The things we do to Africa...

We used to rape the continent, for gold and slaves, and we still keep kicking Africa around like a football. We dump our worst products on it. We charge it more in loan interest than we give in aid. And every now and then we send in troops to various bits, usually from the former colonial power, to make sure the locals know they’re not really in charge.

Why, we even use it from time to time as a source of photo ops for our failing politicians. Did you see David Cameron, at the Mandela funeral, trying to get in on the Danish PM’s selfie with Barack Obama? The man’s shameless.

Is that Cameron trying to muscle in on Helle Thorning Schmidt's 
selfie with an actual world leader?

Now it’s emerged that ‘Boris Bikes’ are beginning to turn up in the Gambia. For the uninitiated, ‘Boris Bikes’ are bicycles available for hire in various places in London, which can be ridden to other places and dropped off again. They’re called ‘Boris Bikes’ in honour of the modest and self-effacing Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

You get what honour you can, I suppose.

It seems they’re now being stolen in large numbers and shipped off to the Gambia where they’re being spotted in villages. Perhaps we should be grateful that Britain is at last making a little restitution for all the exploitation of the past, even if only unofficially and as a result of criminal action.

Photo from the Daily Telegraph of a Boris bike in the Gambia

My only regret is that they’ve only taken Boris’s bikes, and not Boris himself. Still, the Gambia is run by an unhinged egomaniac convinced he’s God’s gift to mankind, so they really don't have a need for Boris, unlike his bikes.

Someone who does seem to be invading Africa in the near future is former Barclays Bank Chief Executive, Bob Diamond. You may remember that he had to leave Barclays under a bit of a shadow: the bank had just been caught fiddling the rates at which banks lend money to each other.

Diamond provided a striking demonstration of the principle by which senior executives only receive their astronomical remuneration because they take responsibility for what happens in the organisations they lead. On his watch, the bank lost about half its share value, and he claimed not to have known anything about the rate rigging. So he suffered the penalty of giving up some £20 million of bonus, meaning he left with only about £3 million. Practically destitute.

And now he’s back. He and a mate have launched a new company, Atlas Mara Co-Nvest, which is designed to go looking for exciting new prospects in Africa.

Aaah. Doesn't Bob Diamond look like an amiable rogue?
But I'm not sure of the amiability

Things don’t look promising. I mean, the company’s an investment vehicle and they can’t even spell ‘invest’. And it’s likely to focus on Financial Services, the field in which Diamond has won such a reputation. Or do I mean notoriety?

We blessed Africa with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, constant colonial wars, borders that don’t correspond to ethnicity, a white regime in South Africa that gave the world apartheid. 

And now we’re sending them Bob Diamond. Haven’t they suffered enough?

South Africa, great memories, anxious times

It was one of the great holidays, the two weeks we spent in South Africa nearly a decade ago. 

It was wonderful pretty much from the beginning. We stopped for lunch an hour or so out from Johannesburg, at what had once been a mission station, and I was absolutely enchanted to see a Vervet monkey swing between two trees just low enough to grab part of my meal. 

Vervets. Cheeky enough to try to nick my meal
But I didn't like it that much, and liked them a lot more

The staff were profusely apologetic, but I was delighted: what else could possibly say so clearly, ‘you’re in Africa’?

That evening we were being fed from a ‘potjie’, the traditional cast iron pot in which a great stew is cooked over an outdoor fire, in our case being prepared by a congenial hostel owner who liked to feed his guests and tell them stories of the old days of the Transvaal

We were there at the right time of year. May’s the ‘cold season’ when tourists don’t turn up much, even the internal ones. We were able to ring the Kruger Park and get accommodation for the next day, in a glorious hut which, at 4:00 in the morning, had impalas lying outside our door, practically close enough to stroke.

Why were we up at 4:00 in the morning? Because we’d manage to enrol for a bush walk, which you usually needs you to book a year in advance.

These days, when I hardly ever seem to be away from the sounds of traffic, to be in a place of miles of plain rolling to the horizon and hear nothing but an occasional insect and a few birds, was nothing short of bliss. Add to that the herd of Kudu – antelopes with glorious twisted horns – through which we drove on the way back, the leopard we saw eying them up lustfully but without the slightest hope of tackling one, the giraffes, the zebras, the rhino, and the rest, and you can imagine how magical the whole thing was.

Kudu. Simply majestic

We even met a friendly Afrikaner couple who took us a little under their wing. But I was amused by his complaint about the lack of ice for a gin and tonic in the bar. The message was clear: the Blacks running the bar were simply not up to the job and things would not have been like that when... well, when things were run more effectively, by the right people.

Funnily enough, I didn’t even want a gin and tonic.

Danielle had shown the good sense to plan our journey economically, and we stayed not in hotels but in hostels – and what hostels! They were luxurious. And the great thing about a hostel is that you meet the other people staying there.

A few days after the Kruger Park, we met a Canadian woman travelling round the country on her own. She explained to us that she’d been walking back along a country road; a group of young black people had been walking in the same direction; sometimes they would overtake her, sometimes she would overtake them.

But then a middle-aged white couple stopped their SUV and offered her a lift.

‘No, thanks, I feel like walking,’ she told them.

‘I think you should get in,’ they said, casting meaningful glances at the group of black youths.

When she still refused, they shrugged and told her, ‘well, on your head be it,’ before driving off.

The Blacks had heard the exchange.

‘I’m sorry Whites can be so stupid,’ she said to them, apologetically.

‘No,’ they said, ‘we don’t think you’re stupid. We need you. So it doesn’t matter.’

Our own experience was like hers. Black people mostly avoided talking to us, giving Whites their space, but if we spoke first, they’d stop or even walk out of their way to have a conversation. One father had to break off a chat with me, to race down a country path and catch up with his rapidly receding family.

In Durban, Danielle and I tried to walk to the Indian market. We were stopped by a gloriously rainbow mixture of policemen at a tiny kerbside police station: one White, one Indian, one Black.

‘Stay on the waterfront,’ they said, ‘don’t try to walk to the market.’

By then, we were beginning to realise how near the surface the racism of the place lay. We were soon to discover how near the surface the violence bubbled too.

We met up again, in Johannesburg, the same Afrikaner couple we’d got to know in the Kruger Park. As they were driving us back from an excursion, we came across a screaming woman, bleeding copiously from a terrible gash on her arm. A few metres on, a man was walking away rapidly, carrying a blood stained knife. Both were black, neither was young.

‘What should we do?’ Danielle and I asked.

‘Nothing at all,’ was the simultaneous response, and we drove on.

Two Whites felt so threatened at the idea of even stopping to help a wounded Black, while the man who’d attacked her was still around, that they left an injured woman to sort herself out. They wouldn’t even ring for an ambulance.

It’s a glorious place, South Africa. I’ve been back, for work, on a couple of occasions, and I love the country. But it’s riven, from top to bottom, with shocking, vicious and sometimes blood-soaked tensions. And I’ve seen so many Whites who have retreated into gated communities with walls and barbed wire to keep the Blacks out, that I have little sense of progress towards bridging the divides.

In fact, a great many of the Whites I met were busy finding themselves some kind of link – any kind of link – to a European ancestor who could provide them passports as a get free ticket out of the place.

Nelson Mandela was the man who held the place together. He embodied the ideal of a rainbow nation. And now he’s gone.

I suspect South Africa will survive and will, ultimately, prosper.

But boy, has it got its work cut out for it.

He held the place together
Now South Africa needs to find another way