This Christmas marked a nearly unbroken ten-year streak of visiting Cape Town for our annual family holiday. This post therefore pleasantly stands out as one of the few journeys I've experienced with some of my nearest and dearest. If I also look back on those ten years, I'd say that, at the ripe old age of twenty-six, this is the only travel destination outside of Israel that I have meaningfully known throughout my political consciousness.
But before I get into a denser disquisition on South African politics, the one thing that has truly not changed since I first started coming here is my unwavering love of the country and, above all, Cape Town. The landscape is truly cinematic, boasting dramatic mountains and sweeping coastal views. Within the city itself, there is a vibrant nightlife, a colourful food scene and, in our case, a wonderful circle of friends. For those Britons who are so inclined – there's a nice hint of imperial nostalgia as you look out onto the Atlantic from what was, pre-Suez, the great historic staging post on the route to India and beyond. Behind Cape Town sits a vast, wonderful hinterland – teeming with wine and wildlife, depending on your proclivities – that truly make this a winter destination without peer. I may well dedicate another blog to South Africa's sprawling wine estates and game reserves, but safe to say that one would be deeply remiss to exclude either from their itinerary. I implore anyone to find me a more accessible (English-speaking) country with a direct flight, near-guaranteed good weather and a two-hour time difference – which always made this an easy sell to work-hungry superiors during my investment banking days.
And yet looks, as that threadbare adage goes, can be awfully deceiving – for beneath this beautiful backdrop lie visible signs of strain. Some of the most spectacular homes I've ever seen are encircled by high walls, electric fences and the insignia of private security companies. Safety is something that feels actively maintained rather than assumed here. Despite recent improvements, which I'll touch on later, going out in the evening still requires a degree of calculation and homelessness is difficult to ignore.
What I find so fascinating about South Africa is that it is truly one of those places that holds a mirror to people's politics: empire, Apartheid, boycotts, Mandela, white flight, farm murders. I would hazard that if you asked people for their opinions on these topics, you could make a good educated guess on who they vote for. Few places in the world are loaded with so much history and yet Cape Town itself does not have much to say on this topic; Johannesburg, I'm told, is more charged. This isn't to say there are no signs, but in my ten or so years of visiting, I haven't seen many. Take for example what is probably the most iconic historical landmark in the Cape: Robben Island – that infamous jail that housed Mandela and that captures both fascination and opprobrium in a manner redolent of the Bastille. In effect, the ultimate symbol of Apartheid tyranny and repression. However – obviously deliberately – it's physically removed from the landmass. I've been to see it, as have my family who were dragged somewhat begrudgingly, but I don't know many tourists who have.
This is the only proper historical site I've visited in Cape Town so I'll devote some attention to it here, but also because I think it opens up a lot about the broader history and state of South Africa today. OG fans might remember that I first touched on this back in 2023, when I wrote about monuments to the White Terror in Taipei – a very different context, but one that prompted a similar observation: "I left feeling that the prevailing injustice was the act of political imprisonment rather than what this actually entailed." As a general rule, I don't think that prisons make for great political history museums because there is often an expectation that the reality must have lived up to the symbolism, which is rarely the case. To be clear, I'm not an apologist for prisons or authoritarian regimes, many of whom have treated their inmates appallingly. Yet there's clearly a conflict of interest between visitor engagement and historical truth which must be acknowledged – and whilst I'm more supportive of that line being blurred at the Tower of London, I do feel that the closer we live to historical events the closer we should strive towards fidelity. The example that stood out to me and my family was the tennis court. Any budding postmodernist would have proudly beamed at the guide's attempt to invert what was clearly a symbol of the relatively relaxed prison environment into an "instrument of control" that could be cruelly taken away at the caprice of the guards. Now that doesn't mean that political imprisonment for non-violent actions, which was the case for many of the inmates, is not still deeply wrong. But I think it's also fair to say that, for all of Apartheid's manifold crimes, the treatment of inmates at Robben Island is probably not high up on the list. Again, to paraphrase an old blog: there were no tennis courts at Auschwitz.
Every revolution has its symbols and is liberal with the truth. The meta narrative of Apartheid being evil and the triumph of Mandela and his vision for a Rainbow Nation is undoubtedly a noble one – but, as a historian, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the nuances; also because I genuinely think that this narrative, while possibly necessary in the period of post-Apartheid reconstruction and reconciliation, is now starting to show cracks. As the fairly woeful state of South Africa today attests, it is arguably also impeding progress and, in some cases, causing regression.
I think it would be fair to say that, thirty years on from Apartheid, the country is not the prosperous, utopian place many had hoped. In fact, by certain metrics, the country has gone backwards. Unemployment has risen significantly since 1994, now standing at over 32%. The end of Apartheid was morally necessary, but what currently lies at the end of the rainbow nation is not always easy to celebrate: rampant crime, endemic corruption, a fearful white minority community, and some pretty questionable international posturing on issues like Ukraine and Israel.
A moment that I'd imagine stood out for many locals and tourists alike was the load-shedding in 2022 and 2023. Those who took GCSE History covering post-war Britain and remember this period – essentially planned power cuts to conserve energy – may have been guilty of thinking that load-shedding was a product of a bygone era, occasioned only by the devastating effects of war or acute energy shortages. So seeing the largest coal-producing nation in Africa unable to keep the lights on felt like a risibly chronic failure of basic state capacity. While the sense among tourists was more one of being inconvenienced, for South Africans it was one of despair, reinforcing a narrative that has particular currency among the diaspora: that corruption and incompetence were hollowing the state out from within. Add to this farm murders. Even where statistics are contested, their psychological impact is undeniable. Targeted violence against a visible minority in a country with weak institutions, a history of land dispossession and incendiary political rhetoric carries a great deal of significance that goes beyond raw numbers. Zimbabwe looms in the background not because the outcomes are identical, but because trajectories matter.
Recent geopolitical events have further brought South Africa's shortcomings into relief. Its equivocation over Russia's invasion of Ukraine has made its anti-colonial posturing ring hollow, revealing a worldview more concerned with symbolic alignment than with confronting blatant aggression. The failure to clearly condemn the violence of October 7, and the reflexive adoption of familiar liberation rhetoric, followed the same pattern. This was disappointing not only because of South Africa's self-image as a moral paragon, but because it raised uncomfortable questions closer to home about the government's willingness to confront violence consistently.
I've noticed that all of these shortcomings have almost been a source of comfort to the diaspora that we've come to know well in London, vindicating people's decisions to uproot themselves and leave. And while I sympathise with many of their grievances, this almost black and white comparison between a ramshackle South Africa and a buttoned-up Blighty has become shakier ground in recent years. Not because the situation in South Africa has particularly improved – save for Cape Town, which I'll come to momentarily – but lamentably because of UK decline.
I think it would be fair to say that many of the pathologies invoked when bemoaning the state of South Africa now, to varying degrees, apply quite pertinently to my home of London: crime is fairly commonplace, bureaucracy feels bloated and inert, and the energy crisis, driven by political choices rather than scarcity, has introduced a faintly South African quality to British governance – though embarrassingly lacking the excuse of underdevelopment in our case.
In parallel, Cape Town at least has measurably improved. The city is governed by the DA rather than the ANC and the difference is perceptible. There is an understanding that prosperity is fragile and must be protected. It is noticeably cleaner and safer than when I first began coming here. Friends who live here boast of never having been burgled, a claim that now feels increasingly alien in north London. The chasm that once felt unbridgeable has narrowed and with it the comfort of easy comparison.
Watching the South African diaspora respond to this shift has been revealing. Many who left in the 1990s and early 2000s built successful lives elsewhere, often speaking about South Africa with wistfulness and despair. More recently, that posturing has softened. Some have begun spending more time back in Cape Town, quietly rebalancing their lives; people always vote with their feet.
As a former British colony, I can never quite help shake the impulse to hold these countries as mirrors to the old motherland. South Africa has not collapsed, nor has it fulfilled its promise; it has muddled through, unevenly and imperfectly. Minority precarity exists alongside genuine progress. An increasingly multiracial Britain should take some comfort and inspiration from the Rainbow Nation's endurance, but it would be foolish not to heed certain warnings as well.