A letter from South Africa’s Stellenbosch, university town, wine paradise and the birthplace of apartheid

How is it that the part of the world which created one of the most haunting ideologies to divide humanity is also one of its most beautiful? Sitting here in Stellenbosch, I re-read Zoë Wicomb’s short story, ‘A Clearing in the Bush’, where a “coloured” cook, Tamieta, is puzzled by the absence of people at the memorial service for the recently assassinated prime minister of the country, Hendrik Verwoerd. “Although the African was to get an education,” wrote Njabulo Ndebele, “it was only so that he could be a better servant who could understand simple instruction and read simple messages.” “I don’t agree with what that improvement means,” says a character from a short story by Sindiwe Magona, who worked as a female domestic worker. Particular forms of Calvinistic prudery, wrote the novelist and essayist Nadine Gordimer, enabled the Church to twist “religion to the service of racism and identified the church with the security of the state, including its sexual morality based on the supposed “purity” of one race.” The results, she can’t stop thinking for a moment, have been a violation of humanity rarely seen before or since. Some of the richest Afrikaners still live in Stellenbosch — labelled the “Stellenbosch mafia” by the controversial black politician Julius Malema — a powerful example of white monopoly capitalism.