Descending toward Johannesburg International Airport (now called OR Tambo) I could almost imagine that I was flying into Los Angeles. Miles and miles of suburbs with backyards dotted with swimming pools. This was an Africa I hadn’t anticipated. Nairobi despite its size was very “African.” Crammed with people and faded colonial architecture. Streets lined with jacarandas and swarming with matatu minibuses. Just outside of Nairobi, giraffes and zebras wandered. But here in Jozie, it’s a concrete jungle and the only wild animals are the anger-management nutcases shaking their fist at you and screaming at the windshield because you just turned the wrong way into a four-way intersection.

Rage is the prince of demons in South Africa. Anger seethes below the surface and adds a prickly sensation to every encounter. The Afrikaners fiercely cling to their culture and language despite centuries of being threatened with extinction. The blacks are insular and unknowable and years after Apartheid’s end still find the glass ceiling very low indeed. The Rainbow Nation also contains “coloureds,” an ancient amalgam of mixed Afrikaner and African ancestry and a small Asian population completes the picture.

It was in South Africa that I first discovered the white bubble. I suppose I noticed the isolation we lived in while in Portugal and England. But things were a lot more color-coded in South Africa. Even after more than a decade of visiting South Africa, we still wander into a store not realizing that it’s for blacks. But in general, while in South Africa, we move in a white bubble: a white guest house, white missions, white churches. The exception is the schools where students are thrown together regardless of race and required to be fluent in two of three languages: English, Afrikaans, and an African language, usually Xhosa or Zulu. Such is the unspoken segregation even today that although only 9% of the population are white, 90% of the people I socialize with are white. It’s not that way everywhere in Africa. In Mozambique, we spend most of our time with blacks. I’d break out of the bubble in South Africa if I knew how.

Our first order of business was to get a set of wheels before December when our mission was having a conference in Harare, Zimbabwe. Tom and Jan (the kids called her Aunt Jam) were settled here in Johannesburg and we borrowed their car to get to Nelspruit where we shopped for a vehicle. The car that chose us was a 1982 VW Double Cab combi which we dubbed the Bob Bus. The Bob Bus was a bizarre looking vehicle with a canvas canopy on the back, but it had more places to smuggle goods across the border than any vehicle we’ve ever used since. There was a huge box under the back seat that no customs official ever thought to look in because our three squirmy cute kids were sitting on top of it strapped into huge car seats. And under the cargo space there was a cavernous cubby hole large enough to smuggle two or three people across the border. We weren’t really hoping to do smuggling. But it was a lot easier to hide away any personal possessions like CDs and computers rather than declare them every time at the border.

Sputtering down jam-packed freeways while sports cars and 4×4s screamed by us was a strangely comforting activity. Life was passing us by in Africa but we were taking it slow, at the speed of a VW with a Toyota engine hidden under the hood. We even had a song: “In the Bob Bus you can have a lot of fun. We’ll go driving in the sun…” I think we thought these songs were meant to comfort our children and create a little light-hearted fun in the midst of a strange country where cars came up behind us and flashed their lights at us until we pulled over and drove on the shoulder. But of course the kids never knew that what we were doing was anything but normal.

In Portugal I could facetiously pretend to be Icelandic but in South Africa you’re not fooling anyone. The blacks knew we were white. And the Afrikaners knew we were rooineks, red-neck English. As Americans we were interesting but not particularly loved. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much the case all over the world. Now Canadians, they are loved by everybody. Americans might not even notice that there’s another country north of the border, but Canadians are known and loved everywhere I’ve ever lived. For ten years, the logistics and hospitality personnel for our mission in South Africa were always Canadians. At first I thought it was a coincidence. But as one Canadian couple after the next came to live and work in South Africa I realized that they were a special caste trained in the secret arts of airport pickups and making tea for wiped out missionaries.

The violent crime in Joburg is bad. When a company came out with a device that sent flames out from under the sides of your car to deter carjackers, the first person to have it installed was the Johannesburg chief of police. The key to safety in South Africa was to move to Australia as soon as possible. Failing that, many South Africans created locked down prisons out of their homes with high fences, razor wire and big black dogs snarling at you. Everyone hides in their home at night watching SABC TV in Afrikaans and Zulu. After the news, the most watched show is Walker, Texas Ranger starring Chuck Norris. We couldn’t believe how many times a night Chuck Norris was on TV. South Africans have some sort of appreciation for the thespian skills of this man that the rest of us fail to detect. Obviously in a country where crime is so dominant it must be a vicarious thrill to watch Chuck giving a roundhouse kick to the baddies. It helps that his sidekick was African-American, Clarence Gilyard.

There is so much to love about South Africa. The food is terrific. The people, when they’re not screaming at you or stealing your car, are really friendly. The music, dance, art, culture, wine, you-name-it are fantastic. We love visiting South Africa. It’s a bit like Los Angeles with lions. There’s a buzz and excitement resulting from an old country being reborn after Apartheid. The ethnic diversity will always be edgy and tense. But I suppose the legacy of segregation and white-minority rule is already casting a fading shadow. We arrived in South Africa toward the end of Nelson Mandela’s tenure as 1st President of South Africa. I suppose we had an inkling of the convulsive events that preceded our arrival, but in general we moved freely through the Republic of South Africa without fully appreciating how much suffering had brought this country to where it is today.

If I thought about South Africa at all before coming it was probably because of Paul Simon’s Graceland album. I listened endlessly to the babble of postmodern lyrics over the burbling guitar of Ray Phiri. Graceland exemplifies everything that’s best and worst about world music. The album is the sweetest of ear candy. It opens your vistas to music that is so far superior to the monotonous garbage on American radio stations. But on the downside it is a caricature and a hash of indigenous music. World music has been called cultural plagiarism. But at the end of the day, African musicians are just as likely to borrow influences from the West, the East, and, e’er the twain shall meet, it makes for great music. It’s the sound of humanity trying to sing together.