Rob Blackhurst

Observations on life in a suburb of Capetown as South Africa goes to the polls.

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"The trouble with the Blacks here is that they are so lazy. They don't want to work". It was not the first time on my stay in Hout Bay, an affluent seaside suburb ten miles from Capetown, that I had heard such sentiments, but it was startling to hear it, not as saloon bar moralizing in White Rugby Bars but from Coblah, the Congolese security guard hut surrounding our fortified compound. "Why don't they build houses instead of living in shacks?" he asked, lifting his outstretched palms towards the mid-day sun in despair.

He spoke with the frustration of an educated and once successful African stuck in a dead-end job. Like so much of the ragged tide of humanity that end up in South Africa, his careful life plans had been up-ended by political instability and war elsewhere. A decade ago in the Congo he had been in charge of Laurent Kabila's personal guard. He was dispatched to teach French to the President of Morocco's children where he lived in grand style in the Royal Palaces. But, in a shady Graham-Green style twist, he claims to have fallen out with the Generals who were defrauding the pay-roll.

So he has ended up as one of South Africa's 300,000 Security Guards, paid the customary $200 dollars a month, baking in a tiny pine hut outside an empty-half-the-year holiday home . Private Security has mushroomed since the end of apartheid with guards far outnumbering the universally mocked Police. The vast Cribs of Hout Bay all have a private security company's logo next to their mailbox and 12ft electrified fences guarding the wisteria bushes, as if Alcatraz has been transported to affluent rural Surrey. Is this a sign of Apartheid South Africa into chaos, of a country where the middle-classes have retreated into Gated Communities from fear of crime? Perhaps, but most evidence of crime here seems to be anecdotal rather than real. It seems more like the product of fear of crime and the abundance of cheap labour.

Coblah's only discernible tasks are to attend to shrieking false alarms from the over-elaborate security system – that conspire to break up the most peaceful South African summer's day- and to let the maids and swimming pool cleaners through the gate. I ask him if he has ever had to stop anyone coming in the house in the two years he has been in the job. "Never". But, despite the lack of any threat, he is kept on a constant nervy alert. When I forget to disarm the second of three locks with my keypad, a van full of guards with excited Alsatians arrived within five minutes. "You forgot to press the red button" he scolded. "Always check".

His contempt for Black South Africans has been reinforced by the ethnic violence of the last year in which 100 people died and 100,000 were displaced when Black South Africans turned on newcomers from the rest of Africa who were competing for low-skilled work. He told me that he wouldn't feel safe visiting the local black township, Imizamo Yethu, ('Our Collective Struggle") for fear of reprisals. Though it escaped the worst of the communal violence, almost all the foreigners fled the township. But, irresistibly, the migrants have continued to flood in leading locals to describe it as "Zimbabwe by the Sea".

The township is unusual in South Africa in occupying a former rubbish dump cheek-by-jowl with White South Africa. It is only a hundred metres walk from the café's serving Devon Cream Teas and bookshops selling Jeffrey Archer novels to the corrugated iron shacks. Here, I join a "Township Tour" - the newest spin-off of the South African tourist industry - with Kenny, a former ANC activist. He has electrode marks branded on his chest from torture sessions at the hands of police in the late seventies, but as a veteran of the struggle is now in the elite as a community organizer. Tourism is still a novelty here; my fellow tourists are a group of Evangelical Christians from Lewisham, who spend most of the tour making sure that they aren't been taken to see the local Sangorma witch-doctor . Understandably, Black teenagers react to this new industry by aiming their beaten-up Nissans directly at the tourists and accelerating.

There are signs of progress since the end of Apartheid. The main road, Nelson Mandela Way, has been surfaced, sewers have been installed, and, where once townships siphoned off their electricity with dangerously improvised cables, they are now on meters. An Irish pub tycoon brought an army of labourers, led by the unlikely figure of Chris Eubank, to built new houses, so that some of the township could pass for social housing in the poorer parts of East London. But, spilling out as the township climbs to the top of a hill, the tarmac runs out and new shacks appear made of cheap pieces of wood and plastic, constructed by Zimbabweans who have arrived with nothing. Flies swarm around dead rats amid the sweet-sour smell of sheeps heads cooking and human sewage. Over a third of the population is unemployed; the local paper has a report from a microbiologist warning that contact with the groundwater here could prove fatal. Imizamo Yethu sprang up in the 1990s after several local townships were burnt down: the shacks are a constant fire-hazard with their inflammable combination of wood, cooking gas and overcrowding. But over that time it has doubled in size to around 30,000. It's one of the few places in the country where the unemployed have close access to suburbia and form a reservoir of cheap casual labour to provide maids, kitchen-hands and waitresses.

It is a world that the gilded white residents of Hout Bay never enter. On the eve of Zuma's election, they might lack lacki political power but still have a near-total hold on economic power. The Yacht Club is still thriving; the blonde, big-boned gap-year kids from English public schools are still Playing Polo on the impossibly verdant turf of nearby Constantia - once home to Mark Thatcher and a favourite haunt of Prince Harry. They swap surfing tips and seem more concerned about shark attacks (the Cape peninsular is the place in the world you are most likely to be attacked by a Great White) than crime. There are still the ageing red-faced English ex-pats searching for space, sunshine and one of the few places where pensions paid in sterling can buy a good standard of living. One told me that he had left Britain in disgust after the "coup". Coup? "Yes, you know, when they got rid of Thatcher"

It is striking that white residents have consciously walked away from the "rainbow nation" that Mandela attempted to build. They believe they are living in a one-party state have retreated into their private lives. They don't think that the new opposition to the ANC – the consciously multi-ethnic Democratic Alliance can make much difference. Despite growing up with Mandela's imprisonment on Robbin island in the news, none had visited the liberation struggle's sacred site – not just because they feel guilt about the past but because it represents for them everything that has gone wrong since 1994: the ANC's toxic malfeasance and propaganda. For them, the post-Apartheid story is summed up by the fact that Robbin Island despite receiving 300,000 paying visitors a year, manages to make a loss. South Africa's Auditor General refuses to sign off the accounts amid unexplained "discrepancies in ticket sales".

In a bar one night, I talked to some University of Cape-town students who were born a year after Mandela was released from prison in 1990. They weren't a group of jocks, but pale-skinned rock fans with long lank hair, eyes focused on their converse trainers. "What do you think when you see shacks in the townships" I asked. "We don't have any sympathy" one said, "Apartheid is over, the Blacks have got equality now. We're not responsible for the way they live. They chose to elect a thug and a rapist to be their leader". Another complained about the strike by black Taxi drivers complaining about the introduction of new buses that will threaten their trade. "They are so lazy the Blacks. They'll get drunk in the townships all weekend and not be up for work on Monday".

If Hout Bay is a microcosm for South Africa, then the country is scarcely more integrated than it was during Apartheid. There are three separate communities in Hout Bay – white, coloured and black – and relations remain sour. White residents of Hout Bay, represented by the local Ratepayer's Association, have long objected to the expansion of the township – calling it a "land grab" whilst the ANC accuses white residents groups of stirring up racism. Two weeks ahead of Zuma's relationship, there aren't many rainbows to be seen here.