There it was, the seed of his discombobulation. Till the Hillbrow meeting, Kagiso had been able to make a distinction between his two lives. It was the only way he could make it work. How could the man from Soil of Africa ask a farmer to walk the road of reconciliation and shared endeavour if that other man, the one who plotted and planned, was also at the table? He now understood the conflict. In his heart Kagiso liked being the former and hated having to be the latter.

He remembered the time when he had helped to organise an end of harvest braai, South Africa’s version of a barbecue, on a farm right on the border with Mozambique. It was the first year of a profit-sharing scheme that Kagiso had helped put together. The area had been blessed with good rains and a bountiful crop. That evening, as a blood-orange sky had turned purple, as shadows grew longer and fainter till they just seeped away into the soil, one of the migrant workers had brought out his mbira, a traditional hand-held musical instrument, a finger piano, as some called it.

Kagiso had sat on the edge of the group, entranced by this vision of a different future. The farmer and his wife, Afrikaners both, sat near the fire. On the other side of the circle their children huddled next to the housemaid and some of the workers’ children. An old man, rheumy eyes staring into the embers, pulled at a zol, a home-made cigarette spiced with the comforting fragrance of dagga. Women spread polyester blankets over their bare legs and young men shared the last few bottles of beer. Calloused thumbs plucked at the metal tines of the mbira, shaped like the flat handles of tablespoons, and picked out a tune that had been written in another century in the great language of the coast, Swahili. Nobody understood the words but all were moved by the ballad, the lament of a young suitor who knows he will not wed his angel, his malaika, for want of good fortune. Kagiso had looked across at the farmer and was sure he’d seen the man’s eyes well up with a tenderness so far removed from the caricature of his people. The morning, he knew, would expose again the starkness of his country’s struggle to find a middle ground between great wealth and great poverty but, for that evening, under that deep and star-studded African sky, Kagiso let himself dream, yes, dream, of another country, one in which hope triumphed over despair and idealism scored a victory over cynicism.

Now the man who believed in idealism and persuasion was about to be eclipsed by the saboteur, who resorted to the insidious power to destroy. It was the unsettling effect of being defined by your least attractive feature.