The difference is that Tanzania has a certain stability, a sense of worth and a unity that isn’t visibly affected by colour or cultures. There are frustrations, and we have experienced some petty corruption. President Magifuli is much admired, although I suspect that there might be some that don’t like him. He has walked in to offices and sacked the people who weren’t at their desks. He has discovered the government's 10,000 ghost workers whose salaries were still being paid to others and demanded that their salaries be recovered. He has cancelled celebrations and made the people clean their cities instead. He has sacked the Dar es Salaam harbour leaders for the corruption there, the arbitrary and false taxation demanded by them, and for the disappearance of thousands of containers. He has cancelled imports of milk and sugar to impress on the nation that they must stop importing and grow it themselves. He is personal and popular.
South Africa now has leadership that is building itself the little fortresses, the palaces that sustain the coveted lifestyle of the wealthy.
South Africa has gone from bad to worse to good to amazing and now is subsiding slowly into empty discourse about land and possession and the rhetoric of the tragic drought stricken politics of some neighbouring countries.
Tanzania appears to have a unity unlike the richest nation in Africa. There are very few clashes between tribes and ethnic groups.
But it is still among the five poorest nations in global terms.
I asked a teacher to rate the average happiness of Tanzanian people, out of ten. He said six, or seven.
Better even than Brexit Britain, I would have thought, among the five wealthiest nations of the world.
From South Africa.
When I worked in the London Borough of Brent, I met another teacher from South Africa. He was dark skinned, and had black hair, and looked Asian. He was what the South African law classified as “coloured”. As a coloured person, he was not entitled to any of the privileges of the “European” or white person. He told me that he and his sister would go to the train station to catch a train into Cape Town. She would stand at one end of the platform and join the “Europeans”. This was because she was blonde and pale skinned, and had blue eyes. Within this one family were all the torments of Apartheid.
There were times when the authorities, usually the South African Police (renowned at the time for their intelligence and sensitivity), could not immediately make up their minds about the racial classification of a person. In their efforts to be totally fair, they used what is now an infamous South African test to decide whether a person was “European” or “non-European”: This was to slide a pencil through the hair of the person being tested. If it stayed in, they were classified as “non-European”. That the classification system existed is, with hindsight, beyond belief. It was abandoned twenty years ago.
Apartheid was part of the slum of European culture. But it is humanity that is to do with forgiveness and restitution.
In my childhood, I lived in a house that overlooked the sea that surged and roared night and day, that brought sultry storms and torrential warm rain.
With us there lived others. There were Henry, John and Trefina, and Hari who came occasionally to work in the garden. Hari’s tasks were clearing and maintaining the kikuyu grass in a garden full of frogs and lychees and passion fruit and paw-paw, hydrangeas and a thorny tree with small brilliant red flowers, and the most beautiful frangipani.
Trefina was the Zulu equivalent of a herbalist, what the western world called a witch doctor. She had yellowed teeth, and at least one missing. She used to sing. She was a nanny to me when I was very small, while my mother painted in oils and played golf.
John Shangane was a proud man who came from the Shangaan tribe, part of the Zulu nation. He was employed as a menial, directed to serve at table in a smart white uniform, and tend to the garden. He would wash the cars, clip the hedges, keep the dog clean, dust and clean and polish and vacuum.
Henry, who was quite old, cooked for us. Sometimes, joyously, he got drunk on a pink and wild smelling opaque beer called "tshwala". It was illegal for Zulu people to drink alcohol, under the laws of Apartheid. Henry was a Zulu induna, a person who presided over a village in the east midlands of what is now Kwazulu, a land once peopled only by the Zulu nation. He owed his allegiance to a Zulu prince, and to the then unrecognised king. Henry had three wives, and while we knew him, he put together the lobola for a fourth, a young woman dressed in the beautiful cultural style of her people and who was able to visit us once. He paid eleven cows for her.
And we, the white nation, asserted that they "needed the work" and that they should be "treated well" . My father could afford to pay their wages, which he did every week in a kind of suburban Friday ritual when they came, hands clasped, with their passbooks, and with mumblings of Baba, Inkosi, received money from the big man.
When we moved a few miles, only one of these people could come too. I didn't understand, at eight years old, why, or that something was wrong. When we moved yet again, we left behind more people who I had grown with.
In a small, crowded industrial town, where the main street began among dusty gum trees and finished after the bank, the cinema and three traffic lights among more gum trees, we took up residence.
Three miles away was the town of Sharpeville, notorious for the wanton panic killing by police of some of its citizens in 1960, the year before we moved there. Sheltered from the ‘black tide’, I knew nothing of it when we moved there, and it was later on that I began to understand what had happened.
Many people were connected with the company house we had moved to. They were a cook, a maid, a house "boy", a head gardener, three gardeners, a night watchman and a driver. In a small house on the same piece of land was a private secretary to my father.
I loved this house. It was large and had rambling outhouses and corners that even in the eight years I spent my school holidays there, I never got to finish exploring. There was a tall avenue of pine trees alongside an orchard, a swimming pool, and a clump of poplar trees that whispered in the dry and dusty wind. Close to the bottom of its long garden was a wide brown river, lined with willow and poplar trees, swimming with catfish.
This was a parochial, right wing highveld town, industrial and full of steelworks and coalmines. In the winters of sharp frost and bloody sunsets I became a teenager and raced the roads on bicycles. In the thin silken dust of summer I played in ragged old sports cars, and took the rowdy crowd of friends to the cinema in the fat-cat vehicle that was my father's workright as the boss of the steelworks.
I was fascinated by the steelworks. There were huge iron smelters the size of small swimming pools, heated electrically, full of molten iron and carbon and manganese and nickel which alloyed steel to make tubes. I watched it being poured into billets, being shaped by hydraulic hammers, being rammed through dies to make steel tubes. The noise and clatter and commotion were intense, with cranes overhead and people moving, concentrating, shouting, swearing.
I watched steel being galvanised, copper tubes being made, engine blocks being cast.
I explored this huge place that echoed with the forces of fire and iron.
I found the workers' dormitories.
Imagine a room as big as a bedroom. Imagine living in it, with all your belongings, with a photo of your girlfriend or wife hundreds of miles away in Lesotho or the Northern Transvaal, to whom you send your wages every week, except the little you need for entertainment and to save for your bus journey home. Now imagine that the room is whitewashed, and has a small window at one end, and a door at the other. Outside there is a concrete space which runs along the front of several other similar rooms, and at the edge of this concrete there is a gutter for waste water. There are some standpipes. Beyond these is a narrow tarmac'd road which separates the space from the tall and forbidding corrugated iron wall of the welded steel pipe plant, just a little way from the reek of caustic from the galvanising plant. There are no shrubs or trees, no colour, no sky.
Now imagine that there are six beds in that room, and five other people sharing it with you, and that your only table is a box, and your only light is a bulb in the ceiling. You are there for two months at a time, and then allowed four days off. You wash outside, and there are squat toilets at the end of the row.
Put this against the suits and leather seats, the clear cold beer and pleasures of parties and feasts, of privilege and space. This is the picture of Apartheid.
We left the town on my father's retirement, a caravan of cars and furniture lorries. None of the gentle people, who had cared for me, who I had supported and even rescued, came with us. If they had wanted to they wouldn't have been allowed to. I said goodbye, and felt something that is still in my heart, for the loss of people, for the loss of a life that had grown with others.
Months later I returned to this town to visit friends. I went back to the house. I wanted to sit in the corners and see the home that I had had, to hear the voices of these people, the barking of dogs, the whisper of trees, the comfort of knowing: but it was no longer the same place, I was no longer welcome, it was conquered by some other force of culture, and I was alone.
A few years later I worked in the theatre, and found that I, on the strength of a university degree, was in charge of a group of ten or twelve men who had no degrees, who earned a quarter of the salary given to me as a raw graduate, and who knew more about theatre than I knew about the sum of everything in my tiny world.
I lived in a house made of corrugated iron, which was boiling hot in summer. My partner had a friend who came round with his Muslim wife to bathe in my bath and eat and talk. He was a red haired Professor of Politics at the University, and had married a Muslim woman by becoming a Muslim himself. The South African authorities were unable to work out how he had broken some law of Apartheid, as there were no laws about Muslims marrying each other. But, by the usual tests he was a ‘European’, and she was a ‘Non-European’, and under the laws then current, this was an illegal marriage. So they put him under house arrest and later, because he disagreed eloquently with the status quo, he was gunned down at point blank range at his front door.
This was Apartheid, the monochrome nation. The Rainbow State appeared stable, dignified, sociable and desirable. It attracted millions of pounds and dollars and Euros. It appears to be the most powerful nation in Africa, it has nuclear capability, and an arms industry that exports to the world. It holds the third largest stocks of gold in the world, more diamonds than anyone knows what to do with, supplies the nuclear industries of the USA, Britain and Europe with uranium. It exports timber, aluminium, sugar and wine in huge quantities. It has the two busiest seaports in Africa.
But what you see is not what you get.
South Africa still faces the legacy of colonialism and Apartheid: the shattering of the social structures by what was called the Group Areas Act has left a huge rural population in poverty. Nearly a third of its population is below the poverty line. The exploitation of forced migrant labour divided families and promoted the promiscuity that contributed massively to the HIV epidemic. A fifth of its population is HIV positive. The United States has withdrawn some support for South Africa in the face of the difficulties in employment and production.
In spite of the domination of white culture, humanity is to do with forgiveness and restitution. The last twenty years of South African culture have seen the growth from one to the other through a humanity led by Nelson Mandela, himself once a terrorist in the eyes of the European establishment and an African who believed in humanity.
Now the country has moved on, and to some it appears to be knocking at the door of the exclusive club of corruption and letting the high ideals of the post Mandela era slip back into land grab and discrimination.
And now we live in a small cottage near the cold North Sea, and it is comfortable and pleasing. Our politics can sleep the night through, and we can wait patiently for the days to pass.
It is like there is a code that needs to be broken, and the final story read, the secrets revealed. We won't know what the heritage is until others tell us, or time finds us ready.
But thank you Africa. For all this.
