What a South African road taught me

Ian Williams:

JOHANNESBURG – There was a dark mystique about the road to Rustenburg well before I even set foot on it.

It's treacherous, I was warned by friends in Johannesburg. Wild animals wander on it at will, and crime – car-jacking, in particular – is rife. Don’t even think about driving after dark, and if you do, don't stop!

A few days later, I was on that road in the middle of the night, after reporting on a late World Cup soccer match in Rustenburg. Hotels were full, and we had an early-morning appointment in Johannesburg, two to three hours away.
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We'd spent an earlier night at a sprawling guest house, "just up the road." It turned out to be an hour and a half out of town, and was run by a white Afrikaner couple.

They were perfectly polite, but just off their dining room they had built what can best be described as a shrine to apartheid. It included the old apartheid-era flag and a big portrait of Hendrik Verwoerd, the man often described as the "architect of apartheid."

I was worried this would offend Gu Gu, our black South African coordinator, or our (black) driver Colin. Although I learned later that their biggest worry had been that it might offend me.

It wasn't that they didn't care, they just found it rather quaint – and ultimately irrelevant.

They were more amused than angry. They, and their South Africa, have moved on. And in their own way Gu Gu and Colin represented the confident new face of post-apartheid South Africa, that is increasingly asserting itself, proud that its children are growing up largely colorblind.

In San Francisco the leftists always used to tell me that South Africa would be a "blood-bath." That's because leftists are negrophobic. They literally fear black people which is why they like to keep them on the plantation - docile and dependent on welfare. I would tell the commies that they were ignorant and had no idea what South Africa was like. Yes, it has problems but they'll sort it out fine.