Day Seven: Black to the Future

Okay, who turned on the timewarp machine? While I wasn't looking, or perhaps I was but in the Highveld glare I simply didn't notice, somebody switched on the megatron, the De Lorean that hits 88mph, the Time Machine was cranked up, and I was transported back to an earlier time, an earlier country.

It's all rather ironic, really, in the sense that Nelson Mandela is a man of 92 and is (probably) at death's door. I'm surrounded by hysterical white liberals who have fallen for the ANC's false-prophet media manipulation and weep at night, praying for their spiritual leader to make a full recovery and thus live, as is expected of him, to 320, or at least until everyone else is dead and therefore doesn't have to attend the funeral (or witness the mass slaughter of whites by angry blacks at the death of their sweet prince).

For god's sake, let the man be. If this is his time, he's led a full life (no-one could argue that), let him sleep. Rather, the myth-making of a great man (but a mortal nonetheless) fills the vacuum of true intellectual and political discourse.

I went to a dinner in a gentrified neighbourhood, and ended up being treated to the most egregious and underhanded political tosh by people claiming to be political but amounting to nothing more than dipsomaniacs. Confusing intelligent discourse with alcoholism works only when you're the one who's been drinking.

The fact of the matter is that, for all its new-world, post-colonial, "world-class" posturing, the country remains firmly rooted in the past. Exactly which past isn't entirely clear, but it's certainly one built around the country's tenets, the essence of its formation, which was the extraction of wealth and the defence of land.

Despite the obvious outpouring of aspiration (black yuppies in 4x4s, low-cut blouses, botched botox mouths and Louis Vuitton bags), class still takes a back seat to race. It's not a preoccupation here. It's an obsession. It works alternatively and simultaneously as a cushion, a crush, an explanation, a slur, an excuse, an explanation, a deception and a truism. It is silly (even impossible) to expect anything else. Asking South Africans, for whom culture, tribalism and skin colour was the very basis for its wealth, borders and identity, to forget about race is a bit like asking the Fins to forget about the concept of snow.

It's utterly exhausting. Thankfully the aspirational culture meant there was a fine selection of single malt whiskeys on offer.

Still, I say enough already. For peat's sake.