A Pretoria boy, I had just turned nine when I first saw the huge city of Johannesburg, 36 miles to the south. I think it was VJ Day, 1945, a holiday for the Victory over Japan, so the streets were fairly quiet, all the way through the sprawl of suburbs, then the streets like canyons through the tall buildings, then out through more suburbs. Joburg began just after the road from Pretoria had passed alongside the open stretches of rough grass which people of Alex used as a golf course. Then we turned right, at the corner of Louis Botha Avenue and into Corlett Drive. As we made that turn, my father was warning us three boys that when we started driving a car one day, we must never hang our elbow out of the window as we steer – though he often caught himself doing so – because it might be hit by a car coming the other way. He knew a man whose elbow was horribly crushed that way. The eina thought of a man with a mangled funnybone never left me. But it didn’t stop me leaning my elbow out the...
Left wing commentary from the heart and the head