He couldn’t help feeling that these incidents in South Africa were symptoms of the unfinished business he’d talked about so often. It was the price that had to be paid for the way in which the ‘real’ struggle in South Africa – as he put it – had been tamed and repackaged so that race rather than wealth had become the defining characteristic.

That, to Anton, was apartheid’s big lie: that the great divide was all about race. The painstaking demarcation of areas between whites and others: nie-blankes, vir debruik deur blankes. The classification of people according to skin colour: natives, Indians, Coloureds, whites. Anton was dark-skinned, darker than many so-called blacks, a genetic trace of the Tamil blood that ran strong in his veins but which he barely acknowledged. One of the lasting legacies of the apartheid system was the way in which its brutally simple racial categories superseded more subtle cultural and ethnic differences. So, in the old days, when he was growing up in Durban on South Africa’s east coast, he was simply ‘Indian’. Whether he was Tamil or not was irrelevant. The point was to distinguish whites from non-whites, nothing more.

For Anton, replacing white leaders with black was merely a stepping stone to the real prize – the communal ownership of wealth-making. There were rare, unguarded moments, usually on a bellyful of whisky, when he would tell his colleagues: ‘Whether you are being fucked by a black bastard or a white bastard is irrelevant – you are still being fucked!’ In his book, a black capitalist was barely an improvement on a white one.

Of all the adjustments he’d had to make since he was released from jail into European exile, the most difficult had been the need to leave his particular brand of politics behind. He remembered how all those matronly Scandinavian women and their earnest, sandal-wearing partners had been shocked to hear that he didn’t just want to change the colour of government but the entire edifice on which it was built. In the early days, when he was still something of a celebrity on the ‘struggle’ lecture circuit, he’d noticed the collective unease in the audience whenever he started talking about changing the whole system, lock, stock and barrel (one of his favoured rhetorical phrases).