First published in the Waikato Times, January 2006:

In the summer of 2001, Hamilton-based Green MP Nandor Tanczos visits his
family in Cape Town and gets a glimpse of post-apartheid South Africa.

"SOUTH Africa?" she said, shaking her head. "Things are terrible there now. So much violence."

It was not the first time I had heard that opinion. The moment I made the decision to visit the land of my foremothers I seemed to become some kind of psychic magnet for expat South Africans.

I bumped into them in cafes, on buses, on planes. Not surprisingly, they almost all felt South Africa was beautiful but doomed.

Most New Zealanders don't have many sources of information to base an opinion on. Western media tends to ignore news from Africa unless it comprises war or famine. Reporting from South Africa largely ended with the first post-apartheid election in 1994.

Not so immigration. Many South Africans have moved to New Zealand since the end of apartheid, and it is their story many of us have heard. The story of one class of South African society. I discussed with Father Michael Lapsley, a famed anti-apartheid activist, the perceptions of South Africa that prevail in New Zealand.

"People who have left South Africa have a certain interest in talking the country down," he suggested. "That is not to say that their stories are not true. We could spend a whole day talking about all the bad things that are happening here. But we could also spend a day talking about all the good things."

Lapsley is in a position to know. A New Zealand-born priest, he is a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and was in exile in Lesotho and Botswana. He is the director of the Institute for the Healing of Memories, which works with victims of violence and torture, and was himself the victim of a letter bomb which took both his hands.

One of the main difficulties in South Africa, he told me, is the enormity of the problems. The Government is making progress, but not fast enough for many people.

"The Government has built a million homes since coming to power. If you ask the four million that remain homeless about how the Government is doing, they will say that nothing has changed. If you ask the million that now have homes, they will say - well they might say - `we don't yet have electricity'."

They called it "smarty town", the new housing project you can see from the motorway into Cape Town. Brightly painted, with power and running water, it was a happy example of the results of a liberation Government.

Other schemes were more modest, smaller, with fewer amenities. All showed real progress despite the harsh, sandy conditions. But, even with these initiatives, the shanty towns remained. When one family moved into a new government-built home, another one took over the shack they had left.

The poverty there was devastating. Yet, despite the warnings about violence and hostility, I was amazed by the friendliness, the creativity and the generosity of spirit of the people. Township youths had taken on the role of unofficial parking attendants, directing drivers into empty spaces and protecting the cars from thieves and tickets in return for a tip when the driver returned.

People hustled newspapers at traffic lights, children begged for money for food. People carved, painted, busked, whatever they could do to make a living. But with unemployment at 50 per cent and no social welfare system, it was not surprising that crime was high. And there was growing resentment at the privatisation agenda adopted by the ANC Government.

But what I sensed more than anything else was a feeling of pride and of optimism. People were starting to assert themselves in new ways. Homegrown media reflected this and affirmed it. Like the Pasifika focus that is visible now in Aotearoa, South Africa was being redefined as an African country instead of a European enclave at the edge of "the Dark Continent".

Among the coloured community in Cape Town there was a resurgent interest in the Khoikhoi and the San, the original people of Southern Africa. Coloureds had been largely defined in the past as the bastard offspring of Europeans and Bantu Africans. Now, many were starting to reclaim their Khoi and San ancestors - the so-called Hottentots - as First Nation peoples.

The coloureds were even laying claim to Afrikaner culture, including the Afrikaans language. It was the coloureds, they said, the Khoi traders and labourers as well as the bastard offspring of slaves and Europeans who, unable to speak High Dutch, invented Afrikaans as a kind of pidgin or trade language.

Only later was it adopted by the Boer, along with many other Cape Coloured cultural items, in an unconscious tribute to the people they dispossessed in Southern Africa.

I found the idea too exquisite to disbelieve. It certainly wouldn't be the first example of colonisers copying indigenous styles and pretending it was their own idea. Boerewors, melktert, the distinctive architecture and crafts of Afrikaner society were all, my cousins told me, stolen off us by the Boer just as they stole the land itself.

They laughed as they said it, the kind of laughter we inherited, perhaps, from our oupa, our grandfather. The kind that makes hurt more bearable.

It didn't take much searching to find the anger simmering inside my relations, their friends, total strangers. Like my cousin Morris, who was expelled from law school because of his anti-apartheid activities. What other punishments, humiliations and violence he faced I do not know. His wife Gina did tell me about armed soldiers occupying her classroom. About the day the teachers marched, and seeing people with heads split open and blood staining the streets. But she also told me about their amazement when the 1981 Springbok tour game was cancelled at Hamilton's Rugby Park. "We danced in the streets," she said.

Their joy erupted like fireworks, to know that people all the way over in New Zealand knew about their struggle, cared about their struggle, for dignity and human rights.

Random connections shimmer between the two lands, like George Grey's stint as governor in South Africa prior to his arrival here, or the rebellious New Zealand soldiers who returned home from fighting Boer to fight the local constabulary using the same tricks they had learned in Africa.

A South African man came to my office to meet me when I got back, a guerilla, in truth. He asked if I had met any political people while I was there. I thought he meant MPs and said no, but then mentioned my uncle, Richard Stevens. "Oh Richard. I was in prison with him," he said, and then laughed as he told me about some of my uncle's prison tricks.

Uncle Richard was a lovely man. We had visited him for lunch and talked about various things, including black theology, which he had taught at the university, and also the black consciousness movement that he had been part of.

He lamented the effect on his family of seeing him dragged from his home by police, of his enforced absences. Yet he himself demonstrated an openness that his experience might have stolen from another man.

His son, Rhian, was one of the Cape Town Nyabhingi, serious dreads who had built themselves a tabernacle and organised themselves into a spiritual order. One of the more organised of the Rastafarian communities in South Africa, they were highly influential in the local reggae music scene. There were also Twelve Tribes of Israel members, House of Judah and others, spread all along the coast at least to Knysna and probably further. I found it interesting that most of them seemed to come from the coloured community.

Some of them had heard of the Rastafarian MP from New Zealand, and were eager to talk about faith, politics, food and all the facets that comprise Rastafarian philosophy. All welcomed me home as a son of Africa. I had been uneasy about this question at first, wandering around Cape Town on my own. Outside of my family, I must have looked like some white fella with dreads, a wannabe African. What I found instead was recognition. Everywhere I went, Africans would raise their fists in solidarity and hail me as a Rasta bredren. I don't know how much they knew of the philosophy, but they recognised it as an Africa-centred view of the world, as an
Africa-defined faith and, perhaps in a land where Africans have struggled so long for basic respect, this was enough.

Africa is in the process of redefining itself, in spite of the monocular view offered in the West where famine and war are the only events of interest. The great civilisations and empires of African history are rarely acknowledged outside the continent, nor its statespeople, philosophers or artists.

Just as with the indigenous people of this land, there seems to be a certain nterest in talking things down. I was inspired by what I saw in South Africa, in spite of the many problems, and I returned to Aotearoa proud of my own links to the great motherland.