MORAL COURAGE
Cost of recoiling from gaze of reckoning
We should create an environment in which white and black people might tell stories about one another that everyone could find tolerable, writes Jonny Steinberg
I was in a restaurant in Stockholm last week and the waiter who took my order was a white man in his early thirties with a South African accent. "How is Sweden working for you?" I asked. "Brilliantly," he replied, "Anywhere that isn’t SA works brilliantly for me." I shall call the waiter Graham. He grew up in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, he told me, attended a fine school and got a BSc from Wits. And then he took flight from SA and began an itinerant life working on boats and waiting tables. He is married to a French woman and they have an infant child. He has his restaurant job and she looks after their daughter; they are doing okay, but no more than that. Walking the streets later, Graham stuck in my head. I wondered whether he had not made a terrible mistake, one that would shape the rest of his life. SA is starved of skilled labour and Graham’s qualifications are in desperate demand. In his native city, Johannesburg, his networks are surely thick and wide. I have little...
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