I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong hills. The equator runs across these highlands," Karen Blixen begins Out of Africa. "The Mountain of Ngong stretches in a long ridge from north to south, and is crowned with four noble peaks." For Karen?and other whites who came to live here?the key was the altitude of 6,000 feet and the cool air. "Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke in the morning and thought: here I am, where I ought to be."
As I write these lines, I too look out at those four peaks of Ngong for I am on the outer fringe of Nairobi, in Karen (named after Ms Blixen) on the next property to hers; indeed, I visited her house today. It is well preserved, thanks largely to the Danish government, which bought the property and gave it to the people of Kenya at independence, and its beautiful grounds?a 6,000-acre coffee plantation in her day?have the cricket pitch smell of new-mown grass. It's a lovely place; her furniture still as it was, photos of the smiling, attractive Karen and her numerous (and equally smiling) black staff. But it's as well to remember that despite her confident statement, "Here I am, where I ought to be," Karen Blixen left Africa in 1931 and in her remaining 31 years never set foot on the continent again. It seems slightly odd to be celebrating her book and her life as a key piece of Africana. A nearby shop prominently displays a picture of Meryl Streep during the filming of "Out of Africa". It is as if Karen Blixen's real achievement was that, long after her death, Robert Redford and Ms Streep were in a film about her.
As you drive around Karen, the name boards at the gates tell their own story?Harney, Griffiths, Koch, Bulloch, Mbwa Kali, Pelizzioli, Dobie, Fryer, Ballantyne Evans, Cross?but the houses are invisible, for the properties here all have several acres and long drives, populated with tall trees and thick multi-coloured bushes. To motor up the drive of the house I'm staying in is like entering heaven; as you turn off the road everywhere ahead is blue, purple, red and orange flowers, great waving bamboos, and the almost narcotic odour of the bushes overwhelms you.
But there is more than a touch of sadness even here. "Lots of people are leaving," I'm told, a fact borne out by the forest of "For Sale" signs. "Not just whites and Asians, but many black professionals. Some of the blacks go to South Africa but otherwise they go to the same places as the others, the US, Canada, Britain and so forth. They've just given up on Kenya." You can see why they might. The arrival in power of the reforming Kibaki government has been the most heartening thing to happen in decades, but the problems are such?and the government's naivete so obvious?that it is hard to believe it can quickly reverse the banditry and vigilantism, the ubiquitous power cuts, potholes, vanishing services, sky-high prices, the Aids orphans in the streets, the babies for sale you read about in the "East African Standard" and all the rest of it.
I've spent a good deal of the last three years in Zimbabwe and the feeling of d?j? vu is strong. But not complete: after all, the Zimbabwe crisis is about the death frenzy of the liberation culture, of Mugabe pulling down the pillars of the building rather than be survived by his old enemies, the white farmers. Far worse, Mugabe is deliberately trying to starve out the half and more of Zimbabweans who supported the opposition against him. Nothing remotely like that is going on in Kenya to explain the same despairing emigration. The only thing in common, and perhaps the only thing that matters, is that both countries have for too long endured an African elite in power which knew no bounds of law, patriotism or even of rationality in its enjoyment of power and its kleptomania.
I think of a white Zimbabwean couple I know, their Harare house a beautiful refuge I cannot pass without a surge of warmth. As a young lawyer, Morris abandoned his practice in the Cape after a client was re-classified from white to coloured. Morris set himself to fight this ruling but the client, overwhelmed by the collapse of his marriage, the dispatch of his children to inferior schools and the need to relocate to a slum, hung himself. Morris and his wife Sandra, atheist Jews both, had found the incident Hitlerist and had decamped to the more liberal world of Southern Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe then was). Morris became a leading lawyer; Sandra devoted herself to human rights work and, later, to helping Aids victims.
In the end, as Mugabe destroyed the country, I helped them pack for Sydney. The house, although beautiful, was, of course, unsellable. Life in Sydney would be much poorer, horribly reduced in fact, but at least predictable?there would be electricity that worked, shops with food in them, the certainty of doctors and dentists being around and even the prospect that children and grandchildren might join them there one day. Australia was a country where the pillars would not fall down. That, rather than any sense of bitterness, was what they talked about as they packed to leave the country they loved, which they had intended never to leave. I remember, one evening after helping them pack, lying in a bedroom full of boxes, wondering: perhaps all whites who stay in Africa long enough will leave as refugees.
Some of these migrations are a terrible mistake. Academics in their 50s take early retirement, sell their houses in Durban or Johannesburg for pitiful amounts in hard currency, and abandon comfortable if anxious lives to embark hopefully for Toronto or Auckland, applying in vain for jobs as schoolteachers, night-shift copy editors or what have you while they pour away their tiny capital on high bedsit rents. One of the better philosophers I knew in South Africa ended up, without the assistance of Zen, as a motorcycle maintenance man in Wisconsin. Lives full of meaning become dingy and disjointed.
Too many whites have behaved badly in Africa for their emigration to arouse much sympathy. In any case, it is beside the point, which is simply that Africa's crisis deepens by the year. If that crisis is ever to bottom out, if recovery is ever to happen, Africa will need all the hard-working, humane professional people it can find?countries which drive away people like Morris and Sandra are committing suicide.
Many of the professionals who leave Africa today are Africans or Asians but often, still, they're white. Many black professionals were brought on by whites like Morris and Sandra; theirs was the innovating liberal impulse, the first drive, the original model. It is this, rather than their skin colour, which makes their leaving so significant and so sad.
But there is a racial angle too. If you ask young whites why they leave South Africa they often speak of affirmative action, a reply which fewer Asians and no African would give. Affirmative action in favour of downtrodden minorities in the US or Britain is so ordinary that it often goes unnoticed that affirmative action in favour of a huge majority is discrimination against a better-educated minority?a different thing.
Of course, there have been pockets of whites in pockets of time who have felt they were utterly rooted here, could live nowhere else: pre-eminently the Boers, but one should not forget that Albert Camus and over a million other whites once felt equally rooted in Algeria. Today they are all gone and Afrikaners now emigrate from South Africa as easily as English-speakers.
It had always been hoped that the coming of democracy would see a return of the South African diaspora, for the country had leaked talent throughout the apartheid period. In the event, not one tenth of the white ?migr?s returned. I was one of the few white returnees of the diaspora. Many, even of those who did return, did not stay long. Everyone welcomed democracy but none could welcome the hugely higher crime rate, the anti-white, anti-Asian and anti-coloured discrimination in the job market and the speed with which Mandela's rhetoric of national reconciliation gave way to Mbeki's black nationalism.
Young whites flooded abroad in numbers?there are said to be some 300,000 in London alone?and the exodus continues. It is mainly the older age groups who stay, which means that natural mortality will produce a huge shrinkage in the white population in the decade or two ahead. To attend any theatre or orchestral concert in South Africa is to view a sea of grey and white heads in a still largely white audience, allowing one to predict with some certainty the collapse of those institutions of high culture which have survived thus far. In the universities, people are being appointed to lectureships, chairs or even vice-chancellorships who, on merit, would never even have reached shortlists before. My own home town of Durban boasts two universities. The vice chancellor of one is a man who recently boasted of how he would rub himself all over with lion fat every morning the better to arm himself against his adversaries. The other is a man who was expelled for exam cheating at the institution he now heads.
There is a terrible, ineffable sadness to this: not only the collapse of standards and cultural institutions, nor even the far larger sense that for all its 350-year length South Africa has suffered a failed colonisation. Far worse is the certainty that the euphoric birth of the "new South Africa" can hardly survive the ebbing of this tide: how to make a success of the country if orchestras, theatres, museums, newspapers, libraries and universities collapse or suffer a catastrophic lowering of standards? The government operates on the assumption that it can create an adequate new intelligentsia to run all these institutions simply by administrative fiat. All it is achieving is an ever more rapid devalorisation of everything it touches. There are times when, to borrow the title of one of JM Coetzee's books, the sense of "waiting for the barbarians" is overwhelming.
Which, indeed, brings one to Coetzee, South Africa's greatest literary son and Nobel Laureate-in-prospect. His own take on the new political correctness and the death-in-life it implied was laid bare in Disgrace. The anti-hero starts, like Coetzee himself, as a Cape Town-based lecturer in English literature. The man has a regular relationship with a coloured prostitute which seems fair enough to him: he gives her money, she gives him sex?until he sees her, harassed, with her young family. Then he drifts into an affair with a young student. Again, it seems fair enough, a voluntary liaison on both sides. But then his number is called: he has, like South African whites down the ages, been making apparently equal arrangements with people who are not only intrinsically weaker but, in the case of the student, are left in his care. He is told that the only way out is to confess, abase himself utterly. He refuses; he makes no other stand, he simply will not abase himself. He is cast into outer darkness, into complete disgrace.
Tellingly, the anti-hero is engaged in a high-culture project, anchored within a sophisticated, Eurocentric world of letters. Most of his waking hours are preoccupied with this project, but it comes to nothing. Like all such projects, on African soil it is out of place, it fails. He seeks out his daughter on a farmstead in the eastern Cape. She is gang-raped by passing Africans but decides to carry on with the pregnancy that results, refuses to complain, says it is the price of staying on if you are white. He is horrified but all he can do is give comfort in trivial, dead-end ways to lonely women or, in another telling image, to dead dogs whose carcasses need re-arranging so they can pass smoothly into the incinerator. If you are white, no positive, active role is left to you. Either you accommodate yourself to the unreasonable or you play out your life in some futile back alley. You are doomed to this by the disgraceful history of your kind. Maybe it's fair, maybe it's not, but it is the way things are.
At first the moral dissonance in "Disgrace" consists merely in the fact that the lecturer's sex-for-money deal with the prostitute isn't really fair; then in his affair with the student which is, ironically, treated as more serious. But the novel derives its punch from the far greater dissonance of his daughter's acquiescence in her own gang-rape. "Disgrace" won Coetzee the Booker for a second time and many other awards. It sold well in South Africa but its theme made Coetzee a non-person in polite society. It was ignored by South Africa's book-prize givers, who preferred third-rate but politically correct works.
Which is where the matter might have rested, were it not for the fact that the young Thabo Mbeki, who mixed with the Marxist literary crowd at Sussex University in the 1960s, had learnt how well a good literary quotation could set off a speech. This habit he employs in virtually every speech as president, earning himself a reputation for intellectualism in ANC circles where such flourishes are otherwise unheard of. Moreover, it had been decided in 2000 that the ANC would bring the errant liberal press to heel by having the human rights commission hold inquisitorial hearings into "racism in the media." The luckless ANC Minister, Jeff Radebe, was chosen to present the ANC's diatribe against "subliminal racism"?and out poured a vitriolic denunciation of "Disgrace", transparently authored by Mbeki himself: indeed, one newspaper even managed to trace the document back to Mbeki's own computer. As the Aids debate has revealed, Mbeki feels a particular fury over the image (which he feels to be immanent in many discussions of Aids) of black males as sexually irresponsible "disease-carriers," and the book's depiction of a gang rape by black men had predictably set him roaring.
"Disgrace" was thus savaged by the ruling party as the epitome of white racism and pretty clearly by the president himself. Coetzee, who has always avoided public statements, said nothing but it was not very surprising when, a few months later, news of his emigration slipped out. Typically, Coetzee refused to explain, pointing out that all emigrations were "intimate" affairs: sometimes one only understood their true significance years later. It is a good index of how fearful and ideologically bullied the South African intelligentsia has become that no single word of protest or even regret was uttered at this treatment of the country's greatest writer. Last year, I pointed out this sequence of events in a column I write for a Johannesburg newspaper. The result was a predictably furious response from a presidential spokesman denying Mbeki's authorship of the original denunciation of Coetzee and claiming that Coetzee himself had said he wasn't leaving for the reasons I had adduced. Both assertions were untrue: Coetzee had refused to give any explanation; and Mbeki, as head of the ANC, was clearly responsible for its statements on such key subjects as press freedom. This second statement too was replete with literary flourishes?this time about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. It too had probably been authored by Mbeki and then given to a "spokesman" to publish.
Much as I admire "Disgrace", its message is surely wrong. Given that the doctrine of collective guilt is nonsense, it follows that whites in Africa should only feel guilty if they have individually deserved to do so. Nor do I think that the only thing left for people like me is to rearrange dead dogs so they can go neatly into incinerators. Whites have lived in Africa since Roman times. Never more than a tiny minority, they have extraordinary achievements-as well as great crimes?to their name. If Africa is to rescue itself from its current crisis it will need all the help it can get, certainly including help from whites.
All this must have seemed very obvious in Karen Blixen's day. What happened in between was the great convulsion of Mau Mau, the ascent and now the collapse of African nationalism. Even Kenyans refer disparagingly to the group which took over in the 1960s as "the nationalists," for nationalism turned out mainly to be a cover for theft. First Kenyatta and then Moi used their office to acquire enormous wealth, as did most of their ministers. Their example inevitably percolated down through every avenue of life. The result has been the economic, environmental and moral exhaustion of the country.
It has been the same story elsewhere in Africa. The nationalist determination to get rid of Asians and whites is a key part of this irrational convulsion. What makes it irrational is that these are nationalists devoid of patriotism. If Kenyatta or Moi had really wanted to build Kenya up they would not have encouraged the pervasive culture of corruption. Moi is now reputedly the tenth richest man in the world but Kenya's hospitals, schools and physical infrastructure lie in ruins: everywhere the national patrimony has been plundered. Similarly, Mugabe has cut Zimbabwe's GDP by 30 per cent in three years and is starving half his countrymen to death, actions justified in the name of the same strange "nationalism" which has no regard for the national interest.
It is the same with Mbeki. If he were genuinely concerned with South Africa' s national interests he would not be destroying the universities or driving hundreds of thousands of the best and brightest abroad. Nor would he insist on acclaiming the genocidal Mugabe as a "progressive." Such African nationalists, although they may defend their actions in the universalist terms of justice and development, are acting out psycho-dramas of revenge and self-aggrandisement rooted more in the damaged colonial ego Fanon describes than in any rational consideration of national needs. VS Naipaul's "A Bend in the River" said it all long ago.
Many of the whites and Asians who stay on in Africa do so because they believe that this vast, irrational convulsion must pass?and pass in their own lifetime. But many have already lost this bet. Morris and Sandra sat it out through the 1980s and 1990s in Zimbabwe believing the lunacy must lessen or that the opposition would give the country a fresh start. The bitterest thing for those who leave Africa now is that they have reason to envy those who left in the 1970s or 1980s?people they excoriated at the time as fainthearts but who, because they gave up hope sooner, have used their time to build comfortable lives elsewhere rather than, as it now appears, "wasting" that time working for a future which refused to arrive. The logic, it might seem, is for all whites, Asians and those of mixed race to quit Africa. But such an outcome would not stop the irrational convulsion: the vast majority of Mugabe's victims are black, just as almost all the victims of Mbeki's Aids policies are black. If all Asians and whites left, even larger numbers of African professionals would leave too, precipitating a further economic collapse and robbing the continent not just of any shared, non-racial future but of pretty well any future at all.
For those of us committed to staying put there are many frustrations, above all that we are not allowed to contribute what we would like to give. But even if those who thought the irrationalism would pass quicker than it has have been proved wrong, they were still right that pass it must. Africa is, in any case, bigger than anyone's personal disappointment. It is always beautiful, never boring. To wake up looking down over Table Bay, or over the sub-tropical vegetation of Durban to the huge rollers of the Indian ocean, or, indeed, at the four hills of Ngong is compensation enough for anyone with a soul to lose.
