By the mid-nineties the Ponte echoed to the sound of a dozen languages, a Babel-esque din which foretold the worst fears of white South Africans, who worried that they would be left marooned in their final redoubt, unable to understand the world around them and misunderstood by it. With white flight went the businesses and their taxes; with the taxes went many of the public services that had once made Ponte the gold standard of urban living.

Ponte’s new immigrant colony, from Nigerian traders and Congolese pastors to Mozambican labourers and Somali shopkeepers, lived in the Catch-22 of the black economy, where they were in the city but not of it. If they tried to pay their bills, their dubious immigration status would be exposed. If they tried to sort out their residence permits they would be thrown out. So the plaster peeled off the walls, and the plumbing sprang leaks and the rubbish piled up. The building itself, with its great cylindrical cavern, became a dumping ground, the detritus rising in layers, like geological accretions, until it stood several storeys high.

More recent attempts to rehabilitate the building had met with varying degrees of success. Flats in the uppermost floors were renovated and a few adventurous types had moved in, like an expedition force sent into the unknown. But for the most part, Ponte City remained what it had been for twenty-odd years – a home from home for those for whom the African dream was still just that: a work in progress.

Now even that meagre hope was threatened, engulfed in the indiscriminate flames of xenophobia.

6

Outside Nelspruit, in Mpumalanga Province, the few people left in the squatter camp, the ‘informal settlement’, as the bureaucrats call it, stare at the man. He’s an outsider. That much is obvious: his clothes are too clean; they fit him like he actually bought them, not like the rags they are standing in. They only have to look at him to know he’s a South African, not like them, migrants. They are the marginal people, the cleaners and labourers, the servants and night-shift workers who creep around the shadowlands of every nation on earth.

What does he want? He greets them, or tries to. They just turn away, suspicious. He wants to ask them how it happened, this devastation. Did they recognise anyone, perhaps those who led the thugs? Did the police come? No answers. Just the silent accusation that whoever he is, whatever he wants, it is too late. He wants to tell them it was not his fault.