Jonny Steinberg on South African Crime and Punishment, the Mandelas' Marriage, and the Post-Apartheid Era

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm very excited to be talking with Joni Steinberg. He has written what I think is one of the very best books of the last 10 years. It's called Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage. He is, in my view, one of the most underrated, in North America at least, writers and thinkers. I like all of his books. A Thin Blue and the Number are two others I would recommend. He originally was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has taught there. He was a professor at Oxford University. He now is teaching part-time at Yale. Johnny, welcome.

Thanks, Tyler.

Your work on the police in South Africa. If there are two policemen in a township in South Africa, how large is the crowd they can successfully confront and still manage to handle?

That depends very much on the circumstances, where they are, the time of day. But if it's a Saturday night and there are 10 or 20 people and they're young, those two cops don't want to be there. They'll make sure that they're not.

So they just don't even show up and take the call?

Yeah, when I was riding around with them, it was really amusing. They had an equivalent of a CompStat system, which told them where the hotspots were, which was where they had a police. And they'd make absolutely sure to do the opposite and not be in the hotspots. Because if there were only two of them, they were not sure that they could control people.

So you spent about 350 hours riding around in South African police vans?

Yeah, about that.

This is what, 2004 to 2007?

That's right.

What was the most surprising thing you learned?

Well, exactly that the police try not to police because they're afraid of people. And they essentially gravitate to situations in which they're comfortable. And the only situation in which they're comfortable is a situation in which they've been called. And that's usually domestic violence because they walk into a scene because they've been asked to be there, and that gives them authority. And this is hardly a new thought, but what comes to me is that policing happens by consent or it doesn't happen. They don't enter crowds because those crowds don't want them and don't consent for them to be there, and so they are not. And so a relationship between police and a public is driven by whether a public wants them there.

I know you did your fieldwork some while ago, but do you have a sense of circa 2025 how willing people are to be policed in South Africa?

It was a long time ago, but it's probably gotten worse. You know, 2007 was 13 years after the beginning of democracy. There was still a novelty that you could call the police at all, which if you were Black, you couldn't do under apartheid. You know, whatever shreds of legitimacy the police had in 2007 are much, much weaker now.

And do you see any path for fixing this that's on the horizon, or it seems very distant?

No, it can be fixed. I'm not sure that the constellation of political forces in charge now can do it. But it, it, it absolutely can be fixed. I mean, I don't know if you want me to go into some of the details.

No. What, what does that path look like? Tell us.

Well, you start by choosing which crimes are the ones that you want to go after and you target them, usually beginning with good detection. And to do good detection, you assemble carefully handpicked group of people into small, well-resourced, well-motivated groups. You don't try and fix the whole thing at once. It's absolutely enormous. You start with priorities and you build good organizations around those priorities and you move from there.

And do you think South Africa is doing that now or failing?

It has been failing catastrophically up until now. There is— there's an enormous crisis in policing right now. One of the leading commanders in the police accused the cabinet minister in charge of policing of being in hock with organized crime. There's a big commission of inquiry. There's a new minister. It may be one of those inflection points in which change is possible, but there hasn't been much good in policing for the last 15 years.

And the moral force that the policemen have when confronting a crowd, does that depend much on whether they're white or Black, or that's just not very relevant? The main thing's that they're police.

It's complicated. I mean, generally Black— so when there's recruitment into the police, the educational requirements are minimal. You need a driver's license and a secondary school education. And in a country with an expanded unemployment rate of 40%, literally tens of thousands of people apply. A tiny, tiny minority of those who apply get the job. And they now have a fairly decent salary, they have a life job, they're going to get a pension. They've really, in the eyes of other people who've missed out, been catapulted unfairly into the middle class. And so there's an anger around Black police that in a country of mass unemployment, they've gotten ahead just by chance, just by throwing the dice. And so there's a sense that you're being policed by people who are trying to get out of the ghetto and have succeeded and shouldn't have. So that creates this class resentment towards the police, towards Black police.

So you think it might be even harder for Black police?

I think it's hard for both, but those are the particular resentments that Black police carry.

And female cops versus male cops, do you think there's a noticeable difference?

Yeah, well, in domestic violence, there's a huge difference, and I see how differently female and male cops police a domestic violence scene. I mean, the really sad thing about policing in South Africa is very few ordinary people know what the law is, and it's, it's made up by police in the and they have a lot of leeway because they've been called onto the scene. And what a woman does and a man does is, in my experience, usually very, very different. There are different imaginations of what a family should be, different types of empathy. Yeah, it can make the world of difference.

And on average, who do you think does the better job, the male cop or the female cop?

It depends so much on the situation. It depends on the male and the female cop. It depends who the perpetrator was. I don't think you can generalize. Scenes surprise you. I was always surprised by what happened at the scene.

How trustworthy are the police themselves?

Less and less so. It's become fairly common practice in South African police that if you're going to see to a crime scene, see to a crime, you get paid. It's become fairly endemic in the South African police.

And you're paid by whom?

Paid by the people you want to investigate, who want you to investigate the crime. So, for instance, Police arrive on a scene, it could even be domestic violence, and, you know, police could say, "Well, whether we stay depends on whether you make it lucrative for us." Is it ever like some parts of Mexico where you're more afraid of the police themselves than of the criminals?

I mean, the police then are the criminals.

I think that's rare. I think that in a poor ghetto on a Friday and a Saturday night, the police are very violent. They move in in paramilitary formations, they throw young men on the streets into vans, but Generally, they will not seriously hurt or kill somebody in a situation like that. So yeah, I'd say people are not more afraid of the police than of criminals, but they are very, very wary of the police.

And how dangerous is it to work as police in South Africa? If they're not going to a lot of the crimes and the troubled situations, is it in some ways a safe job, or is it still very dangerous?

I don't know what the numbers are now, but the per capita rate of murder of policing when I was working on this stuff 15 years ago was considerably lower than a 25-year-old Black man in a ghetto who was not a police officer. So they were safer than the people they were policing.

And during the transition from apartheid, what mistakes do you think were made with policing and police forces? What would you have done differently with the benefit of hindsight?

Well, there was a kind of a 4 or 5-year hiatus in which the new government did not trust the existing police, but also had a constitutional agreement not to get rid of them. And there was a long pause, and oddly, in that pause, some fairly good work was done. When South Africa's second democratically elected president came to power, Thabo Mbeki, he immediately began using the police to police his own party. He put his own police commissioner in place. A number of his opponents and enemies were being policed by, you know, a function that was meant to be a state function, not a party function. And— that saw a rapid decline because once the police is seen as a politician's vehicle, becomes very difficult to maintain its bureaucratic integrity.

Now, if I'm in Cape Town, at least many parts of that seem relatively safe. What have they done differently or why has that evolved differently?

Well, I think because probably in Cape Town, you were in middle-class bourgeois spaces, which are privately policed. They're not as—

You mean private security forces? Yes.

They're not nearly as safe as the streets of New York City or London or Paris. But on the other side of the mountain is Khayelitsha, which is a township of, I think now, over a million people. And the murder rate there is literally exponentially higher than in the parts of Cape Town you and I wander through.

But it's a puzzle for me as an economist in many areas, not just Cape Town, why the criminals don't take greater effort to move into the safer neighborhoods and commit crimes there. Is it because they stand out too much, or they're culturally not attuned to that possibility, or they simply would be detained right away? What stops the mobility across the borders?

Well, there's a lot of mobility across the borders. Property crime rates are pretty high in middle-class Cape Town. But the vast majority of violent crimes are between young men who know one another. You know, predatory crime sometimes results in murder, but it's a small minority of them. So yes, I mean, middle-class people are much, much more victimized by crime than their counterparts in, you know, where you and I live, but not murder.

And the property crime would be something like breaking into a home to take a television, look for jewelry, or is it different?

Stealing a car. You know, the scary ones are the face-to-face ones, being robbed at gunpoint, and that ebbs and flows depending on how well middle-class areas are policed.

Now, in your book, The Number, you studied prison gangs in South Africa. How do those gangs regulate the behavior of their members?

Through a combination of pretty scary violence and a very, very elaborate set of rituals, which are based on a rich old oral history. And so to be initiated into one of South Africa's prison gangs is to be told a story of a figure who is both mythical and based on a real historical figure called Nongoloza, who was abandoned at the very beginning of the industrialization of South Africa. And his story of banditry, you know, which is told as one of crime as anti-colonial resistance, becomes a set of laws for a gang. And the disputes between him and his colleagues in their time, primarily over gangsters can have sex with one another, mirror the divisions of gangs today. It's an extraordinary ritualized world, but it's also a fascinating way of storytelling because you have law and ritual embedded in narrative. And so to enforce law is to tell a story.

That seems culturally richer than American gangs. Maybe I'm wrong there, but do you have the sense the South African gangs have deeper stories or institutions?

I haven't come across anything quite like it elsewhere in the world. You know, South Africa, you could walk into any prison anywhere in the country and one of the gangs derived from these stories, they call the 26s, the 27s, and 28s will control the prison and they'll be telling the same story. And that story hasn't changed all that much in a century. It's extraordinary the extent to which it's been passed from generation to generation and the fact that it has not lost its texture, it hasn't lost its basic narrative line. Those prison gangs are probably the oldest institutions in South Africa.

And those gangs, they have courts and trials, right? What are those like?

I mean, again, they're enormously ritualized. So the gangs speak a language which is purposed to make these organizations functional, including judicial functions. And so A judge and a gang will essentially retell the story of Nongoloza in order to try the accused. You're literally metaphorically placing yourself in another time, in another place, out in the open, in the late 19th century, deciding whether you've lived by Nongoloza's rules. There's a strange combination of fairytale, procedural process, and violence.

Do you have a sense of where all this comes from?

I mean, in the first place, it comes from the mass incarceration of the early working class of Johannesburg. There was a point in the early 20th century where 70-80% of working-class Black people who entered the city would go into the jails at some point. And Nongoloza's— the real historical Nongoloza's original gang was out in the open, and he was eventually subdued. He was arrested, he went into jail, and strangely, much of the early working class went into jail with him. So there's a parallel movement between the founder and an entire class of people. You know, the extent to which incarceration became an everyday experience for most people was extraordinary. It was one of the One of the defining features of early modern South Africa. It stands out in relation to the rest of Africa, certainly.

And what is it exactly that they're going to jail for?

Well, back in those early days, it was having the wrong stamp in your book or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that really intensified during the high apartheid period. By the late 1960s, something like 3/4 of a million people were being taken off the streets every year for having the wrong stamp in their book or not having their book at all. It was racial minority regimes policing of Black movements, which put the majority of those people in prison.

And that just becomes practically impossible at some point, right?

Well, the apartheid government was terrified by what it was doing. It never realized it would have to use so much coercion. And by the late '60s, early '70s, there was a very, very strange sense of unreality in South Africa's ruling elites. It knew that the system had a shelf life. It could not last forever. There wasn't really the courage or the imagination to think of something else. And so the system kept spinning with everybody knowing it had to come to an end sometime. It went on much, much too long.

And is Rhodesia imprisoning working-class people at a comparable rate, or that's a very different story?

It's the one other Southern African country which is imprisoning a huge amount of people, not the same percentages as South Africa, but also a very strong bureaucratic state imprisoning a lot of people to police a new proletariat.

And in the prisons, how did apartheid work? There's separate sections for white and black prisoners?

Yes.

And the guards are Black for the Black sections and white for the white sections, or what?

It changes through history. In the beginning, it's only white warders for Black prisoners. But by the 1970s, 1980s, there aren't nearly enough people to staff the apartheid state. And by then, the majority of civil servants are Black. But there's a color bar, there's a limit to how far their careers can advance. And so you have the basic functionaries of police from— of the state, from police to prison warders to nurses being Black in a white-governed state.

And are the guards in league with the gangs? In essence, they find that's the easiest way to keep order is to make deals with the gangs and let the gangs rule?

Sometimes, but generally, canonically, it was a deeply, deeply hostile relationship. And it was— that hostility was fueled by the occasional act of ritual violence that gangsters inflicted on a white warder. And when that happened, the relationship would break down and there would be a ritual of general violence inflicted on the entire prison population. The entire population would be herded into a courtyard. The warders would, not only warders, but depending on where the prison was, the white farmers in the area would all collect with baseball bats and literally break bones.

And who would run the prison economies? Would it be the gangs or the guards?

Well, until the late 1980s, there was barely a prison economy. They were tightly sealed. But as apartheid began falling apart, so did the prisons. And by the late 1980s, early '90s, warders were one of the main conduits in the drug economy, passing merchandise in and out of the prison. So things changed very rapidly, very quickly.

I suppose I have this as a more general question about apartheid, but prisons in particular. What if someone had a skin color that at least visually did not very well match the legal status of their race? They would be put into which kind of prison and how would they fare?

Well, it depends what it said in their passbook, in their identity documents. And there was a huge debate in early apartheid South Africa about how to racially classify people. Generally, the judiciary wanted it to be by ancestry, but that became very tricky because there was much more mixing than the apartheid government could be comfortable with. And finally, what was used was the common sense of white working-class people. In 1950, the government decided that it was going to finally racially categorize every single person in the country, and a posse of white working-class people who had really only become white working class in the last generation through a project of racial uplift, and therefore knew how they were not black, were sent out to define who everybody was. And they wouldn't certainly know scientific classifications or even any particularly rigid classifications. It was relying on intuition. We know that you are not white by the way you carry yourself, by where you live, by who your friends are, by what you wear. So in a sense, the cultural victory was punctuated by this process of racially defining everybody. You could appeal against it, and it's, it's through the appeals that we see this process happening because those are written down and transcribed.

And the group known as coloreds or the Malays How were they classified in the prison system?

Well, the prison that I did most of my research in was predominantly colored people because the majority colored population is in the Western Cape, and that's where the prison was. They were classified as coloreds. That was one of the official apartheid categories.

So they have their own set of cells that are set off from the others?

Oh, no, no. They and black people were mixed. It was white people who couldn't mix with anybody else.

And once apartheid fell, How is it that the prisons change in all these regards? Are the prisons themselves desegregated?

Yes, they are. And you get white people appearing in this maximum security prison that I was researching for the first time in South African history. There'd be very few and far between. There'd be one white guy in a cell of 50 people. They stood out and they had to acculturate very quickly. They become members of a gang. They would work out some sort of modus vivendi. They were quite exotic figures in this environment.

Overall, did that go okay or was there a lot of violence or—?

There is a lot of violence in South African prisons.

Sure, but relative to normal status quo.

I mean, I can only say what I saw and what— I never watched a white person come in for the first time and have to negotiate things from scratch. I met white people who had been there for a while and had managed to negotiate a presence. I don't think they were necessarily subject to more violence, particularly more violence than anybody else.

My favorite book of yours again is Winnie and Nelson, which has won a number of awards. A few questions about that. So they're this very charismatic couple. Obviously, they become world historical famous. For how long were they even together as a pair?

Very, very briefly. They met in early 1957. They married in '58. By 1960, Mandela was no longer living at home. He was underground. He was on the run. By 1962, he was in prison. So They were really only living together under the same roof for 2 years.

And how well do you feel they knew each other?

Well, that's an interesting question because I don't— Nelson Mandela was very, very in love with his wife, very besotted with his wife. He was 38, she was 20 when they met. She was, she was beautiful. He was a notorious philanderer. He was married with 3 children when they met. He really was besotted with her. I, I don't think that he ever truly came to know her. And when he was imprisoned, he— you can see it in his letters, it's quite remarkable to watch— she more and more becomes the center of meaning in his life, his sense of foundation, his sense of self as everything else is falling away. And he begins to love her more and more and even to coronate her more and more so that she doesn't forget him. His letters grow more romantic, more intense, more emotional. But the person who he's so deeply in love with is really a fiction. She is becoming She's living a life on the outside, and you see this very troubling line between fantasy and reality. A man becoming deeply, deeply involved with a woman who is more and more a figment of his imagination.

Do you think you learned anything about marriage more generally from writing this book?

You know, one of the set of documents that I came across in writing the book were the transcripts of their meetings in the last 10 years of his imprisonment. The authorities bugged all of his meetings. They knew they were being bugged, but Nevertheless, they were very, very candid with each other, and you very unusually see a marriage in real time and what people are saying to each other. And when I read those lines, I— 10 different marriages that I know, you know, passed through my head. The bickering, the lying, the nasty things that people do to one another, the cruelties, it all seemed very familiar.

How is it you think she managed his career from a distance, so to speak?

Well, she was a really interesting woman. She arrived in Johannesburg, 20 years old, in the 1950s, where there was no reason to expect a woman to want a place in public life, particularly not in the prime of public life. And she was absolutely convinced that there was no position she should not occupy because she's a woman. She wanted a place in politics, she wanted to exercise power, but she understood intuitively that in that time and place, the way to do that was through a man. And she went after the most powerful rising political activists available. I don't think it was quite as cynical as that. She loved him, but she absolutely wanted to exercise power, and that was a way to do it. And once she became Mrs. Mandela, I think she had an enormously aristocratic sense of politics and of entitlement and legitimacy and understood her to be South Africa's leader by virtue of being married to him and understood his and her reputation as her projects to endeavor to keep going. And she did so brilliantly. She was unbelievably savvy. She understood the power of image like nobody else did. And at times saved them both from oblivion.

This is maybe a delicate question, but from a number of things I read, including your book, I get the impression that Winnie's just flat out a bad person. If you look at the late 1980s, she's involved in kidnappings. She endorses necklacing. It's one thing to be with some other men when your husband's in prison, but she seems to have an excessive number of affairs. She's, you know, borderline communist. What's the defense of her? Or is she just a bad person who did some important good things?

Well, I think if you're a biographer, you can't really— it's a bad starting point to think of somebody as a flat-out bad person. I don't think you're going to write a good book for them if that's your starting point. But I'm a reader, right?

So you can be the biographer and have the complex view, and I'm the reader.

She did some chilling and scary stuff. She, you know, the irony is that she was meant to be the great representative of the oppressed, but the people that she hurt were poor, young, Black, and defenseless. She was capable of terrible violence. But as a biographer, I'm also interested in the fact that she was capable of deep sympathy and love and commitment. And my puzzle was to put that all together in one psyche, in one human being. And I think that in the end, saw these amazing antinomies in her not as contradictions, but as part of one psychic architecture.

And young Winnie and older Winnie, do you think it's a big difference in terms of moral behavior, or she's more or less the same quality person throughout?

That's a difficult one. There are lots of underlying continuities. From a young age, she— I mean, one way to begin is with her family. She was one of 11 children. She had unbelievably ambitious parents who were not scared to tell their children that we're going to pick winners among you and we don't care about the losers. And, and so she understood from very early in life that the stakes were very, very high. She, she got into her father's head and made sure that she occupied a prime, prime place there in order to be a favorite child. And she lived her life that way. She, she had very, very weak boundaries. She would need to be very intensely involved with somebody to, to colonize their heads, to be inside them all the time. And, and that, you know, that stretched throughout her life. Unfortunately, it meant that she made for a very weak prisoner when she was being tortured because she allowed the man torturing her deep into her head, deep into her psyche. And at one point, many years later, 15 years after she'd been tortured by him, he suddenly came up in an interview where she said, he made me, I am his child. I experienced his hatred at such close quarters that I began to hate him back. And she presents that hatred as the fuel of her political activism. So I don't think that was in her at the beginning. I think that— I do think that happened to her because of who she'd been at the beginning, if that makes sense.

When it comes to Nelson, what do you think were the masks and how did you get under those masks as you kept on writing the book?

So there were just a formidable number of masks. Nelson's genius was to read the times and to present himself as a character he felt the times needed. And so in the mid-1950s, when he was a Black lawyer, which self-represented something very powerful, he would dress in very expensive tailored suits, he would drive a fancy car, he would have a beautiful young wife, and he understood that to be a Black man in the height of apartheid, transmitting that image was politically powerful, that it had substance. When his organization was banned, he immediately changed the mask and really molded himself on Fidel Castro. He grew his hair, he wore trench coats, he was a military man. When he went on trial in '64, he recast himself as a martyr. The most important and greatest mask he wore was in the 1990s to bring democracy to South Africa. He himself personally at that time felt that deep, deep raging anger at what had happened to him. He felt that his life had been destroyed and was a tragedy. He was very sad, but he felt that if he brought that into politics as the leader of Black South Africa, he would lead his people to war. And so the mask he wore was really the opposite of what he felt as a And as an avuncular old man, he felt that to bring the country from the brink of civil war to a peaceful coexistence, he would have to present himself in the most unthreatening form that he knew. And he projected joy and cheerfulness when personally he was feeling anything but. The capacity to wear that mask, that professionalism, that vocational certainty, and to do it so well with very few hitches was quite remarkable.

What did you rediscover about South Africa writing this book?

I discovered how essentially South Africa didn't really heal from the civil war that it fought in the 1980s. I thought that I knew about that, but delving into the minutiae of Winnie's life in the late 1980s and the extreme violence in which was surrounding her and which she was involved, you know, I understood that those wounds had never really quite healed, partly because of what didn't happen next, that it was a very sadly formative time in South African history and There are some societies that recover very quickly from extreme moments and others that don't, and South Africa never quite did.

It surprised me in India how much in recent times there's been a move away from the heritage of Gandhi and simply assuming everything connected with Gandhi must be good. To what extent is something like that going on in South Africa with the Mandelas, either or both of them?

It's very much happening. Many educated middle-class young Black people have really quite decisively turned their back on Nelson Mandela. He's associated with 30 years of ANC rule, which have not gone especially well. Young people legitimately ask what sort of deal he made in the early 1990s and whether it was the right one and whether it worked. He's very, very much out of fashion among young people. Winnie also, but perhaps less so. There's particularly a There's a, I guess, a middle-class populist constituency for radical politics in South Africa and they take her as a lodestar. They take her as a proponent of a violent revolution that ought to have happened that never did. I don't think that there are a huge amount of people, but they're vocal and there are a fair number of them.

What did go wrong with the ANC?

I think the ANC governed reasonably well for 15 years. They were very lucky that they caught a commodity supercycle. They benefited greatly from China's rise and in the first 15 years of of democracy, literally everybody did better. The bottom two deciles of South African society were earning about twice as much as they did at the end of apartheid. And the ANC managed that wave reasonably well, built a reasonably strong state. You know, what happened in 2007, 2008 is that there was something of a revolution inside the ANC and a thwarted, frustrated provincial middle class essentially took over the organization and the state. And their politics was pretty nihilistic. They were very, very racially brittle people. They didn't believe that they or anybody else was capable of building a future in such a difficult country. And they began fleecing the state through their position in power and in the bureaucracy. It was tragic to see.

As I'm sure you know, there's been plenty of discourse in the United States over the last year about Afrikaner farmers, claims about how many are being murdered or having their land taken. Set us straight on what you think is really going on.

Well, white South African farmers are, are not being murdered in huge numbers, but what is happening is— so the vast majority of people who are murdered in South Africa are young Black and unemployed, and that's— it's incontestable. That is statistically shown again and again. The majority of the violence is in the ghettos, but it spills out in a very meaningful way into the suburbs and into the middle classes. And middle-class South Africans experience a degree of crime and a degree violence which their counterparts in the developed world do not, and that is very scary. It's particularly scary when through all the years of the 20th century, the suburbs and the middle classes were largely protected from violence. And so to be a white farmer in South Africa is to face a degree of threat of violence which is scary. But the idea that they are victimized, that there is a genocide, is absolutely insane.

One hears from a distance that the judiciary is the part of South African government that has held up the best over all these troubles. Do you agree with that?

And if so, why? The judiciary's independence has held up, but its quality has not held up. So it is certainly not caved and done the executive's bidding. And you ask why? That is probably because of a very deep and old legal tradition, going back to the apartheid years and before, a legal culture which insisted on independence from the apartheid state and which made the apartheid government's life very difficult, and that's great, and it's been a treasure. But the quality of judiciary, as with every other public institution in South Africa, is much weaker than it was 10 years ago. And that is a result of that revolution I was talking about in 2007, '08, of a very, very inside the ruling party, a very different group of people coming to power.

Well, what does the optimistic case for South Africa look like? Because you've said some fairly pessimistic things, yet from my point of view, the one time I went Things were doing a bit better than I was expecting. Admittedly, I went to Cape Town, but I thought, well, there'd be electricity shortages all the time. There weren't. There seems to be some capacity for renewal and self-improvement in the system, or is that just my delusion?

No, it's not your delusion at all. I, you know, I'm replying to your questions and maybe that's what makes me sound more pessimistic than I am. But I think that what South Africa has, which is quite remarkable given What's happened to it over the last 15, 20 years is it has a very solid political center, which is very hard to dislodge, and a pretty sane liberal-minded political center. And it's guaranteed 25, 30% of the votes every election and is expanding. And that gives a fairly solid rational basis to govern the country well into the future. And a lot of the stuff that fell apart in, you know, between 2010 and 2020 can be rebuilt, basic stuff like logistics and electricity. And the basic plumbing of the country. It's being very slow to rebuild, but it can be rebuilt. But whether it can do more than that, whether it can actually flourish, depends on something much more ambitious. And that includes rebuilding a civil service, which is really, really on its knees and whose personnel are animated by a very destructive ideology. And for the politics for that sort of renewal to be in place, we're not there now. And that may take some time if it ever happens. So, So I'm not despairing. I think that some modest improvement is possible and probable, but it is modest until something more fundamental changes. Should I buy land there?

Let's say I were a person of means.

It depends where. You could certainly buy land in Cape Town. Its value will probably increase. Yeah, it's a big country. It depends where you're going to be.

I asked GPT. What happened with land prices in Durban? Now, some while ago, people used to tell me Durban was a fantastic place. I've never been there. And over a few decades, it seems land prices have fallen 20, 25%, which is unusual in this world, right? Land has become a lot more valuable. It's one of the largest cities. What exactly went wrong with Durban?

It's also one of the cities that I don't know best, Tyler, but I think that it was— the main issue is absolutely shocking local government management. And that itself is a symptom of the corruption of the ruling party. Local government in Johannesburg and in Durban and in one or two other major cities has been ruined. And the result is that the basic infrastructure of the place is deteriorating over time. And the result is that commerce flees that, the costs of doing business escalate. So yeah, a great deal of South Africa's problems are about the nitty-gritty of governance at a local and regional level.

How has the struggle against HIV/AIDS gone?

It's gone remarkably well if you consider that 25 years ago, 20 years ago, something like 25% of the population was HIV positive. You know what, antiretroviral treatment, which at the time nobody was sure whether South African Health Service could administer, they did administer. Several million people went on to treatment. That was a sign of state capacity that really could work despite the fact that we had a president who was an AIDS denier. Socialist. So that was an extraordinary achievement.

Do you think there's any chance of a Zimbabwe-like scenario for South Africa, or that is unimaginable to you? It's not unimaginable.

It is much more unlikely. You know, what Zimbabwe didn't have was 30% of the electorate always voting for the center. It's probably South Africa's saving grace. To try and do in South Africa what was done in Zimbabwe would be very, very hard. There would be concerted resistance from across the society, it would be very, very hard.

If we think about the South African economy, my sense is there's ongoing deindustrialization. Mining at times does very well, may have a very bright future with all this investment in hardware. Agriculture may have a very bright future as we're seeing, say, in Brazil. And if the economic future of South Africa is many more exports of agricultural products and mining outputs. Do you worry that's bad for income inequality, or am I not identifying the issue correctly?

No, I think that you're right. I think that agriculture has been a great success over the last 30 years and can be much, much more successful. Mining has been a bit of a disaster because it's been very badly managed by public policy, but there is a potentially, with different politics, a great future in that. What it produce more inequality. You know, South Africa's great, great problem is human capital and its incapacity to build an education system which is going to make the majority of the population employable in more than unskilled labor. That is probably the blockage to a more equal country.

Do you think Johannesburg is still artistically robust? People tell me it is. That for an art scene, it's hard to do much better.

It's fascinating. Yeah, it's amazingly so. Music, fine arts, theater. Yeah, it's probably more robust than it's ever been.

So let's say I go there and I want to take in these art scenes. What's the way that I do that that is more or less physically safe? Because I do want to go there and do that.

Well, there's a sample of different stuff that you need to take in. So one would be to go to Soweto and to its jazz scene, and you don't need do too much to keep yourself safe. You go on an organized tour. There are many, many tour guides who would take you to see jazz. If you know local people, you go with local people. Another is the music scene in downtown Johannesburg, just north of downtown Johannesburg around Bramfontein. Again, there's— you can get in an Uber and go to your venue and listen to your music and go home without too much fear.

But if this is some parts of Brazil, and I'm not saying it is, but I would be afraid even to walk out of the private car into the door of the club, that there'd be a reasonable chance I'd be mugged, you know, even in that 30-second interval.

So you're saying it's not like that? Yeah, it's not like that. I'm, you know, I do that all the time without fear. Everybody I know does that all the time without fear.

And to see visual arts, what do I do there?

The visual arts are not as strong at the moment. There are a couple of renowned galleries that you could go to. There are also a couple of really interesting museums. There's an Apartheid Museum, there's a Constitutional Court Museum, which both have really interesting collections. I would do that.

That. Why does William Kentridge still live in Johannesburg, indeed in his childhood home, I hear?

I have absolutely no idea. I just read what he writes and says about it, which is that he wants to live somewhere very interesting, somewhere fluid. I think I remember him once saying that in South Africa, you stop your car at a traffic light and you're watching a small-scale civil war around you, and that's interesting.

And you've thought of moving back but decided not to?

Yeah, I did actually move back briefly 10 years ago and left again. And that was— it wasn't so much about the country as about a lot of personal matters.

As a South African and, of course, a scholar of South Africa, do you feel there are things you at least might understand about Elon Musk that non-South Africans would miss?

It's a puzzle to me. South Africans are very preoccupied with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Feel and their South African connection. I honestly don't know. I do think that, you know, I'm more or less the same age as Musk. He grew up maybe 50 kilometers away from where I did. There was something about 1980s South Africa where everybody knew that the old order would not last very much longer, that a new order was on its way. And certainly in my circles, that produced a kind of an excitement about first principle thinking about having no shibboleths, about imagining the unimaginable. It's quite possible that he took that with him. It was certainly enormously formative for me. Beyond that, I'm not sure.

I don't know Musk, but I've thought for a while that his desire to settle Mars is perhaps a uniquely South African impulse, the notion that people need somewhere they can escape to.

I'm skeptical of those thoughts. I mean, there are a lot of them, a lot of similar thoughts. It seems too obvious to me. I think that human beings are always more interesting than you imagine them when you actually sit down with them and talk to them.

What do we learn about South Africa from how the country handled COVID?

So I watched the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, lock the country down using the military, and he's a very, very eloquent and charming man and a very powerful speaker when he needs to be. And I remember him addressing the army and telling them that they need to be kind. They are the army and that they do have weapons, but this is about a health risk, not a security risk. And yet watching what happened next was devastating. It was a hard, hard lockdown. It lasted much, much, much longer than it ought to. It worked fine for middle-class people. Poor people suffered enormously, both in the short term and in the long term. And you had the irony of a government that was once, long ago, a liberation movement, feeling overly paternalistic, much, much too statist, feeling that it needed anxiously to control the situation. And the result is that it's hurt its own people gratuitously. So it was sad to watch.

And you think it was just error?

I think it was— in the beginning, it was fear. I don't think there was a single case in South Africa when the lockdown began. It was in the collective imagination that something really awful might happen, which has been part of South Africa's collective imagination for a long, long time. So I think initially it was fear, and in the end, I think it was there's a group of people in Ramaphosa's cabinet who had been itching for serious state intervention for a long time and saw the opportunity, not in a cynical way, but because that's what they believed they should do. And so you had a very raw, very blunt, statist mentality given the lease of life that it wouldn't have had outside of an epidemic.

How is fiction writing going in South Africa these days?

Are there people I should Well, I think some of the best fiction in South Africa was written after the end of apartheid. So one book that stands out is by an Afrikaans writer, Marlene van Niekerk. I think the book in English has two titles depending where it is. One is "Ag Haat," the other is "The Way of the Woman." It takes place in the head of a dying woman who has motor neuron disease and cannot communicate or move. And all she can do is make eye contact with her carer, who is a colored woman who has worked for the family all her life. And through this very intense wordless interaction, a very complicated story about a country comes together. It's an extraordinary book. I think it's a work of genius.

And you think those traditions are still alive and well, or do you have a sense of that? Yeah, I think that's—

I wouldn't be surprised if the best South African novels are in the future. The traditions are very much alive and well.

And what accounts for that vitality? Is it the sense that the stakes are high? Because when I read South African fiction, which I know only a little, but it never seems obsessed with trivialities, I would It is partly because the stakes are high.

It's also just a very long tradition now. You know, this was a country of nationalisms, and nationalisms get very, very serious about their literary figures and about their literature. It's in the country's DNA to produce writers and for writers to be very serious in the world around them. It was part of the Afrikaner nationalist project. It was part of the Black nationalist project. It was an idea that to write is to be deeply serious. It's an old, you know, it's a classic old trait of old nationalism.

And for you next, you're writing a biography of Cecil Rhodes. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. Now, as I'm sure you know, there's one that just came out by William Storey, The Colonialist. Yeah.

What will you do that he doesn't? Mine is considerably more intimate. I was initially intrigued by the commonplace that he was gay and how a gay man, if he was gay, came to exercise the power he did, what the connections were between the very intimate and the very public. That was my starting point. The subject matter shifted as I learned more and more about him. Him. I thought the idea that he was gay became more and more complicated. His very idea of what a private life should be was deeply strange to me. It took a long time to get my head around it. But yes, I think it's both a much more intimate book and also a grander book in the sense that I tried to understand the geopolitics of the time and the place that he found in it. Was he gay? I don't think that he understood himself as gay. I suspect that he never had sex with anybody, man or woman, although I don't know. But I certainly think that looking at it as an outsider, he was in love with some of the young men around him, and that love was very important. It was formative. It was shaping.

One reads that at first he did not want women to come to what became Rhodesia. Is that true?

At the very, very beginning, because the people he sent into Rhodesia were doubling. They were settlers, but they were soldiers. They were military and they were prospective farming class. They doubled up and he didn't see a place for women in a force that may be an invading force. But he certainly wanted women soon afterwards. As soon as settlement became viable, he wanted women.

And why is Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, settled so much later than South Africa, by whites, that is?

Well, white people settled at the southern reaches of the Cape in the mid-17th century largely because its rainfall patterns and climate were Mediterranean, and it didn't have malaria, it didn't have diseases that were going to kill white people. And there was a northern march beginning at the beginning of the 18th century, and it finally got as far as current-day Zimbabwe towards the end of the 19th century. So it was simply about a northern movement of white people in an attenuated way, not dissimilar to the western movement of white people in, in America.

And the English families that moved there in the 1920s, I mean, are they just foolish or was it—

You mean in the 1820s?

No, the 1920s. So a lot of English families moved there after World War I.

To Zimbabwe, to Rhodesia.

Yeah, whatever you want to call it. Are they just foolish to think that can work?

No, by the 1920s, it was working. Rhodesia was for the first time a successful staple exporter. It was earning foreign currency. It had a pretty strong state by then. It had those sort of institutions that what white middle-class people could be nourished by. It was politically docile. I don't think they were foolish at all. I think that they ended up living quite good lives.

Are you optimistic about Botswana?

You know, Botswana is at an inflection point. It's just had a change of government for the first time since 1966. It has been reliant on diamond revenue and the diamond industry is in trouble. I think it's going to take a political class to negotiate this period very deftly. I don't know whether they will. It's a difficult moment.

Namibia, optimistic? I think Namibia, a bit like South Africa, goes on.

It doesn't grow very quickly, doesn't fall apart. It's a hard place. There's a lot of crime, a lot of unemployment. That's probably South Africa's future too, not coming apart at the seams, but not flourishing.

And for our listeners, let's say someone wants to visit South Africa, and other than safari— put that aside, of course everyone should do that— but what in your view is something like an ideal 2-week trip around South Africa? Where should someone go and why?

Well, I'd go to Cape Town because it is, to my mind, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. You've been to Cape Town. What did you make of it?

Yes, but only Cape Town. Fantastic. And I'm hoping to go back this March. And take my sister and possibly my wife?

Well, from Cape Town, I would drive eastwards along the coast for a long way, for, you know, as much as 2,000 kilometers till you start moving up the east coast and towards the old Transkei. The coastline is absolutely spectacular all the way. It's just an affront of natural beauty for mile after mile after mile. And if you get as far as the Transkei, you will also just socially see the densest rural zone of South Africa. You know, you will see the history of the country. You will see that old apartheid zone that was meant to be its own quasi-sovereign state back in the old days and what it looks like.

And that drive is relatively safe? Yeah, that drive is pretty safe. And where should I go then?

How long did you say you have?

Say 2 weeks. Well, I'd say— This is for all our listeners. I'd say— Like, I know what I'm going to do, but I'm going to go to Durban too.

It depends what you like. You could also drive west and north from Cape Town up the west coast, which is semi-deserts and very beautiful. I would definitely go to Johannesburg. It is a lively, quite wild, very, very vibrant city, by far South Africa's most vibrant city. If you like music, you must go there.

And I should stay in the suburbs or in the center city, or how do I do that?

I think you should stay in the suburbs, but not too far out. Johannesburg is urban sprawl, and you don't want to be in the midst of the sprawl. You want to be in one of the suburbs just to the north or the west of of downtown, which makes you pretty central. You can pretty much go to wherever is interesting within a 20-25 minutes Uber ride. That's where I'd stay. I definitely wouldn't miss Johannesburg. I really, really wouldn't miss anywhere in South Africa because I was afraid of crime. You know, crime is zoned. There is ghettos. There are ways to move around quite safely if one doesn't do anything stupid.

Now, you mentioned the biography of Rhodes, but just to close, I will ask, what else do you think of yourself as doing over the next, I don't know, 10, 15 years? You're young, you're very productive. What else? Well, I'm—

I've finished a draft of the Rhodes book, and I'm dabbling at the next book, and I'm not exactly sure what it's going to be, but I'm rooting through archives in Johannesburg for the mid-apartheid period.

So about Southern Africa in some way?

Yes, the next one is definitely going to be about Southern Africa for and probably historical.

And you think you'll write about Southern Africa for the rest of your life?

Well, as you say, I'm young and hopefully the rest of my life will be a long time. So who knows? I'm not somebody who plans into the future very long and I hope that I can take myself by surprise. I hope that we can all do that.

Again, for listeners, I'll recommend again Jonny's book, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, one of my favorite books of the last 10 years. Johnny Steinberg, thank you very much. Thanks, Tyler. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen, and the show is @CowenConvoes. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.