South Africa’s promise now lives in a cage

I went back to see my old house in Cape Town last week, and they’d put a cage around it. Otherwise it was unchanged; broad, plantationish and oddly ill-suited to the slim, cluttered suburban street on which it sat. Yet the whole thing, from the eaves where our little flat was to the porch where we all used to sit and smoke, had been wedged into a box of bars. As though it were about to go diving with sharks.

This was where I lived for the best part of a year, about a decade and a half ago, and not really for any good reason. Ostensibly I was following my girlfriend, now my wife, as she kick-started a travel journalism career by writing guidebooks. We were near the university, and our many, many housemates were either a multiracial mix of local arty young professionals or German medical students. The latter bunch were drawn to South African hospitals because they had plenty of knife and bullet wounds, just like Germany didn’t.

The rand was criminally low at the time, almost as low as now, and our lives cost nearly nothing. Two hundred pounds a month, maybe? I wrote a bit and read a lot, working my way through the nearby used bookshop, where any modern classic you could think of could be yours for the equivalent of about 30p. Mainly I smoked and played pool and walked on the mountain and went to the beach and fretted, when I remembered to, about what I would do when the money ran out and I had to go home.

People do drone on about the lure of Africa — the majesty of the veldt and all that Hemingway crap — but for me the emotional connection has always been more urban.