A Witness Account from the Closing Months of Apartheid, and a Question for the Generation That Did Not Live It
In 1989, in the final months before Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison, I lived in South Africa for nearly eleven months. I went in on an Ivorian passport, the one African document that opened that door, because Côte d’Ivoire was the one African state still doing business with Pretoria.
The apartheid state then classified me as Coloured, though I am Black as charcoal. That single administrative line decided which streets I could walk, which hotels I could sleep in, which restaurants would serve me, and which suburbs I could enter.
I saw the apartheid economy from the inside: how white capital used Coloured front men to operate in the Homelands, how sanctions were quietly evaded through African intermediaries, and how the country was being remade in real time while the world watched from outside.
I write this now because the South Africa I see today is not the South Africa whose freedom my generation prayed for. The xenophobia directed at Ghanaians, Nigerians, Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, and other Africans is being carried out by men who do not know the history of their own liberation. They do not remember who sheltered their exiles, who funded their movements, who broke ranks with the apartheid economy at real cost. My quarrel is not with retaliation. It is with the silent question nobody is asking: what happens if we simply leave?
- How I Got In
I travelled into South Africa in 1989 at a time when every African government, with the lone exception of Côte d’Ivoire under President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, had barred its citizens from setting foot in the country. I entered on an Ivorian passport, and that was no accident. Abidjan was the one African capital that still kept open channels to Pretoria, so an Ivorian document raised none of the questions another African passport would have raised.
My entry was itself a small piece of the sanctions-era arrangement, the same Houphouët-Boigny relationship that made the whole project possible. The apartheid Department of Home Affairs, which sorted human beings into White, Coloured, Indian and Black African the way a clerk sorts envelopes, looked at the passport, looked at my face, and pencilled me in as Coloured.
That classification was a small bureaucratic act with very large consequences. As a Coloured man under apartheid, I could enter spaces a Black African could not. I could drink in certain bars, eat in certain restaurants, sleep in certain hotels, drive through certain suburbs without being stopped. I could move. The Black South African born five miles from where I stood could not.
What Abidjan was on the African continent, two great Western powers were in the wider world. While most of the world demanded comprehensive sanctions, Margaret Thatcher’s Britain resisted them openly, at the Commonwealth and in Europe, and British trade with Pretoria carried on.
Ronald Reagan’s America took the same line through its policy of constructive engagement, until its own Congress overrode the President’s veto in 1986 to impose sanctions against his wishes. The governments most willing to keep South Africa’s economy breathing sat at the two ends of the earth, one small state in West Africa and the great powers of the English-speaking West.
There was nothing strange about an Ivorian passport in my hands. I am a Nzema man from the far west of Ghana, from the frontier country that runs up to Côte d’Ivoire. My ancestors lived partly on the other side of that frontier, in the years before the Berlin Conference of 1884 set the European partition in motion and the Anglo-French boundary agreements that followed hardened the line between the British and French spheres into a border.
That border cut through a single people. The Nzema on the western side have always moved easily across it, and have acquired Ivorian papers as a matter of course. I was not borrowing another country’s identity. I was using one that history had always left open to me.
I am Black as charcoal. A friendly African state had vouched for me, and the regime still sorted me by my face before anything else. It granted me Coloured mobility only because the Ivorian connection made me commercially useful. The face decided what I was. The usefulness decided where I could go.
- The Mission
I was not in South Africa as a tourist. I was there as the African front for a commercial proposition put forward by a major Cape wine producer. The proposition was straightforward in commercial terms and explosive in political terms.
To understand why the proposition was being put to me, and why the destination was Abidjan, you have to understand what Côte d’Ivoire was in the late 1980s. Houphouët-Boigny had broken openly with the African consensus on apartheid.
While the Organisation of African Unity, the Frontline States and the rest of the continent treated Pretoria as a pariah, Abidjan maintained quiet diplomatic and commercial channels to South Africa. Houphouët-Boigny met openly with P. W. Botha. Ivorian ports and Ivorian factories were, in practical terms, the one West African door the apartheid economy could still walk through. Every other door on the continent was bolted from the inside.
This was no modest side operation. It was a hundred-million-dollar project, to be built in three phases, and its ambition was openly competitive. It was designed to break the French grip on the wine trade across fourteen countries of West and Central Africa bound to the French franc.
South African wine, bottled on African soil and sold into markets France had treated as its own since independence, would undercut the French shippers on price and proximity. South African bulk would go in. Ivorian-labelled finished product would come out. The sanctions architecture, designed around country of origin, would never see the underlying source.
This was sanctions evasion by any honest reading. It was also, from the South African business point of view, survival. The producer in question was not a clandestine operation. It was a major Cape institution, and what I was being asked to do was the kind of arrangement that quietly kept the apartheid economy breathing while the world thought it was suffocating.
That is why Paris killed it. The French government was content to let Abidjan be the African outlier on apartheid, because that posture suited French strategy in the region. It was not content to let Abidjan host a hundred-million-dollar platform built to drive French wine out of France’s own African markets. The sabotage was efficient and final. I returned with the lesson that imperial powers protect their markets the way a leopard protects a carcass.
III. My Host, and How the Homelands Really Worked
I was hosted by the late Roger Oliphant, who lived in Mabopane, on the Pretoria side of the Bophuthatswana boundary. Roger was no minor operator. He was the biggest business tycoon in the territory, and most of the white capital moving into the Homeland was channelled through him.
He was classified Coloured, and he was useful precisely because of that classification. Bophuthatswana was one of the so-called independent Homelands the apartheid state had carved out as fictitious republics to strip Black South Africans of their citizenship. White capital, including significant Jewish South African capital expanding aggressively into the Homelands in the late 1980s, used men like Roger as the visible face of operations in territories where direct white ownership was politically awkward and commercially constrained.
I watched the expansion of major South African retail and consumer chains into the Homelands at that time. The pattern was the same in every case. A Coloured or Black African front, the actual capital and operational control sitting elsewhere, and a public story about indigenous business development that nobody at the table believed.
I lodged at the Upper Berkeley Park Hotel in Pretoria. I moved between Pretoria, Johannesburg, East London, Cape Town and Paarl. I went into the Homelands. I went into Soweto. I drank in the Hillbrow bars and restaurants in the one neighbourhood in Johannesburg where the racial geography of apartheid had collapsed, where Black, White, Coloured and Indian South Africans, and the foreigners who passed through, drank at the same counter.
And I went into the shebeens of Soweto, the unlicensed drinking houses that existed because the apartheid state would not permit Black South Africans to buy alcohol on the same terms as whites. The shebeens were warm, generous, dangerous, and far more honest than any licensed bar in Pretoria.
- What Sandton Cost in 1989
I was in Johannesburg when Sandton was being built. The northern suburbs were opening up. Plots in Sandton, in Atholl, in the streets that are now the most expensive residential addresses on the African continent, were being offered for the equivalent of one thousand United States dollars per stand. I could have bought ten of them for ten thousand dollars and ended my financial worries for life.
I did not. I was not there to acquire land. I was there to do a job, and I did not bend my purpose to opportunity. I make no apology for that. I record it only because it tells you what apartheid South Africa looked like to a man with foreign currency and the right paperwork at the right moment. The country was on sale to anyone the regime considered acceptable, and the regime considered me acceptable because of a passport.
- The Girls Were in School. The Boys Were in the Street.
This is the observation that has stayed with me for almost forty years, and it is the one that explains most of what has happened since.
In 1989, in the townships and locations and Homeland settlements I visited, the Black South African girls were in school. They wore their natural hair. They were not bleaching their skin, not wearing wigs, not wearing eyelashes. They carried themselves with the organic dignity of young women who knew who they were and where they came from. They were the most naturally beautiful young women I had encountered on the continent. They were also the ones doing the schoolwork.
The boys were not. The boys were in the streets. They were doing political activism. They were burning tyres, throwing stones, attending rallies, fighting the regime in the only theatre the regime had left open to them. I do not mock this. The struggle was real, the regime was monstrous, and somebody had to fight it.
But the political fight consumed an entire generation of Black South African men at exactly the moment their education should have been built. When liberation came, the boys who had been in the street were thirty years old with no qualifications, no trade, no professional formation, and a country that suddenly required all of those things from its citizens.
The girls became the nurses, the teachers, the administrators, the small business owners. The boys became the unemployable. This is not a slander on Black South African manhood. It is what happens when a generation of young men is asked to choose between books and barricades, and chooses barricades because the regime has made the choice unavoidable.
- The Xenophobia Has a History the Xenophobes Have Forgotten
The young Black South African man who attacks a Ghanaian shopkeeper in Soweto today, or a Nigerian trader in Alexandra, or a Zimbabwean security guard in Pretoria, does not know that Ghana hosted the African National Congress when it had no home. He does not know that Nigeria taxed itself for decades to fund the liberation movements. He does not know that the Frontline States bled, economically and militarily, to bring his freedom about. He does not know that the foreign African in front of him is, in the historical ledger, a creditor of his liberation.
He does not know because nobody taught him. The post-apartheid state did many things, but it did not write the history of African solidarity into the school curriculum in a way that survived contact with unemployment and frustration. So the young man who cannot find work looks across the street at the Somali shopkeeper who can, and concludes that the shopkeeper is the cause of his condition. He is wrong. But his wrongness is the predictable product of an educational vacuum and an economic structure that was never restructured.
VII. What I Propose
The voices in Lagos and Accra calling for retaliation against South Africans are understandable, and they are wrong. Retaliation against ordinary Black South Africans, most of whom have not lifted a hand against any foreigner, would be a moral failure and a strategic gift to the very forces that benefit from African disunity.
I propose something different, and I propose it as a serious policy question and not as rhetoric.
Withdraw. Ghanaians, Nigerians, Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Malawians, Congolese, Senegalese, every African working in South Africa, every African running a business in South Africa, every African qualified professional staffing a South African hospital or school or mine or boardroom, should consider an organised, dignified withdrawal. Not a flight. A return. Come home in numbers, with the skills you built there, and put them to work in the economies that need you.
And to the extent that South African capital sits in our markets, in our telecoms, in our broadcasting, in our retail chains, in our banking and our mining, let our governments examine the question of national ownership with clear eyes. I am not calling for confiscation.
I am calling for the deliberate, lawful, negotiated transfer of strategic infrastructure into the hands of the citizens whose markets sustain it. South African capital in Africa exists because African consumers permit it to exist. That permission is not unconditional and ought not to be treated as such.
Let those who do not know their history learn it the hard way. Let them see what their country looks like when the African professionals, traders, technicians, doctors, teachers, and small business operators withdraw their labour and their capital. Let them see whether the white minority that engineered apartheid, and that has retained the commanding heights of the South African economy through every political transition since 1994, will fill the gap. Let them discover, as a national lesson, what the rest of Africa was to their liberation and what the rest of Africa still is to their daily survival.
This is not retaliation. This is the withdrawal of a gift that was never properly acknowledged.
VIII. A Closing Note from a Witness
I write as a man who saw what apartheid looked like from inside the door the regime opened to him by mistake. I saw the front companies, the sanctions evasions, the racial bookkeeping, the geography of permitted and forbidden suburbs, the construction of the wealth that is still concentrated in the hands that built it.
I also saw the dignity of a generation of young Black South African women who were not yet trying to look like anybody else, and the tragedy of a generation of young Black South African men whose lives were spent on a fight that was necessary and that left them with nothing to live on when it ended.
The South Africa of 2026 is not the country I was sent into in 1989. But the architecture of who owns what, who works for whom, and who is permitted to prosper, has changed less than the flags and the anthems suggest. The xenophobia is the symptom of that unfinished business. It is not the disease.
The disease is older, deeper, and not the work of Ghanaians or Nigerians. We should stop trying to cure it for them.
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