South Africa is buzzing — and not just in the afterglow of victory in the Rugby World Cup. Johannesburg, built in the 1880s on the back of mineral excavation, is experiencing a contemporary form of gold rush. At the gleaming international airport, yuppies of every hue shape deals on their laptops. A ride into town takes you past shopping malls almost as large as the gold dumps on the outskirts, into a city of building sites. Another sports fixture, the 2010 soccer World Cup which South Africa will host, is often touted as the trigger for this construction boom, but much of it would clearly have happened anyway.
Parts of the smart northern suburbs are gridlocked by road-closures related to the building of Gautrain — a 25 billion rand (£1.8 billion) rapid rail network connecting Pretoria and Johannesburg with the airport and the upmarket shopping district of Sandton. Target passengers for this system are not the many thousands who daily criss-cross the city in packed ‘combi’ taxis: price-wise, Gautrain is aimed at the affluent and ‘commercially active’, and tourists. The project’s co-ordinators are at pains to point out that, while they hope to have everything operational in time for the soccer tournament, the project does not revolve around one sporting event — a comment sports-mad South Africans might find utterly incomprehensible.
But there is Trouble in Paradise. Dinner-party talk in the leafy suburbs is of condoms as well as rugby. Twenty million condoms, to be precise, which had to be recalled for being potentially defective. Men prodding the boerewors around the braai joke about the story. But this being South Africa, the bawdiness masks unease. The country has one of the world’s highest HIV infection rates, with up to 1,000 Aids-related deaths per day.
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