Landing in Johannesburg from anywhere else in Africa can be a deeply disorienting experience, no matter how many times you do it.
In fact the contrasts are so great, you can end up wondering if you are still in Africa at all.
Confusion sets in as soon as you head into town along a network of fine roads that would put London to shame, let alone the dusty potholed streets of most African cities.
If there are traffic jams, it is because too many gleaming BMW, Mercedes and other new cars are racing home to indulge the almost religious devotion to quality leisure time.
In Nairobi, where I live, you can get held up on the main airport road at almost any time by the crazed antics of battered minibuses and hoards of scruffy cars playing Russian roulette at the many roundabouts–a much more typically African experience.
In another striking contrast, the plush northern suburbs of Johannesburg are dotted with ritzy shopping malls where designer stores sell luxury clothing at European prices.
In fact, shopping seems to be the major pastime for well-off whites and blacks, fuelling a retail boom which the central bank admits it is struggling to choke, despite rising inflation.
There are many other signs of prosperity here. During a recent public holiday my inquiry about booking a room at a country hotel was met with a derisive: ”But we have been booked up for months sir.”
Yet more than a decade after apartheid was defeated, this prosperity is still one-sided — most of the clients in the plush hotels and restaurants are white and the staff black.
Economy in white hands
The private economy, as opposed to political power, is still largely in white hands and although a black middle class is rapidly expanding, the fruits of black rule are taking a long time to reach the majority of the population.
Some other things also seem hardly to have changed.
Rugby, long the national game, is still mostly a white preserve. At a recent match against Australia, most of the team and almost all the crowd were white. Security men at the gate appeared to be the same beefy, broken-nosed white men as a decade ago, albeit now cordial to blacks.
South Africa’s prosperity and contrasts are not confined to Johannesburg. From the graceful winelands of the Western Cape to the beautiful coasts of KwaZulu-Natal, the entire country is linked with an impressive network of well-surfaced roads that could not be more of a contrast to my home in Kenya.
One of Kenya’s premier tourist attractions, the Maasai Mara reserve, is linked to Nairobi by roads that often resemble a dried-up river bed, complete with rocks and pools of water.
A glance at some statistics illustrates the contrasts.
South Africa is the undisputed economic giant of sub-Saharan Africa. With 6% of the population it has more than one-third of the GDP — three times that of second-placed Nigeria and 40 times more than Mali.
Nevertheless, despite South Africa’s enormous achievements, outward impressions can obscure many challenging problems, including the slow trickle-down of wealth to the majority.
South Africa has some of the world’s worst violent crime and the greatest caseload of Aids cases, with one in nine of its 45-million population infected with HIV.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid hero and South Africa’s moral conscience, said recently he was deeply concerned about crime and the widening gap between rich and poor.
”We need to be very careful that the poor don’t begin to say ‘Where is the freedom dividend?’… I am very surprised that it has taken them so long to vent their anger and their impatience,” he said. – Reuters