The Colour Code

I never did check which way the water swirled down the drain of my hotel bathtub. But the world has turned upside down in South Africa. It’s just about 10 years since the end of apartheid and there’s no mistaking the changing currents of power, wealth and status in South African society. At a sidewalk cafe a white hobo asks me for a cigarette and after he leaves my companion clucks that white beggars have only themselves to blame. An Afrikaaner jokes about her car being ‘redistributed’. The numerous racial categories of apartheid persist but the government is rationalising them for purposes of positive discrimination. One man describes himself as a ‘PDI’: previously disadvantaged individual. I hear a Xhosa maid call her English employer ‘master’ and somehow it sounds much worse than saheb. There’s a slightly exaggerated bonhomie in the extended salutations between strangers of different pigment. ‘How are you my brother? Thanks my friend. Have a good one, hey?’ (Of course, coming from New Delhi almost any pleasantry seems excessive, while in South Africa drivers routinely flash their hazards to say ‘thank you’ as they overtake). Still, there are many ripples and eddies of racial etiquette that I can sense but can’t quite follow, and sometimes I’m unnecessarily on the edge. On one such occasion I reluctantly accept a glass of rosé wine and am pleasantly surprised to find it is dry. It’s a Blanc de Noir my host tells me and then launches into a graphic description of the advantages of crushing young blek grapes to get waht wine. I notice I am the only one squirming.