Oh My, the Beloved Country!

South Africa and I parted company 40 years ago. A while back, I started making annual visits to Cape Town, not simply to avoid our Hamptons winter. I wanted to measure the changes taking place in what I still consider to be my “beloved country.”

When Mandela was freed, hope surged, as I know it did for all South Africans, and the world. So is that hope being fulfilled? How much has changed?

Let me start with what has not changed. Two elements stand out: one, the staggering beauty of the country, and two, the warmth of its people. In a heartbeat, I would exchange the relaxed “Howzit?” of a white South African or the friendliness of an African for many of their U.S. equivalents. There’s something about the South African joie de vivre that lifts the heart. There are good people at work. Here are a few of them:

I met a farming family that has diversified into making cheeses; their products bring home international awards. I know of an Englishwoman who came here a few years ago, adopted two African children, and heads a charity that delivers health and educational resources to the children of vineyard workers. A young American, Amagansett’s own Mark Crandall, visits Cape Town for months at a time; in crime-infested Crossroads Township, Mark teaches young black kids the skills of basketball.

All these entrepreneurs add vitality and hope to the local scene. Are they fearful of the future? They are realists. One family, recently returned from “sanitized” Australia, summed up their feelings this way: “We only have one life, so you may as well feel the marrow in your bone and not just the wash of multiple shades of vanilla.”

Sadly, the beauty of the land, the energy of most people, and the successes of a few entrepreneurs are the only positive features I discovered on this most recent visit to the sun-splashed country I love.

In the shadows, I detected widespread disappointment. There’s dismay — even resentment — among people of every color at the inability of the government to deliver on its promises. There’s a sense, as Archbishop Tutu is said to have said some years ago, that “the gravy train only stopped to change passengers.”

I found that incompetence and corruption seem to be the defining features of South African governance. Yet, paradoxically, the ruling African National Congress party still pulls 62 percent of the vote. So, what causes this cognitive dissonance? Why do dissatisfied people vote for the source of dissatisfaction? I detected a number of issues at play, all of them a reaction to various forms of what could be called social engineering.

The A.N.C. runs provincial governments in all nine provinces (what we might call states) except the high-performing Western Cape. The governing party is desperate to win control of the Cape’s white-dominated administration at the next local elections. With this goal in view, one of the strategies has been to encourage compliant media ownership. The target is the local morning newspaper, the Cape Times.

The Cape Times was founded in 1876 and has always had a liberal slant. In recent years, though, it seems to have become in thrall to the government’s party line. This loss of editorial independence has had a drastic effect on circulation: Wikipedia reports a drop from 267,000 in 2012 to 31,930 in the fourth quarter of 2014.

A topic of more national import is — as someone described it to me — “affirmative action on steroids” or “reverse discrimination.” A recent newspaper headline, “Half Bok team must be black,” referred to the Springboks, the hallowed national rugby team. The national rugby chief believes “we have got to do our duty in terms of transformation” and implied that coaches are selecting heavier white players over lighter black players. Talent, speed, and ability, the usual yardsticks of potential, seem now to be less important than being of light weight. Many South Africans see this as a policy to make game-winning potential secondary to racial ideology.

Local people speak testily about what they call “reverse discrimination.” Whites agree when I point out that, after three centuries of discrimination, some balancing of the books is bound to occur. But they add, “If only the people who get the jobs were competent.” It is true that many public services are in disarray: the post office, telecommunications, power supplies, national pensions, and passport applications.

What seems inescapable to me is that these examples of sputtering public “service delivery” are a direct consequence of the apartheid era. How so? Because the previous Afrikaner government failed to train Africans for anything other than menial (domestic servants, cleaners) or manual labor (construction, diamond and gold mining) jobs. That karma is now back to disrupt everyone’s daily life.

Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd (1901-1966), Afrikaner prime minister and apar­theid’s architect, once said that he preferred to call apartheid “good neighborliness.” Yet he also believed that his African neighbors would forever be, as his Bible verse (Joshua 9:21) put it, “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” So his government decreed where people should live (Group Areas Act), which jobs they would be allowed to have (Job Reservation legislation), and with whom they could — to put it politely — fraternize (Immorality Act). It is, indeed, payback time for such “good neighborliness.”

This embedded incompetence, however much justified by the past, saps the spirit of many South Africans, regardless of color. A mixed-race engineer was told that his job application was rejected because he was “not black enough.” Some African garage attendants laughed when I asked them what they thought of their president: “He’s always smiling because he steals from us and we can’t catch him!”

In a country village in the dusty Karoo, a white health worker put it to me this way: “When I visited America to see my daughter — all my children have left here — I got a fantastic sense of how proud Americans are about their country. Yet here, our national motto of ‘Proudly South African’ is a joke; how can you be proud when President Zuma is stealing from taxpayers to build a 250 million rand [$21 million] retirement home? How can you be proud when we have power failures and our national airline is bust, and broadcasting chiefs plus dozens of other government officials are under suspicion of malpractice? How can you be proud when, after 20 years in power, our politicians are still blaming our failures on the legacy of apartheid?”

Has the “transformation” to a black government affected the lifestyle of ordinary white people? I mentioned to another citizen that the status of white South Africans didn’t seem to have changed much. He smiled. “Sure, we’re still traveling first class, but now we’re on the Titanic.” But he asked me to remember that, in a country of 54 million, of which 4.5 million are white, the largest percentage of tax revenue comes from the white sector (white people earn about five times as much as black people). There are 17 million “indigent” blacks in South Africa, and the government gives them the equivalent of $95 U.S. per month in support. Although there are 13.7 million registered taxpayers, only 5 million submitted tax returns in 2013.

So, most whites feel that they are doing their bit for the country. “Essentially, we are carrying the unemployed and the unemployable,” said my source.

At street level, I did not see much improvement. What I did see: tramps sorting through rubbish bins, poor whites standing at traffic lights with begging notices, criminals living on hillsides and attacking unwary hikers on Table Mountain, the walls of every home spiked with barbed wire. What I missed was any sign of law enforcement. Vigorous but fair law enforcement is a symbol of good government; the lack of it is evidence of a failing state.

Yet tourists love the beloved country! Tourism is the chief growth engine in the Western Cape. It’s a beautiful region and with the rand so puny (an exchange rate of about 12/1), it’s cheap to visit. As they say in New York, “What’s not to like?”

Restaurants, many in fabulous settings, are plentiful and serve world-class food. Service, however, is glacially slow. I dined at 25 restaurants in nine weeks (like I said, it’s cheap on dollars) and only twice did a manager walk up to our table to ask if we were satisfied. So I never blame the servers; they’re victims of poor training and supervision.

The impression I took away this year is that South Africans are shrugging off their nation’s dysfunction. (And let’s not forget that only 9 percent of Americans think that their Congress is doing a decent job.) The majority of citizens in my beloved country — as in America, as in the world — treat their self-serving politicians with disdain. People just try to get on with their lives.

South Africans seem to have accepted that this is how Africa works. They’re all passengers in a stolen car that’s steered by a learner driver who seems to treat his incompetence as a bit of a laugh. But the countryside is vivid with sunshine and the sky is blue. Sure, the car breaks down a lot, but hey, that comes with the territory.

Brian Clewly Johnson is the author of “Deep Memory” and a forthcoming memoir, “A Cape Town Boy.” He lives in Amagansett.