I was not expecting to find Cecil Rhodes’s head reattached. This was accomplished quietly, without the international media attention stirred by the statue’s decapitation in 2020. The reborn bronze gained internal steel rods, industrial cement, an alarm system, a gps tracker, and other very South African security features to discourage further attacks. And so the “immense and brooding spirit” once again gazes pensively from Devil’s Peak, above the University of Cape Town, toward the great African hinterland.
On my recent visit to the monument, the atmosphere was modulated by a curvaceous blonde glamour model and three photographers engaged in a lingerie shoot among the columns of Herbert Baker’s 1912 memorial. I was the only other visitor, and we all acknowledged each other cheerfully before continuing to seek out the best camera angles; I of George Watts’s famed statue Physical Energy at the foot of the monument, they of the model’s differently splendid bottom.
“Why are you so obsessed with all this old stuff?” my host later asked. I had just admitted my rapture at the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, another of the country’s less anodyne tourist attractions. It was an attitude I’ve encountered many times among young, white, especially affluent South Africans. The country offers obvious pleasures: game viewing, trail running, hiking, gastronomy. A brief respectful visit to the Apartheid Museum might be dutifully encouraged. But any interest in the past that extends beyond this is unwholesome and arouses distaste. It is the South African equivalent of German Geschichtsmüdigkeit: “the weariness with history.”
South Africa is embarrassingly comfortable.
And how could it be otherwise? For certain lucky swaths of society, life in South Africa is embarrassingly comfortable, indistinguishable in some ways from life before the end of apartheid. The choicest suburbs are overwhelmingly white and ingeniously insulated from the disintegration advancing through the rest of the country. Streets, gardens, parks, and houses are kept immaculately clean; luxury cars are polished in fortified garages; babies are coddled by nannies. And the food is exquisite: you can almost taste the labor-intensity in succulent lamb hand-reared on the veld, and in wine from vineyards still harvested by hand, thanks to an almost unlimited black labor force. Unemployment among the young is approaching 50 percent, and their poor township homes lie behind the same highways, railway lines, golf courses, and industrial estates that were strategically positioned decades ago to effect the segregation.
But for everything to stay the same, everything had to change. The anc is entering its thirtieth year in power, seemingly determined to fulfill all predictions of the most pessimistic apologists for the old regime: grotesque corruption, rampant crime, infrastructural collapse, expropriation, an irremediable energy crisis, and the country’s global realignment with all the worst people in the world.
But for the most prosperous residents—as for the Instagramming tourists bronzing themselves at Sea Point—these problems feel distant enough to be disregarded. In central Cape Town, I noted a towering mountain of rubbish in which black (and very occasionally white) destitutes appeared to be living in burrows, but the owner of a trim little Italian greyhound seemed not to notice as he paused conscientiously to recover his dog’s minute stool from the adjacent pavement.
“Turn your phone into a panic button.”
“Turn your phone into a panic button” recommends an enormous billboard above passport control at Cape Town International Airport. It was an advertisement for a private security app through which you could direct an armed response team to your location in the event of misadventure. I don’t know if it would have helped Kar Hao Teoh, the young British surgeon who was shot dead last year within minutes of collecting his rental car from the airport. He had taken a wrong turn into Nyanga, a township whose reputation for lawlessness remains undiminished. While I was in the country, a friend had his phone stolen and was able to track the device to a dubious-looking shop there, even identifiable on Google Maps street view. But when he presented this evidence to the police, they just smiled apologetically. “We can’t possibly go there,” they explained.
“Don’t get me wrong. South Africa is a safe country. It’s a beautiful country,” pronounced my guide. “It’s just necessary that we all exist in a state of permanent paranoia.” I couldn’t help but hear an echo of “total onslaught,” the endgame policy of white South Africa as it struggled to resist collapse in the 1980s. Was “total paranoia” the present-day harvest reaped from this?
As a visitor far better acquainted with less developed parts of the African continent, I find the country disorientating: the constant veering between hazard and safety, familiar and unfamiliar, functional and dysfunctional, never quite knowing if I should be expecting Australia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“Stay on this side, move quickly. Look like you know where you’re going. Tell them to meet us inside. Not on the street”—this as we made for a rendezvous at one of Joburg’s most fashionable restaurants, there to dine on porchetta and old-vine Chenin Blanc.
I became accustomed to the caged antechambers to shops and restaurants, which, on exiting, allowed you to watch out for your taxi from a vantage point of relative safety. “Ah, but this area is completely fine. Just make sure you go out the back entrance if you are leaving on foot.” A wry smile and a half wink. “Never the front.” I sometimes sensed a macabre delight in the dispensing of friendly advice to worried visitors.
Yet broader discussion of the insecurity often feels unwelcome. No doubt the outside world’s fascination with the country’s decline grows irksome—but the irritation seemed sometimes to slide into denial. “It’s all so exaggerated” is a line I’ve heard a few times, but from rich rather than poor South Africans. I’ve even encountered some surprisingly generous views of the country’s government, though these struck me as expressions of politesse rather than principle. Like some of the more ostentatious displays of courtesy shown towards black South Africans in public, it felt like a liturgy to invoke the spirit of the Rainbow Nation and ward off the end of days a little longer. Even the government’s noisy solidarity with the Palestinian cause I once heard tactfully indulged. “Well, Israel practices apartheid, so I guess the anc just feels it has skin in the game.”
Of course whites with the means to do so have been leaving the country for years and in large numbers—for Britain, the United States, Australia, and elsewhere in Africa. But now that escape routes have been established, foreign passports secured, some trickle back:
Yes, a few of us have returned now we’ve got kids. It’s just so much easier: schools, childcare, home help—and there’s space! I love my kids being able to run around barefoot. I mean, we’ll probably get ourselves back to the U.K. when they’re older.
The prospects of young whites leaving university are dire in an economy ravaged by an official policy called Black Economic Empowerment. “It’s a cyclical process,” I was informed. “A company’s shares are seized and distributed among senior members of the anc. The shares are sold, the money spent. Then it’s time for more Black Economic Empowerment.”
And, more specifically, an affirmative-action quota system makes young whites virtually unemployable in most government and private sectors. The options are either to leave the country or to start your own business.
Right of entry is, of course, reserved.
For those with the acumen and capital, this results in paradoxical spasms of free-market activity that fill the void left by government services. Thus in the absence of reliable policing, homes are emblazoned with the emblems of private security firms that will be summoned if the electric fence is tripped. For those with the means, the infamous problem of “load shedding” (rolling blackouts) is obviated by elaborate systems of solar units and current inverters—or even by small-scale grids. Public transport has been supplanted by private bus and train services that passengers board from sleek, semi-fortified shelters, overseen by the sort of armed guards you’d expect at a military installation. Right of entry is, of course, reserved.
It feels like a case study in how long the reflexes of civilization can continue to twitch in the face of advancing ruin. I was reminded of the small but sophisticated systems of private reservoirs and cisterns that sprang up throughout the late Roman Empire as the aqueducts were turned off. My journeys on the private “Gau-train” were impeccable, but it’s an extremely limited service compared with the extraordinary public network that once existed. I went to see what remained of this at Joburg Park Station, the country’s former main terminus. There was just a vast panorama of derelict rolling stock stretching to the horizon.
My guide hurried me on: it did not pay to linger in the centre of Joburg and, in fact, I’d been warned in Cape Town against going there at all. And so we got back in the car and made our way through traffic less disorderly than I expected given the traffic lights were all without power.
The architecture is ugly, but I liked it. There is a consistency of style to the buildings, whether 1890s civic structures or 1980s office blocks: all exhibit a great heaviness, as if determined to overstate the principle of “built to last.” I observed varying degrees of functionality: a handful still appeared to be purposefully occupied, others looked deserted or overrun by squatters, and almost all were besmirched with graffiti and tangled with razor wire.
Some important sites were pointed out to me: the district where my guide had been shot at in broad daylight; the busy shopping street where an impressive gas explosion was caught on camera last year, tossing cars and minibuses high in the air. Then I was taken to the remains of the tenement consumed by fire a few weeks later. Over seventy died in the blaze, mostly migrant workers, and their deaths excited an orgy of gloating from xenophobic South African elements on social media—including, it was alleged, one of the commissioners on the board of enquiry into the event.
With relief I exchanged the glare and tumult of the streets for the peace and half-light of the Origins Centre, a wondrous museum dedicated to the rock art of the San people—the Bushmen whose near extinction was brought to the world’s attention by Laurens van der Post in his Lost World of the Kalahari (1958). Centuries of predation by black and white had shattered a way of life—along with an artistic tradition—that spanned millennia. Hunting scenes, entranced rites, dances of communion with ancestral spirits: the San paintings depict all that was most important in their makers’ world before it vanished.
The degree of stylization can be arresting: a speared eland is instantly recognizable despite being reimagined as just four or five bold lines of blood red and ochre. Perhaps it was only because I had come from Cape Town the day before, but the eland’s death throes transported me back to Physical Energy, the statue at the base of the Rhodes Memorial. In both cases the artist had contorted his subjects’ bodies to the very limits of believability, and the eland’s twisted tension became one in my mind with Watts’s nude rider, straining atop his foaming horse to take in the immensity of the troubled land before him.
“A symbol of that restless physical impulse to seek the still unachieved in the domain of material things” was Watts’s description of the statue. The words assume a mordant tone in the context of contemporary South Africa.
I moved on to the last work of the last San painter, an old man who produced the image for a fascinated anthropologist in the 1930s. As he worked he lamented that, of his fallen people, none remained who could carry on or even understand his painting. “The Bushman’s gods were dying,” commented Van der Post. “Now to whom and to what could he turn?”
