Trouble Ahead for South Africa

“Bring me my machine gun!” sings the next president of South Africa in a pleasing baritone, and as the audience joins in with the catchy tune, he intones more politely the second line of the song, “Please bring me my machine gun!” Nobody actually obliges. It is the thought that counts, and the thought is worrying.

We are at an election rally of the mighty African National Congress on the sports field of Springbok, a small, rather arid town. This is almost the top left corner of the Republic of South Africa, separated from the Europeanized tourist enclave of Cape Town by hundreds of miles of brooding mountains with occasional picturesque oases of modest comfort on the way. People do not come here unless they need to. The railroad stops a long way south, at the evocatively named settlement of Bitterfontein. The highway is so sparsely used that tortoises—a mainstay of the local wildlife—occasionally succeed in getting all the way across it. Many of the local people are Namaquas, a distinctive tribe, once nomadic, now mostly not, whose lovely high-boned features look almost Chinese.