Welcome to the un-mappable country. Along the ghost roads and spectral highways that are named and renamed and renamed again, every journey ends in a cul-de-sac. After liberation, when old landmarks were erased to reflect the new character of the new country, one name remained the same: this was still unromantically and pragmatically South Africa. No revolutionary designations to freak out the investors in the boardrooms of the foreign capitals – this would never be ‘Azania’, or anything that had a ring of otherness about it. A UPC symbol, to be scanned and accessioned and monetised and forgotten.

The South African poet Lionel Abrahams once reminded us that, “Memory takes root only half in the folds of the brain: half’s in the concrete streets we have lived along.” Abrahams was Johannesburg’s unofficial poet laureate, the reigning flâneur of an unwalkable city. He spent the last decades of his life confined to a wheelchair, and I have always imagined him rolling slowly over the city’s unused sidewalks, peering through the shadows cast by brutalist high rises and Victorian-era mining houses.

Abrahams understood that the city – our cities – are haunted: Johannesburg, which is locked in a constant process of erasing itself, is crowded with the ghosts of ghosts. In his poem ‘Connection’ (1999), Abrahams rendered the looming twenty-first century as a “hurricane of sheer futurity”, one that would “change change itself, language and history”. The poet’s role, the flâneur’s job, was to slow time by acknowledging the spaces in between, the gaps in the agreed-upon world that acted as reliquaries for what we’d lost.

Time, though, would not be slowed. Change itself indeed changed, and the deals we made with history when we transformed a Paul Kruger Boulevard into an Elias Motsoaledi Drive were a necessary acknowledgement of one epoch ending and another beginning. We needed a line drawn through time, and we drew the line with names – on Pretoria’s street signs, old pronouns were literally crossed out and replaced with new ones. Textbooks were emptied to reflect a new history, and so were maps.

What does it mean, though, when the letters on maps are reconfigured but the roads remain the same? The shape of South African cities, their embedded evil –wealthy (white) suburbs surrounded and serviced by poor (black) bedroom townships – did not change. If anything, the tenets of separation decreed by Apartheid were reified as Apartheid disappeared. Changing names did not change the structure of our cities. We needed a new cartography, a psycho-geographic rewiring of our collective synapsis, a wholesale reinvention of our living spaces, a vicious new architecture that spooked us onto the streets.

Instead, we got Joe Slovo Drive.

And in the spirit of these limited gestures – and what are the renaming of roads but assertions of ownership? – we arrive at the ultimate cul-de-sac: FW de Klerk Boulevard in Cape Town. We must not pretend that Table Bay Boulevard’s renaming represents a proper reappraisal of De Klerk’s compromised legacy, or that it is meant to honour a man who played a role in the liberation of this country from a regime he unquestionably supported. No, FW de Klerk Boulevard is meant to signify that there are pockets of this country that exist outside of the official narrative’s grasp, and that the line we drew through time is not a straight one.

That FW de Klerk Boulevard should be inaugurated in a city in which many black people insist they feel unwelcome, and in which both political and economic power remains squarely in the hands of a narrow white elite, should come as no surprise. Cape Town remains colonised by the old colonisers, an organic vegetable garden cut off from the rest of the country, fashioning and refashioning its own take on the South African story. As the Cameroonian thinker Achille Mbembe once wrote, “By definition a modern city is a cosmopolitan entity. It mainly characterises by its hospitality towards foreigners and its opening to the world in general. It is a place where all differences mix together, whether ethnic, racial or religious.” Cape Town, by this reasoning, is not a modern city. It is an outpost of the ancient regime, cut off to most of those who live within its walls, and FW de Klerk Boulevard is not a road but a fortification.

Enter Prime Evil.

At this strange nodal point in the South African continuum, we can now imagine the triggerman’s triggerman, expert exploder of people – Eugene de Kock, ex-officio member of Apartheid’s High Priesthood – travelling along De Klerk Boulevard in a 2015 Ford Fusion, crumpled lightweight Gortex jacket on a hook behind him. This week, De Kock won his inevitable parole, despite a 212-year sentence for crimes so awful that they beggar belief. He has let us know that he wants to live a simple, quiet life; he’s done his time, sat quietly in jail while his old masters retired to farms and wineries and hit the Stellenbosch circuit in order to keep the Broederbond fires burning. He will help the state find the remains of some of those he killed, but he’s finished with being a Symbol.

Indeed, De Kock emerges into a country that is losing its handle on symbols. He will find his surroundings immediately familiar – he’ll wonderingly snap pictures with his iPhone 6 Plus of a world he knows: the cities Prime Evil will traverse are odes in concrete to Apartheid’s time-resistant cruelty. And when he pulls onto FW de Klerk Boulevard, within spitting distance of some of Africa’s priciest real estate, he will encounter a blast-hole through time and space, a view of a Valhalla in which the manne that sent him to do his terrible work are venerated by our GPS units.

De Kock on De Klerk is perhaps the most succinct summary of where the reconciliation process has meandered over the years, and where we stand as a country. More than ever, we need new maps, and new directions. DM