When I close my eyes and think back to apartheid, it’s 1984 and I’m sitting on my grandparents’ veranda in Johannesburg. It’s a blazing December day, and I’ve just had a swim in their pool. Nesta, the black maid who lives behind the kitchen, is cutting the chocolate cake. In the garden below, her grandchildren are playing in our old underpants from Europe. We all know that apartheid will last forever.
Twenty years ago this Sunday, South Africa’s first multiracial elections officially buried apartheid. But I still see apartheid everywhere I go. In part, this is a personal deformation. The apartheid I witnessed on visits to my grandparents was the most vivid sight of my childhood, more interesting than anything in the small Dutch town where I grew up, and so it remains my frame for understanding the world.
True, the analogy with South African apartheid is never perfect. Today’s apartheid isn’t as naked. No country now has laws dividing people by “race”. No country proclaims a policy of “Bantu education”, which deliberately teaches blacks only just enough to do lowly jobs for whites. And yet things often seem to end up that way.