The Children of Apartheid

Christopher Hope about South African ways of thinking

„South Africa does not exist as a place, it is only the expression of policy, it is not a country, it is a condition.” (Christopher Hope, in: White Boy Running, 1988)

All over the world, people knew South Africa, that is the country of apartheid. And they all knew who Nelson Mandela was. But which country is it now? Who was opposing against apartheid? And what has changed? Has anything changed?

Christopher Hope. Photo: private.

Christopher Hope is one of the famous English writing South African authors like Nadine Gordimer or J.M. Coetzee. He was born in Johannesburg in 1944. His parents were Irish. In 1981, his first book was banned by the South African government. He left South Africa in 1987 and lives today, after some time he spent in London, in Moscow and particularly travelling, near Toulouse (France). One of the most important issues in his books is the way people in South Africa and in other parts of the world talk and act along the obsession of the skin color line, but he writes in his books about a lot of people who have no definite skin color which is a problem in a world where people do not like to accept ambivalence and ambiguity.

In “White Boy Running”, a book around the times of the 1987 elections, he wrote: “Henceforth, the country was to be run on the lines of a human zoo with different species confined to their own cages.” All this being “secure in the knowledge that it was not only Party policy, but also God’s will.”

In April, 2025, Christopher and I talked about the message South African history and politics could give to us thinking about the actual threats on liberalism and democracy in the world we live in.

The most considerable question of our days

Norbert Reichel: Let’s start with your last journey to and through South Africa. Are there any changes since the times you were writing books like “White Boy running” or “The Café de Move-On Blues”?

Christopher Hope: South African politics, like so many matters in South Africa, tends to be political and to have a racial dimension to it. You sometimes wonder if anything ever changes. The country tends more towards Iran, Cuba and China and what the ANC ruling party seems to dislike are allies of, let’s call it Western Europe. For instance, as you know they introduced the case against Israel in the International Criminal Court.

When I was back in the country recently, the news was that the South African ambassador to Washington had been expelled as persona non grata, that he was a race-baiting provocateur. And nothing like that has not happened before. South Africa had a free ride, principally because of the achievements of Mandela. And because Mandela was so universally accepted and so universally admired, a great deal was overlooked, particularly this curious fixation of South Africa with the socialism of the 1970s and the 1980s. I always had the feeling, when I was in South Africa that there is no bad political idea ( of the British Labour Party in particular and from the old Soviet bloc) from the 1980s that the South African government is not prepared to accept and became enthusiastic about. And that’s new because they had a free ride when the new South Africa was seen as both a beautiful country, a developing country, but when it also kept a foot in the other camp, in the developed world.

That is changing. And it has considerable effects in South Africa, which has some of the highest unemployment rates in the world, particularly among young people. It has also one of the highest crime rates in the world. High crime rates and low employment haunt the country. The present ANC government likes to claim that it will govern forever. They really believe they are immortal. But that situation is changing, at each election the ANC is losing votes and the party is increasingly seen as corrupt, greedy and ineffective.

About tribalism and power

Norbert Reichel: I would like to quote some words from “White Boy Running”: “My generation are the children of apartheid.” If I read your remark rightly I would like to conclude that one totalitarian and dysfunctional regime was replaced – not with Mandela, but afterwards – by another totalitarian and dysfunctional regime, I would like to say, replaced at least by another crypto totalitarian regime.

Christopher Hope: That is a very nice phrase: crypto totalitarian. That sums it up very exactly. I would add one word: antediluvian crypto totalitarian. In the sense that they look always backwards, not forward. They look backwards principally to a period in the 1970s and the 1980s when socialism with a human face was one of the predominant political philosophies in Europe. And the current ruler of South Africa think that is still the case. We seem to have replaced a racially obsessed minority white government with a racially and politically obsessed majority black government. And both of them were nationalists. Both suffer from exactly the same unfortunate problems that nationalism gives rise to: an over-excessive emphasis on national pride and an over- excessive emphasis on one’s own ethnic group. This is uncannily like the nightmare from which we thought we had awakened when the old regime ended.

Norbert Reichel: A kind of tribalism?

Christopher Hope: Yes. A kind of tribalism. The irony is so profound, the irony is so dark, that we have moved from a rampant muscular tribalism of one white tribe, as it were in South Africa, to another version of it. You hear the phrase that is used all the time by the present government in South Africa, the leaders talk incessantly of “our people”. When they are pressed about this, they say, ‘of course we mean all South Africans’. But of course, they don’t. This is not a government of redistribution but a government of readjustment, along new tribal lines, and along new skin color lines. The ANC has never been democratic. When it came to power in South Africa, it believed that because it most votes, it could so whatever it wished. Since it began losing votes, it has been forced to compromise a little. But it remains a majoritarian movement whose every action shows it still believes that what is good for the ANC is good for the country.

If you asked anybody in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, or at any time through to the ending of apartheid in1994, whether South Africa would ever return to anything like the old skin color obsessions of the apartheid regime, they would have said you were crazy. But it is what we have done. It is a karma. It pursues us.

Norbert Reichel: In your books you described forms of tribalism between different white people, between Afrikaners and English or – like you are – Irish people. It is something I find nowadays in diverse combinations everywhere in the world. South Africa seems to be a model for tribalist thinking all over the world.

Christopher Hope: (laughing) We all have a wall in our heads. It becomes very fashionable once again. You are quite right. I read somewhere quite an interesting analysis recently. Certainly, people talk about a new world order. The old order was something like international amity, knocking down borders and barriers, free trade and free movement. This has gone. Once again, we are in a world very like the one which saw the destruction of the people of Melos at the whim of Athens. We seem to be living in a world that George Orwell described, where the world is divided into power blocks, where the strong do as they wish and the weak suffer what they must.

Norbert Reichel: The dialogue between the people from Athens and the people from Melos. One of the timeless and most important and always striking descriptions of imperialism, colonialism, the power one tribe practices over another allegedly weaker tribe. It is just the same way Putin is talking to Ukraine.

Christopher Hope: Exactly. And the same way as Trump talks with people and countries that he considers to be weak. These echoes are very chilly. But yes.

Violence from the beginning

Norbert Reichel: You said that South Africa is looking backwards. But people who are looking backwards never know where they could land doing this, one day in the future. Your books are a kind of South African history from the beginning until today. In “The Café de Move-On Blues” (2018) you wrote about “the statue wars” when people destroyed the statues they connected with an opposite political view, the statues of Rhodes, Verwoerd, Tambo, Mandela, a “public act of exorcism”. Some were burning books. One person in your book, Thandi, says, that she wants to “burn things” whatever this may be. But nearly all people seem to believe that “the old apartheid regime was still in place.”

Christopher Hope: It is a council of despair, I think. Apartheid did not go, it adapted. South Africa has always been, in one way or another, a society devoted to violence, governed by – whoever is ruling, the English, the French or for a long time, the last white regime, white Afrikaner nationalists – a kind of muscular stupidity. We seem unable to communicate in South Africa without physical contact. The usual physical contact is violent.

Norbert Reichel: Muscular or masculine?

Christopher Hope: Masculine to a certain degree, yes. But violence seems to be sewn into the very fabric of the language in my country, in the attitude of people everywhere and that applies right across the board. I don’t think, it is confined to any particular group. South Africa is a work in progress. Nobody is entirely sure what it really is. Lessons from history don’t help much. The very early indigenous people in the Cape, which is still the largest province, the San people, the Bushmen, were all extinguished. They suffered attacks by white farmers and by black incomers. They were caught in the middle. But they were – if anybody had the legal right to call themselves this – the first South Africans. And they vanished because they were driven, and hunted, to extinction.

Norbert Reichel: You could call it genocide?

Christopher Hope: It was an absolutely genocide. One sees it in all provinces and the history of South Africa. Violence is not confined to a particular group. Somehow or another, South Africans seem given over to violence, and it derives from the way in which the country was built and made.

Teaching and learning

Norbert Reichel: In “The Café de Move-On Blues” you wrote: “Apartheid has locked us in the prison of our skins and seemed set to last and even to prosper. Why was it, then, that the near-mystical belief of many Whites that they were destined to prevail seemed nonsense? Not just doomed to fail but already doing so? The vaunted poser of the apartheid state was for me a gigantic bluff – cruel, stupid and ugly, certainly, but a weakness, not a strength, a desperate attempt to reinforce the illusion that Whites were on a roll when they were actually on the skids.”  

Christopher Hope: Most people don’t understand just how deeply engraved this notion of the superiority of some, and the inferiority of others, is still deeply engraved in many White South Africans. It is like in the old days of Germany after the war. It was difficult to find anyone who confessed they believed in the old regime. When Mandela was elected, overnight it was impossible to find in South Africa any white person who was prepared to say that apartheid was a good way to govern the country. In fact, under the old regime, if you were a white South African yourself, it was rare to meet other South Africans who had a serious objection to apartheid. Except to suggest that there should be more of it. They would say, perhaps, that it might be differently handled, or it should be changed in some way, but never that it should be removed. Because if you said that, you might end up in jail. That was a sort of view was seen as almost blasphemous, almost sacrilegious, amongst most white people. This is a sad hard truth in the matter. All of us Whites went along with this, to a lesser or larger degree. It was extraordinary, as you grew up in South Africa, to begin dimly to realize that you were surrounded by African people. Somehow or another you learnt, from a very early age, to see past black people, as if they did not really exist. That was very common. And now – in a very odd way – everything has altered yet nothing much has really changed. Very little.        

Norbert Reichel: What were children taught in schools? During apartheid and now?    

Christopher Hope: I would question whether they were taught at all. You have to remember that it was the small white minority who were very well taught. Black children, however, were schooled under a separate, inferior system, suitable for those destined to be ‘hewers of wood’, as one apartheid minister phrased it. White children were taught to assume their own superiority, to assume the right to govern and to master those who were there basically to work for them. And black children, in so far as they were taught anything, were taught to obey, not to understand but to do basically as they were told and then they would be lucky to get a job. For some people, it was almost a divine rule and for others it was the natural course of events. You had always a complete division between the races. The divide was not only between black or white, there were also Asian and mixed-races minorities. It was a country that was extremely heterogenous, yet it was a country governed and divided as if there existed only two different species, white and black.

I would say there is a very similar situation today. Because black kids educated in the state supported public school system are as badly taught as ever. The public schools, like the public hospitals, have grown worse and worse under the new ANC government. And most white kids are educated in much better schools, in the old pattern, with, of course, new histories taught to them. But I don’t know how much those new histories affect either side and they don’t bring the country closer together. And they don’t seem to teach either side very much about what really happened. You have as much propaganda in the teaching of history now, as you did when I was growing up. It merely comes from another direction.

Education is a mess. We spend more money on education than on anything else, with the least effect. You have the extraordinary situation where many, many young black kids get to university but they drop out. Too few make it through the four or five years they should be at university. The drop-out rate is absolutely enormous. Huge numbers apply for a college job or for a position at the university. One of the profound South African ironies is you have to have special courses in many universities to bring the kids, the students, up to the standards before they begin, seriously begin, a science degree or humanities degree because, in the ten years of bad schooling that preceded college, numeracy and literacy have been so badly taught. This is extraordinary after three decades when enormous amounts were spent on public education. Maybe it is because it is assumed that revolutions really change something. And perhaps they do, but invariably they seem to change things for the worse.  

The mirrors of South Africa

Norbert Reichel: In your books you describe a lot of cases that seem to be very similar to the South African case. You mention the fall of the Berlin wall, Yugoslavia, Ireland, Somalia, the Soviet Union etcetera. In “Jimfish”, the lead person of the novel meets on his journey around the world, a lot of important personalities and sees their fall, for example Nicolae Ceaucescu, “the Genius of the Carpathians”. Jimfish always believes that there will be a good end to everything as his teacher Malala taught him: “If my old teacher Soviet Malala is right about anything, he’s right when he says that those who keep up the struggle will land on the right side of history.” It is not quite clear if it is more important to him to “struggle for the right side of history” or to marry his love Lunamiel. But perhaps it is both the same.

But perhaps it is the wrong side that matters. “Zoran the Serb” explains to Jimfish the reason why he came to Africa: “I came to be enlightened. I said to myself, ‘If race is all the rage, if ethnic cleansing is coming soon to a mini-statelet near me, then it’s time to brush up on ethnic hatred and to take a look at the way others do things.’ But where to start? Kashmir and the Pakistani-Indian partition? Or the Israeli-Palestine split? Belgium, where the tribes detest each other? Northern Ireland, where the sects prefer suicide? Then it came to me: who has done Balkanisation better than the Balkans? South Africans! They’re the champs. For decades they’ve been splitting their country into ethnic islands and locking up people in the prisons of race and tribe, colour and culture.” Everywhere, there is revolution and everywhere, there is the unsuccessful follow up.

Christopher Hope: This is an interesting remark. I certainly know my best education after leaving South Africa, not entirely willingly but having left, was not when I went to England. It was when I was frequently visiting Berlin. It was a time when people really did not go to Berlin very much. It wasn’t a destination – put it that way. But the discovery of what it was like to be on both sides of the Berlin Wall was something which struck me as somehow familiar, even reassuring. I came from a country that built walls between people. And of course, once the Berlin Wall came down, I found it extraordinary. The euphoria of the moment was followed, not long after, by many people retreating to the position they were in before the fall. Maybe this is the inevitable dialectic, particularly when you have a revolution which is not accompanied by a massacre, which the Russian revolution was, or the Chinese revolution, When so many people were killed, a relatively peaceful revolution of the sort we had in South Africa, alters the dialectics that follow. Things bend back towards the status quo.

If one considers that the African National Congress was founded before the Chinese Communist Party, it turned out to be one of the most inefficient liberation movements ever. If you are talking about tactical, violent and military successes, there were very, very few. There were fewer people killed in South Africa over a period than they were in the violent clashes in Northern Ireland, which has a much smaller population. And the violence in South Africa, though bad, was less bloody. When I think about the end results of revolutions and large scale removals of people, I remember that remark of Kant’s ‘ from the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight can be made’.

Norbert Reichel: You write very often about journeys, your own journeys like in “The Café de Move-On Blues” or in “White Boy Running”, fictious journeys like in ”Jimfish”, “Kruger’s Alp” or “My Mother’s Lovers”. Your lead characters including yourself meet a lot of people and situations which explain what happened and happens in South Africa and not only there but all over the world. They are books about discovering different countries by travelling.

Christopher Hope: There is some truth in that. When you leave home, people suffer from a degree of homesickness after they leave. But I was homesick long before I left home. I started very early. Indeed, I used to run away from home, always all the time. It became something as a joke in my family. I had no wish to remain at home. I found family life very, very difficult. And it seemed to me more interesting and more sane to be somewhere else in the world and not to remain in what was defined as home, as Heimat. It was the last thing I wanted.

So when I had to leave, in a way, I suppose, I was very lucky. But I had no idea where I was to go. And I think I found life in a liberal democracy like England, even though I understood the language. I found it to be extremely foreign to everything I have learnt. And therefore, once the door opened to other places, to Yugoslavia for instance, it was an invitation that I accepted with alacrity. I found it endlessly fascinating. And of course, the more one learnt and the more one saw, particularly in Yugoslavia during the tribal wars in that country, the more horrified one became. Nonetheless, it seemed to me closer to life – as it is lived – than I had found it in more settled Western liberal democracies. And I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I come from a place which, in every way, pretended to be normal but was really a kind of madhouse. A not a very interesting madhouse because there is nothing particularly interesting about muscular stupidity.

Norbert Reichel: You wrote in “The Café de Move-On Blues”: “Rhodes was the mirror we looked into and saw ourselves.” And: “Rhodes becomes a kind of substitute religion, a pantheism for patriots; the equivalent of a Cape Town cargo-cult.” Did you have a similar experience in other countries? Did you see there a kind of mirror of apartheid?

Christopher Hope: Yes. I am aware that you carry yourself wherever you go. So it is probably inevitable that you see something of yourself wherever you are, wherever you hold up that mirror. What I realized is that the country from which I come, which I had to imagine was so disturbed that there could be nothing like it, was perhaps not so different after all. Travelling to other places made me confront my own naivety, my own ignorance. Because, what I seemed to see, increasingly, was that South Africa was not behind the time. In a funny strange way, particularly in Yugoslavia, in its old tribal obsessions, it had been ahead of its time. You remember, when the wars in Yugoslavia broke out, it was assumed by some people that this was revanchism. People thought – this is absurd. A theatre of the past. And you can’t repeat the past. This is impossible. One saw people dressing up for political rallies – I remember Tudjman in Croatia – people in the uniforms, the buckles, the funny caps, the badges, big boots, all the bravado of an extremely inferior Nuremberg presentation. It echoed the past. Or so I thought. Though it was closer to Mussolini than it was to Hitler. I thought at first that what I saw in, the destruction of ex-Yugoslavia, was a doomed attempt to reach back to an impossible and retrievable past. But I was absolutely wrong. Of course, it was some of those things, but it was really the rebirth of awakening nationalism. And it is that which has come to define everything today. Yugoslavia and its tribal wars, was not some kind of throwback, Yugoslavia was pointing towards the future. And that was shocking. Just as it was astonishing to move from – say – Belgrade to Kosovo, to go from Serbian orthodox nationalists and then to encounter Kosovar nationalists. They all spoke the same language. But it struck me, again and again, that the language available to nationalism is often the same. The same phrases occur, the proponents of the new nationalism dress in similar fashion, as if for their theatrical shows they all share the same, small wardrobe. Most alarming was to realize that this was alarmingly familiar. I had the feeling that I was a home once again (he laughs) I knew where I was.  

Norbert Reichel: It is not necessary to leave home. You find it everywhere.

Christopher Hope: I remember a dear friend of mine who died a few years ago, a South African, I did not know who he was quoting, but he said to me: “How can you leave? Everything you hate is here!” It is a very good remark he made because that is where I really get back all the time. And indeed, I have to say, just by the way, I am very keen to go back home. It seems to me I have done enough travelling, If I go back, maybe I understand something I missed before.

It’s all about race – in the past as it is today

Norbert Reichel: You’ll find tribalism everywhere. A lot of intellectuals were writing about this phenomenon, these last years. In your books, however, there are a lot of people who are outside any tribe, people of unclear race, for example “Jimfish”, “Happy Sindane”, “Claas and Clara” or “Cindy”, and naturally “George”, the black boy you grew up with.

Christopher Hope: They are people outside definition. It is not a question of people who refuse to conform, it is not that. It is not a choice they make. They simply do not fit the pattern expected of them. And that does fascinate me. Particularly again, the almost military discipline with which the racial policies in the old South Africa were exerted and maintained, deprive, and still do, many people of any form of interesting individuality. And the most interesting individuals in South Africa are those who made the country what it is. Their genealogies are very, very mixed. This is one of the distinctive things about the character of the boy I call Jimfish. It is not possible to say if he is black, or mixed race. Even the racial composition of a man is complicated in my country where people seem to have been born with a built-in racial sensor, a very sensitive Geiger counter, with which they sum up very quickly, rightly or wrongly, where in the ethnic fabric of the country another person may be placed. It has nothing to do with politics, it’s got everything to do with their race, even when that race is indeterminate. And the result is that people are trapped and allocated into groups. But it is those you cannot classify who have always been the most individual and the most interesting people. They defy not only racial profiling, they defy definition. And when the old South African government couldn’t lock up these persons, or put them into jail, or kill them, it was prepared to bore them to death. It was one of the most boring societies one could ever imagine, because any movement, unexpected or unaccepted, or – heaven knows – illegal, was not to be countenanced. The result was terrifying conformity on all sides. We see it still. To watch the present government in South Africa being obeyed, rubber-stamped, by its own members of parliament, is to be overcome by waves of nostalgia. Nothing has changed amongst believers, except the colour of their skins. That’s all.

Norbert Reichel: But what about the difference between those different black parties? In the last elections, ANC lost its long lasting majority.

Christopher Hope: There are other black parties which are much more radical and much more tribal. And the most successful, which came out of nowhere, was the party of the last leader of the ANC, Jacob Zuma. He was thrown out of the ANC and he started his own party, a Zulu based party. Zulus are the largest minority in the country and the most organized, the most cohesive, and they scored extraordinary well in the last election. They are a force to be reckoned with. Again: the irony is such, Zuma’s party is dominantly geographically, situated mainly in the Natal province, which is predominantly Zulu. In a country which is made up with eleven, twelve, fourteen tribal groupings, never mind colour groupings, this new party is a considerable threat to the ANC. And it talks in left wing platitudes, but at heart it is a nationalist and tribalist grouping  

As Alice in Wonderland says, a good politician must believe at least seven impossible things before breakfast. (both of them are laughing loudly)

Talking about Israel in South Africa

Norbert Reichel: A difficult debate is running about the position of South Africa towards Israel. You know the story about the South African professor Achille Mbembe in Germany. I think, in his writing there is a very confusion of anti-zionist and anti-jewish positions, which are perhaps explainable by his attempt to transfer the South African experience of apartheid towards present Israel. Isn’t there a kind of psychological irony to talk about apartheid as something to be found in another country but not in one’s own?

Christopher Hope: It is certainly the argument that is officially made by the ANC, the ruling party, and by some other African politicians. There is among certain predominantly black parties, the Economic Freedom Fighters, the Inkatha Movement, the present Zuma party and the ANC, from time to time, a view that Jews are capitalists or Westerners who have been responsible for colonization or slavery or other things. They are thus characterized as ‘White’. You hear the same thing from some black American political leaders like Jesse Jackson. There is a very narrow dividing line between their anticapitalist and antisemitic views.

In April 2025, in South Africa, there was an attempt, still being debated today, to name a major avenue through the city, after Leila Khaled, the Palestinian terrorist who hijacked two planes and is a great hero to certain people in some political parties. The idea is that because the American consulate is situated at the start of this important road, the Americans will now have to list the address of their consulate as 1, Leila Khaled Avenue. There was an argument, about the renaming, in the town council of Johannesburg, and one of the speakers was Jewish: He put on a yarmulke to deliver his speech. One of the black opposition members of the municipal council stood up and said,’ If you are going to wear a yarmulke and identify yourself as Jewish, then I will come the next time wearing a t-shirt with Adolf Hitler on my chest…’  This juvenile and extremely violent antagonism occurs now and then! Apartheid is constantly tagged on to the name of Israel by those who support Hamas against Israel. It is used repeatedly to make sure that everybody gets the message.

Books of Christopher Hope mentioned above:

• Kruger’s Alp, 1984.
• White Boy Running – The Classic Account of Apartheid in South Africa, 1988, 2018.
• My Mother’s Lovers, 2006.
• Jimfish, 2015.
• The Café de Move-On Blues, 2018.

(Anmerkungen: Erstveröffentlichung im Juni 2025, Internetzugriff zuletzt am 11. Juni 2025. Titelbild: Firouzeh Görgen-Ossouli, aus der Serie „The Space I’m In“, Rechte bei der Künstlerin.)