The British high commissioner climbed out of his car with what seemed to be a look of apology, perhaps for arriving in what was now a rather aged Jaguar (even this, one of the plum jobs in the gift of the foreign secretary, had not escaped the swingeing budget cuts back home). He wore his black tie long, with the fat end tucked into the top of his trousers, as if he’d been somewhat absent-minded the last time he’d used the lavatory. His wife, giving every impression that she would rather be back in an Islington café, marched resolutely towards the church doors but then had to wait, stranded in limbo, while her husband pretended to recognise the man talking to him.

The crowd, five or six deep, looked on. The people at the back peered through rows of beanies and baseball caps that constantly shifted one way and then the other. Headgear that had been put on in the cool light of dawn offered a different kind of protection now that the sun was getting higher. As the temperature warmed, the musty smell of morning breath and clothes soaked in paraffin smoke gave way to an altogether more pungent odour.

There was an air of expectancy, but it was the kind of anticipation you might expect in the minutes before a rock concert, not the solemnity you would associate with a funeral. What was unfolding in front of them was a soap opera, not a wake. They knew many of the characters, household names whose lives were played out in the glossy pages of tabloid magazines and Friday-night talk shows. The VIPs were there to exhibit their collective grief, but what the people of Soweto noticed, what they assumed, was how much easier it must be to carry the burden of sadness when it was cushioned by wealth and status.