SOUTH AFRICA WAS FOR MANY decades the great litmus test of young westerners' compassion and liberalism as the epic white-black struggle went on and Nelson Mandela became perhaps the world's last secular saint, both in and out of prison. It was a kind
of fairy tale which gave idealistic internationalists and opponents of racism a criterion by which to judge humankind.
Since Mandela stepped down as the country's first black head of state ten years ago, South Africa has inexorably begun to slip below the foreign reporting radar and become, almost, just another mundane African state.
For anyone missing his or her ration of South African passion and excitement, Alec Russell's immensely readable account is essential in order to discover what has happened to the Rainbow Nation following Saint Nelson's retirement to a quiet life with his third wife, Graça Machel. The drama is now more interesting and much more complex than ever.
In the wake of freedom it is hard to find any white who will admit to having liked apartheid or any ANC veteran who will confess that he or she once aspired to impose Stalinism, not democracy, on the multi-cultural, multi-lingual economic powerhouse of Africa. Coloureds – people of mixed race – meanwhile, are complaining volubly that they were not white enough under the old regime and are not now black enough under African National Congress governments: their votes are rocking the post-apartheid, post-Mandela consensus.
It is Russell's considerable achievement to have untied the tangled knots of the new South Africa with the lightest of touches while remaining profound. He sets the tone and context with his very first paragraph: "The history of countries throwing off tyrannical regimes tends to follow a pattern. In the immediate aftermath there is euphoria, accompanied by utopian pledges for the future. Then the new rulers find the business of governing more difficult and messier than they could ever have imagined."
From there he takes the reader on a waltz through all the characters, rich and poverty-stricken, powerful and powerless, of every hue, on the current South African stage. There is the superb Dr Mamphela Ramphele, once the lover of Steve Biko and the mother of his child, summing up the difficult legal and Wild West crime problems: "Today the law is dead in this country. You can kill, you can steal, and you can get away with it; crime does pay in South Africa today."
There is the disastrous Thabo Mbeki, Mandela's successor for nine years as head of state, explaining why he does not believe the HIV virus causes AIDS and proclaiming that drugs proven to delay the onset of the disease everywhere else on earth are deadly poisons – thus consigning hundreds of thousands of South Africans to unnecessarily early graves. It led Cheryl Carolus, detained and restricted under apartheid before becoming the ANC's deputy secretary-general and then South Africa's ebullient high commissioner to Britain, to tell Russell that Mbeki had collaborated in "the greatest genocide of our time".
There is schoolboy white Afrikaner Kyle Esterhuyse, in nappies when apartheid ended, complaining: "The blacks at our school act as if it (the new South Africa] is apartheid in reverse. My girlfriend's aunt used to be a chartered accountant, and they gave her job away because she was white." There is the Afrikaner woman owner of a hotel in a former small whites-only country town far beyond the big cities, giving Russell the views of an unreconstructed minority of the white population: "This is the platteland (the rural highveld]. And the Afrikaners don't like the blacks. We let them drink on the stoep (porch], but the boys don't like them in the bar. It's OK for the clever ones who dress well, but the farm kaffirs (the highly abusive equivalent of "nigger" in the United States], smelly and all that, they'll never be accepted. One or two come in talking about the new South Africa. But the boys soon tell them where to go."
Russell's series of neat snapshots of South Africans of every variety are sparkling diamond studs around which he weaves an analysis of the politics and myths of post-apartheid South Africa that is intelligent and gentle without being dry or uncritical – a difficult task disguised by the fluency of his prose.
Russell, who lived in South Africa for two spells, first for the Daily Telegraph and then for the Financial Times before becoming the latter's foreign editor, unfortunately was unable to catch up with some of the latest chapters in the unfolding South African drama – most notably the recent election of a white liberal, Helen Zille – a young journalist and anti-apartheid activist who revealed the murder by white police detectives of Steve Biko – as the first non-ANC chief minister of a South African province, the Western Cape, with the votes of the province's disillusioned coloured majority.
Her victory has brought down on her head some appalling reverse racist abuse from the ANC's Youth League, suggesting that in some ways the great South African saga-cum-soap opera is only just beginning. As Mandela, quoted by Russell, asserts: "There is no short cut to the country of our dreams."
• Alec Russell is at the Edinburgh book festival on Friday 28 August.
The full article contains 916 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
