Post-apartheid, Johannesburg has become the luckiest place in the unluckiest continent.
A tokoloshe is a Zulu demon, a nightstalker, a sprite goblin. Familiar, it lives under your bed and comes to you in the dark. South Africans put their beds on bricks, on tins, wrap spells around them to prevent the tokoloshe climbing up.
What he’ll do to you, if he does, is never mentioned. It’s too horrible. The tokoloshe isn’t some cosy fairytale because of naughtiness to add a frisson to bedtime, he’s a real five-star terror. And what makes him different from every other night-sweat apparition, what makes every tokoloshe unique, is that he’s singular. Each of us invents our own. He is the creation of our deepest, most horrific fears – a bespoke, made-to-measure personal demon.
So when you wake in the stillness and you can hear the faint scratching of hard fingers on the headboard and the sharp-toothed muttering, you know it’s coming just for you. It isn’t interested in anyone else. The tokoloshe can’t be bought off with lies or flattery. You can’t trick him. He knows you outside in.
The tokoloshe is a particularly brilliant and terrible invention, a horror version of psychoanalysis – the psychoses, irrational fear, the weakness that is inside all of us manifest as homunculus. It’s also particularly apposite to South Africa.
Ten years after Mandela and de Klerk, truth and reconciliation and elections, South Africans are still soggy with disbelief that they’ve managed to avoid a civil war. The longer they go on with majority rules, the more astonished they are that it still works. They’ve become immensely forgiving of occasional outbursts of irrational fury or bad behaviour because, ‘Oh, it could all have been so much worse,’ they shake their heads and sigh. For 10 years, they’ve got away with it and there’s no obvious rhyme or reason. Africa is the very last place you’d bet on having a mass agreement of contrition and forgiveness. And South Africa is the only country in the world to uninvent a nuclear bomb.
Of course, everybody gained. It was a platonic triumph. One up for humane civilisation. But – and it’s a huge but – in practical terms most people are, if not worse off, not doing much better. Unemployment could probably beat employment in a fight. And for the first time, this is as bad for young whites as blacks. Affirmative action has reduced their options. The finance minister is running a very Thatcherite strict economy which thrills men in suits in New York and London but is testing the long view of the townships. And then there’s AIDS and illegal immigration from every other country in Africa. There’s a strong export-stifling rand and a drought. It’s tough all round but – and this is an equally big but – it’s also ridiculously hopeful. South Africans smile and look at the sky and say ‘Pinch me, am I dreaming, did we get away with it?’
The last time I was in Jo’burg six or seven years ago, it was a frightening city, unravelling into medieval crime. People who had stuff lived behind barbed wire and spikes with multiple dogs and alarms and private security firms. They drove like fighter pilots sealed in 4WDs with snub-nosed .38s on their laps. Their kids were taught to run in zigzags and lock themselves in their bedrooms and put their fingers in their ears. They all still cooked braais in the garden, played tennis, got drunk, but the strain was terrible. You could see it in their eyes – the wear and tear of terror. Jo’burg rode its luck until it almost died of nervous exhaustion. Everyone knew someone who’d been, well, never mind, we don’t talk about it. The centre of the city emptied and died, the suburbs became mid-western shopping fortresses.
But now, this time, I got out of the airport and was amazed – it’s a new place, really astonishing. Areas you’d never have walked through have grown cafés and boutiques. There’s an atmosphere. It feels like a collective decision to get better, to get on and up. There’s still miles of razor wire, you’ve still got to watch yourself, but Soweto’s a tourist destination. You can get a tour, eat lunch, buy a wire motorcycle souvenir. There’s arts and music – loads of music. There’s theatre and there’s the new apartheid museum which just rams a lump down your throat. As a rule, I don’t like walking round museums that have been twisted into social engineering. There are lessons to be learnt from the past and the past can be accessed through things, but the reason for putting things in museums shouldn’t be to make kids polite citizens because, in general, it makes for self-righteous exhibits and the kids smoke behind the bookshop and swear at passers-by. But this one is something else. There are very few artefacts, it’s a journey through history commissioning an execution of apartheid, told with photographs and film and hundreds of televisions. If that sounds dull, then it’s because I’m not explaining it properly. It’s a cross between a moving scrapbook and an art installation. It’s also the most thoughtful and emotional couple of hours I’ve spent in a museum for years. The divisive story is told inclusively and if you’ve never been to South Africa, you can have no idea how difficult, restrained and courageous that is. The museum is a lesson in how history doesn’t have to have consequences or at least not the ones that were written on the packet. Fate is open to apologies. Classes of black schoolchildren milled round me as ever in Africa, neat and beautifully turned out, in exuberant uniforms. A year ago, I’d never have suggested to a tourist that they take time to visit Jo’burg but now you’ve simply got to. Not just the apartheid museum and the townships and the markets and cafés, the music and jacarandas, and the high, dry veldt, but you should go because this is the luckiest place in the unluckiest continent. This year, the UN pointed out that Africa tipped from being an agrarian continent to an urban one. More Africans live in cities than in the country. And almost all tourists who come to Africa with the best liberal intentions come to see animals and wilderness – very few come to see Africans. No pride of lions is as exciting as an African market, to walk through an African street is more entertaining and enthralling and a lot more inclusively hands-on than a drive in a game park. If you want to feel the rhythm of the dark heart, then go to an African city. I’d go to Jo’burg.
Personally, I think it was the tokoloshe that made South Africa hold back, divert the consequences of the past. South Africans lay awake in the hot night and heard the panting and the muffled sharpening of little goblin pangas and knew what the fears made flesh would bring. The tokoloshe still lurks under the bed, but the longer this normalcy goes on, the smaller the fears that feed him.