Here is my latest DIPLOMAT article, this one about my own modest experiences in Africa:

Malan’s book concluded with the staggering true story of Neil and Creina Alcock. Neil Alcock was a white farmer in Natal who dismayed his family and neighbours by getting involved with the local Zulu community, to the point of abandoning his farm and going to live as a Zulu in a remote part of KwaZulu. His beautiful young wife Creina went with him.

Neil was killed in a local feud, but Creina stayed in their small mud hut. Sometime after her husband’s death, some local people splashed her hut with animal blood – a respectful sign that Neil had died as a true African.

So I visited Creina Alcock myself. I found her deep in Zululand, far from any other ‘white’ person, living in a neat little mud hut perched high at the end of a sprawling dusty valley. A little stream served as her bathroom. Zulu drums throbbed in the distance.

Once she realised that I was not a snooty diplomatic tourist, she talked frankly about her life in the part of South Africa untouched by Europeans and modernity. The killing of twins to make magic mutu. Strange local wars fought with heavy weapons stolen from Mozambique that sprung from nowhere and then died away. Naked young men racing round the moonlit kraal trying to kill a bull with their bare hands. The rituals to bring home for proper burial the spirits of Zulu leaders killed a century previously by the British at the Battle of Isandlwana. All this right beneath the noses of white South Africans in their manicured gardens. ‘Real’ Africa was there in South Africa too – once you knew where to look.

Now, 20 years later we see Africans across the continent on their cell-phones, trading and hustling and making things happen, finally stirring from Africa’s ruinous experiments with imported ideologies (socialism, communism, imperialism and even Africanism).

Let’s remember Creina and Neil Alcock, and Rian Malan’s humbling message: anyone from outside Africa who wants to become an African faces a long, painful journey to be accepted – and then will be accepted only on Africa’s own terms, and when Africa is ready.