Visitors landing at Cape Town International Airport see what a former president of South Africa meant when he described the country as two nations.
Table Mountain looms over a landscape of desperate inequality, which new arrivals cannot miss, and where, it emerged last week, a surgeon from Britain took a fatal wrong turn.
To reach Cape Town’s five-star hotels, beaches and winelands, tourists must pass townships of corrugated shacks and tiny, government-built homes that cling to roads from the airport in every direction. This is where apartheid-era planning laws dumped mixed race “coloureds” and black populations, miles from the city centre.
It is a perfect distillation of what Thabo Mbeki was talking about in 1998, four years after South Africa’s first multiracial election, when he
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