Very soon after gold was discovered in Johannesburg in 1886, my ancestors pitched up there. They never found gold, but they made a living in ancillary services. The Boer war did cause some havoc: the British locked up one of my great-grandfathers as a Boer spy, and sent another to a prison camp in Ceylon, where he spent much of the war playing chess while dodging tropical diseases. Mostly, though, the family found South Africa a comfortable place to be white.
My parents left nearly 50 years ago, but dozens of my relatives remain in the country. Many live with a nagging worry common among whites there: that one day the blacks might drive them into the ocean. The current bogeyman is Julius Malema, white-baiting president of the African National Congress’s youth league who enjoys singing, “Shoot the Boer”. The ANC is about to rule on whether he is guilty of bringing the party into disrepute.
Malema seems to confirm a favourite white and foreign interpretation of South Africa: the country as a colour war waiting to happen. By this analysis, South Africa is the next Zimbabwe. However, that’s probably the wrong interpretative frame. In fact South Africa is more like the next Russia.