In 2004 I travelled to South Africa and my hosts had booked me at the Sandton Sun, one of the finest hotels I have ever stayed at.
That is also the first time I realized what a terrible time bomb South Africa sat on; it was a matter of time before it exploded. Landing at Oliver Tambo airport at night, I called for a taxi.
When I told the black cab driver my destination, he balked and told me: “Do you know how expensive that hotel is? There is no way you could ever stay there!”
After asking him to please take me to the address and let me worry about the rest and he still refused to drive, I pulled out my invitation letter and showed him the hotel address. He asked which country I was from.
I said Uganda, and he repeated that there must have been a mistake. He drove only when I told him to take me and wait for the receptionist to ‘bounce’ me, so he could take me to the correct address ‘befitting an African like me’, as he kept asserting.
At the hotel, he parked where he could see the reception, and refused to leave. When I had my key card and the bellhop had my bags, I turned one last time to him and waved. Shaking his head, he entered his car and drove off.
The jealousy I tasted that day came back to me these last weeks as the xenophobic attacks on Africans living in South Africa intensified. Black South Africans genuinely don’t feel a black person from another part of the continent should be doing better than them.
They don’t feel any better about the whites, but probably fear them. For now. I remember as we drove through Johannesburg with that cab driver, I kept making small talk because he had scared me, telling him how beautiful their country was.
He would look out the window and scoff at the fact that it was “all for the whites”. Then he said something that shut me up for the rest of the trip: “We are only waiting for Madiba to die, then we will take it all back.”
That is when it dawned on me; the rainbow bruhaha was all a façade. South Africa seriously needs our prayers, for this is just the beginning, I believe.
