Englishmen had replaced Jews as God’s chosen people, Harris remarked that when God singled out the Jews as His favourites, He plumped for an attractive, intelligent people. If the English were now the preferred tribe it could only mean the deity was in His dotage.

So far, so bad. But the trouble with hate-figures arises when detractors claim exclusive rights and insist that their special villain beats all others. Black Africans certainly had no reason to love Rhodes and he also had plenty of enemies among his colleagues, compatriots and fellow magnates. But it was the Boers who had as much cause as anyone to detest the man and what he wanted – war. For Rhodes the only barrier between him and the treasures of the Transvaal was the stubborn, absurd figure of Paul Kruger and his deeply backward Boers. It followed therefore that if getting rid of Kruger and his tiresome republic required a war, then Rhodes would arrange one. He had done so before, when he destroyed Lobengula and his Ndebele Kingdom, which had stood between him and the goldfields of Bulawayo, and now he was ready to do it again.

The Boer War began rather badly and might very well have failed, but in the end Rhodes got what he wanted. Kruger was driven into exile, and the goldfields of the Transvaal became the property of the Crown, and the mining tycoons, or ‘Randlords’, of Johannesburg, and financiers in the City of London. The Boers loathed Rhodes, and saw him as the architect of the war, with its burnt farmsteads, extinguished republics and concentration camps where women and children died in great numbers. Paul Kruger summed up, in his memoirs from exile in distant Switzerland, what many of his followers felt and, for that matter, what many of the Black protesters at Cape Town University, demanding his hated statue must fall, would have echoed. Kruger was unsparing: ‘Rhodes was Capital incarnate. No matter how base, no matter how contemptible, be it lying, bribery or treachery, all and every means were welcome to him.’

3

Watching the concluding ceremonies of the fall of Rhodes on campus in Cape Town, I got the feeling that the more you knew about Rhodes and what he got up to, the milder Kruger’s judgement sounded. I also thought: and so what? Was there to be an open competition to decide who hated Rhodes more – and was first prize to be the right to topple his effigy? Rhodes was part and parcel of what made us what we are and he cannot be got rid of. And besides, Africa, from Cape to Cairo, then and now, has been littered with rulers and potentates who were killers, robbers and psychopaths. Airbrushing them out of history would be a very long job.

Again: the questions returned and perplexed – why Rhodes and why now? The sight of a demonstrator reaching into a bucket to pile more shit on the masked statue was strangely moving in its futility, and the excitement of those who lashed the heavy bronze figure, impressive in its suggestion that here was a real devil to exorcise, did not seem very convincing. The whole thing had been somehow very sad, soaked in a kind of helpless hysteria. The spectators were continuing to drift away, their fading attention further eroded by now having to choose between the cheerleaders dancing and whooping on the empty plinth, and the shit-stirrer assaulting the statue.

That was when I saw him or someone who looked like him. He waved to me. His palm was open to the sky in a kind of semi-salute, just as he’d done long ago. Even though he was quite some way off and I had to shake my head to clear it, I had a good idea who he was because it wasn’t the first time he’d made one of his visitations.

It was Georgie, or someone who looked like him, though so many years had gone by since I’d seen him. In those long-ago days Georgie never seemed to wear much but this time he was dressed in a tan sports coat and dark trousers and there may have been a touch of irony to his open-handed salute, as if he was amused to find me in this crowd of noisy kids, all of them a lot younger than either of us. He was on the far side of the crowd, much older now of course, a little stooped, but that was to be expected – he had always been a tall fellow.

I was a child, it was wartime and my father had been killed in North Africa. My mother and I moved back into my grandfather’s Johannesburg house, and because my mother went back to work, I was left with teenage Georgie for company. I think he must have done lots of other work around the house – cooking, gardening, cleaning – but he was also my friend, my ally and my substitute nanny. Each afternoon, he’d hoist me on to his shoulders, a small White boy in a sailor suit, and we’d head down to the nearby park and its playground with four swings and a well-used slide. Rather than pass the house nearby where there lived a man, said Georgie, named Dr Verwoerd, he would cross over the road.

When I asked Georgie why we did this, he waved his hand, palm open, fingers wide, more a waggle than a wave, as if brushing off a bad dream, and said simply, ‘Bad muti.’ Loading the word, which might mean medicine or witchcraft, or both. It was years before I understood that he was referring not to dodgy medicine but to a dangerous man.

Hendrik Verwoerd and I seem to have kept pace for a lot of my life. There has been a revisionist idea around of late that perhaps he was not as bad as he was painted, this man who formalized iron-bound, racial separation for all, from conception to cremation. Anyone who says this was not around at the time of his ascendance or was not paying attention. Georgie was right about the Doctor, as he was about much else. He had been not only my friendly guide, he had helped to counter my ignorance, which, in the way of small White boys, was abundant and fiercely protected. The fashion in which many South Africans moved through much of the twentieth century required that as many people as possible knew as little as possible for as long as possible. Cruelty blended with muscular stupidity formed the policy many Whites wholeheartedly supported or in which most were enthusiastically complicit. But its foundation was always ignorance, proudly encouraged. It was a land where what was on offer was never logic or truth or consistency, values to which for sentimental reasons I attached enormous importance, but rather competing versions of what most grown-ups always insisted was ‘the real thing’.

Georgie, I imagined, had been sent to show me that there was nothing real about the ‘real’ thing. I also assumed that Georgie held the same sort of place in the household inventory as, say, the wheelbarrow, or the garden hose. He was simply part and parcel of the domestic equipment, a fixed feature, but never entirely a figure in the landscape, though he was always a familiar and much-loved part of the scene. He had been my constant guide from my earliest years and I imagined him as having always been there. When, as a Catholic child, I was taught to say my Catechism and learnt that God had no beginning and no end and would be there, for ever and ever, Amen, I thought how very like Georgie He was, even if God lived in heaven and Georgie in a simple room behind our garage.

Georgie came with the house and his only function, as far as I was concerned, was to be there for me. He was faithful, rather like my black spaniel, Rex, but no more important. The only difference between Georgie and Rex was that Rex was covered in silky fur and Georgie seemed to be mostly naked. His long bare legs began at his naked feet and seemed to climb forever up into his floppy white shorts, over which he wore a white linen tunic, cut square at the neck, and edged with blood-red trim, framing his bare, smooth chest.

For my part, I was covered from head to toe, most often in a white sailor suit, a white hat, white socks and brown sandals. There was nothing about me that was bare. Our different costumes signalled the very different roles we were assigned in the great stage-show of our lives but they also revealed who we believed ourselves to be in ‘real’ life. We were actors, but we were always playing ourselves. For my part, I was rehearsing the role of little White master – soon to be majestic. Georgie’s costume told you that he played the general factotum, who might seem rather large or tall to me but was so tiny in the scheme of things that you had to look very hard to notice him at all. I was the Principal Boy, a role of supreme value, while Georgie played any number of walk-on parts: dish-washer, kitchen boy, odd-job man, messenger, gardener – often all at once. Georgie’s repertoire was much larger than mine and so were his language skills; he would speak three languages when I was still learning my first. But my words counted for something, they were law, and it went without saying that people like Georgie had nothing to say. He was able to speak only when spoken to but even then, no one was ready to listen to anything he said.

The crane lifted Rhodes into the sky and left him swinging. Some kids clambered onto the empty plinth and began dancing. They might have been DJs in a nightclub and the crowd relaxed; the dance indicated that the serious business was over, the scapegoat had been dispatched and the partying could begin.

The crane slowly lowered Rhodes onto a flatbed truck and someone solemnly looped a strip of plastic tape around his neck and knotted it. The dancers on the plinth stepped up the beat, the noose tightened, the crowds cheered, and took pictures as the truck slowly moved off, surrounded by a gauntlet of young men still belabouring the silent figure. The tension evaporated, tragedy turned to pantomime and all that was left to do was to boo the villain from the stage and everyone could go home.

The man I thought might have been Georgie turned now and began walking up the hill that led, I knew, to a second monument to Rhodes, much higher up the mountain. The crowd between us was too large for me to cross to him and I watched him go, telling myself I had probably been wrong anyway.

The truck carrying the statue, streaked with shit and wearing the plastic noose, trundled away to some retirement home for redundant idols. What now descended on the crowd seemed a kind of iconoclast’s remorse. The show was over but the job was not complete. Rhodes had served as sacrificial symbol, quite literally a whipping boy, and that would have to do, at least until his attackers were able to go after the real thing. Toppling an effigy did not give quite the same explosive release as real revolution.

As the crowd drifted away, I asked the young man beside me what it was the students wanted, and his answer was very direct.

‘For guys like you to get out of the way.’

His companion was a girl whose placard warned: ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet!’

She was more specific in her answer.

‘What you can do is give us our land back.’

I had trouble working out what the man meant. Who exactly were ‘guys’ like me and how were we to get out of the way? Was I to broadcast this demand to other ‘guys’? The words of his companion were no less vague, if more menacing. Who were the ‘us’ who wanted ‘our’ land back? I registered her aggression but the demand was woolly. It reminded me of Queen Victoria’s objection that her Prime Minister addressed her as if she was a public meeting. I had been addressed as if I was an occupying army.

I walked back down the main campus as sky-blue student shuttle buses rumbled by. These were known as ‘Jammie Shuttles’, and the imposing pile that I walked by was Jameson Hall, whose neo-classical bulk quite dominated the campus. It was named for Leander Starr Jameson, Rhodes’ lifelong friend and dearest disciple. Much of the architecture of the university was a testament to the values and beliefs of men who thought as he did. Jameson always knew best what it was his chief required and tried to get the Boer War off to an early start by leading a raiding party against Kruger’s Transvaal Republic, only to fail spectacularly. He was captured by the Boers and he was lucky that they didn’t shoot him as they would have been quite entitled to have done.

The fiasco of Jameson’s Raid destroyed Rhodes’ political fortunes and he resigned as Premier of the Cape Province. But Rhodes soon got the war he wanted and the republics of the Transvaal and the Free State were destroyed. Paul Kruger was driven into exile in Switzerland and the gold of the Transvaal was open to Rhodes and his allies on the Rand, and in London. The campus had been purged of Rhodes but the faithful Jameson was still there, monumental in the architecture and mobile in the blue buses.

Rhodes had fallen; apparently the show was over, but triumph was tinged with anti-climax. The crowd drifted away amid talk of revolution, decolonization, free education and the rage to come. Discarded posters spoke darkly of blood and war. I heard talk of heading off for a few beers; ‘Peroni’ was the brand, the ‘Waterfront’ the venue. Off they went: Black warriors and White fellow travellers, revolution in their hearts, phones in hand, American chic branded on T-shirts, trainers and baseball caps. Some on foot, some in German, French or Italian cars, heading to the giant shopping mall in the old Cape Town harbour, for a cold beer, after the Fall.

4

I left South Africa in the mid-seventies and settled in London, without expecting to return home. My poems had been prohibited by the ever-busy censors and prospects for political change were bleak. The Nationalist government, preaching racial superiority for Whites and tribal reserves for Blacks, seemed absurd yet unassailable, something even its opponents in exile and in the armed struggle admitted, at least when they were in their cups. Apartheid had locked us into the prisons of our skins and seemed set to last and even to prosper. Why was it, then, that the near-mystical belief of many Whites that they were destined to prevail seemed nonsense? Not just doomed to fail but already doing so? The vaunted power of the apartheid state was for me a gigantic bluff – cruel, stupid and ugly, certainly, but a weakness, not a strength, a desperate attempt to reinforce the illusion that Whites were on a roll when they were actually on the skids.

I had no evidence for this, and my feelings ran counter to all the apparent realities of the time. Those in exile in the liberation movements talked a good war and any sign of dissent or doubt was called defeatism. They needed, as much as Whites at home, to portray the apartheid state as a mighty war-machine. The South African regime returned the compliment by talking up the capacities of the African National Congress and its allies, something they may have been grateful for, because in those years the ANC was a most ineffectual troop and the South African forces and intelligence services were formidable. To Whites back in South Africa, a war between races felt remote, and the ANC a distant threat. Even so, like their adversaries abroad, they needed shows of fortitude and invincibility. Their need to pretend was not just a pose, it was destiny. But even then, what gnawed at the foundations of their being was a growing awareness not so much of defeat but of redundancy and it stared out at them every time they looked in the mirror. After all, the rampant White Afrikaner nationalists who ran the show from the mid-twentieth century reduced White English-speakers to a helpless, if noisy, minority, and however much they may have hated and opposed Afrikaner supremacy, they were just as hooked on the racial privileges it engineered for Whites.

Isolation intensified delusion. South Africans lived not just in another country but in a separate universe where extraterrestrial rules operated. The country and its rulers believed in their own rhetoric. Hubris mixed with ignorance, spiced with exceptionalism, made a heady brew and South Africans swallowed the stuff eagerly. The absurdities about race that White nationalists endorsed for half a century have their present-day counterparts. There are angry Black nationalists who imagine a world where Newton’s law of universal gravitation is proven to be a ruse, put about by White racists. As local wits like to say – in the new South Africa, things all fall ‘up’.

It was to portray the cruel absurdities that passed for ‘real’ life that I wrote a novel called A Separate Development. I told the story of a boy who did not know to which of the official racial groups he belonged and it was promptly banned by our watchful censors. A mutual friend in London mentioned that there had been interest in the book among members of the ANC, and took me to meet its exiled president, Oliver Tambo.

As it happened, Tambo lived in north London, in Muswell Hill, an easy walk from my home in Highgate. I did not expect a happy meeting. The eighties were bleak years for those who dreamt of a freer South Africa. Tambo headed a fractious, often dispirited, largely ineffective liberation movement and no one cared very much for writers and writing. But I was warmly received by Tambo, a gentle, owlish man, who looked like a rather benign geography teacher. We talked about musicians we liked, about Menuhin and Satchmo, and he told me how he’d loved the jazz he’d heard when he and Nelson Mandela were students at the University of Fort Hare, in the Eastern Cape. He was deeply affected by memories of his home in the Pondoland village of Nkantolo and spoke of it as a lost paradise. He recalled hearing the blues played in Sophiatown, the township of Johannesburg so hated by our grim governors for its free-wheeling, mixed-race manners that they razed it to the ground. He said he had heard my novel had been banned for ridiculing those who elevated racialism into the national religion. He took it to be an assault and was a little surprised when I called it a comedy.

‘A comedy about a tragedy?’ Tambo said. ‘A boy of no known race. Unclassifiable? No wonder they banned the book.’

I said I imagined it had been suppressed because the White regime was often called wicked, but never absurd. Dedicated racists saw nothing funny about apartheid.

That was not surprising, said Tambo. He touched again on the neither/nor race of the boy in my novel and said how terrible it was to stake your life on your skin colour. When freedom came,