I just cannot get my head around this Rainbow Nation they call South Africa. It is perhaps the strangest country I have ever visited. In fact, it is more like many countries, all overlapping and sharing the same geographical space, yet interacting very little. Sometimes it feels like Australia, sometimes it feels like the US, sometimes it feels like Britain, and sometimes it feels like, well, an African country. There are plush shopping malls full of affluent white shoppers, and barred-up corner stores selling mealie maize to queues of poor Africans. There are super-smooth highways carrying along the wealthy locals in their BMWs and Mercs, and potholed country roads, where car-less locals have to trudge from home to work, and back again. There are beachside suburbs loaded up with razor-wire-surrounded McMansions, and raggedy villages of mud
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