‘A Man of Good Hope’ is part biography, and partly a record of Steinberg’s interpretation of his conversations with Abdullahi. (Our memories of our past are selective by nature: they are constructed from our image of ourselves and this in turn depends as much on the persona we think we are as it does on the persona into which we think we are becoming.)

Much of the book deals with Abdullahi’s sojourn in South Africa, on the way he survived, the work that he did, the bureaucratic abuse he suffered, the effects of the xenophobic violence which permeated the places where he was able to find employment. It is the record of an remarkable trajectory through numberless places fraught with unimaginable dangers. It also tells us of the heartless and evil society which functions in our midst, whose violence is an everyday experience for those who live without the protection of high walls and a corrupt and mendacious bureaucracy.

After yet another attack and life-threatening betrayal from the township community supplied by his spaza shop, Abdullahi shares his view (via Steinberg’s exegesis) of the people he has been dealing with. “He did not know much of the history of southern Africa, but he guessed that for generation upon generation, their ancestors had been slaves. Their masters had beaten them into a new shape, a subhuman shape. They had become submissive, treacherous slave-beings, beings without self-worth, without honour. And then the whites had come and made them slaves again. Now they had been freed, but such beings could not handle freedom.”

I was reading Steinberg’s book while travelling to a couple of centres in the Eastern Cape, and at the same time as the story of South Africa’s participation in Fifa’s web of corruption was unfolding. I had just been taken to see the latest real estate development of East London’s seemingly self-made property mogul, one Jean du Plessis, whose meteoric rise suggests that, for him at least, the New South Africa is a land of opportunity. He fortuitously happened upon a building in need of renovation. No sooner had he completed his work when a couple of government departments decided it was just perfect for their needs and entered into leases secure enough for him to parley up an empire now said to be worth many hundreds of millions.

I did not see this as evidence that our society is so egalitarian and free of racial prejudice that one can go from the South African equivalent of a log cabin to the White House in a fraction of a lifetime. I saw it in the way that all cynical South Africans have come to interpret the sudden and extraordinary acquisition of great wealth – as something worthy of the attention of an investigative journalist.

At the same time I looked at what was filling the hotels and conference facilities in the cities I was passing through; without exception, the bulk of the business was government: civil service hot air is filling our airplanes and coaches, our auditoriums and ballrooms. It is occupies the time – and whatever capacity there may be to achieve service delivery. No doubt this largely explains why nothing is ever done. Seriously huge numbers of people arrive at these events for their per diem allowances and the conference parties. (I understand from some of the organisers and also from some of the venues that attendance at the conference sessions is somewhat lower than at mealtimes).

There is of course a link to this, to the saga of Asad Abdullahi, to Fifa, to Nkandla and to slavery. It concerns all of us, especially those of us who are not directly implicated – (and as a result have retreated into the bitterness of excoriating the Cloud-Cuckooland which has replaced the Rainbow Nation optimism of a distant past life.) It is about a failure of government: a failure to have delivered on some of the most basic of expectations in a working democracy (not for want of the financial means). Money has been spent – easily, and on a vast scale: but it has been to create a new master class, an elite which has access, directly and indirectly, to the Treasury, and to leave the rest of the country in thrall to old ideologies and to ignorance. This is why our most basic education offering has not improved. It would be too dangerous to have an electorate able to make discerning judgements.

So certain is the Zuma coterie that they are impervious to accountability that Nathi Nhleko shamelessly delivers a fictional explanation to parliament to explain how a swimming pool with steps into the water is actually a reservoir for Nkandla’s fire-fighters. So certain is Fikile Mbalula that what he says will never be tested against the truth that he describes a bribe as incorporeal, a ghost that cannot be touched – because he thinks he’s untouchable even while Chuck Blazer’s confession is being opened up to the world. So certain are the civil servants that they cannot be fired that they don’t even bother to answer their phones or emails. They have their salaries – and their annual increases which exceed inflation and which are never linked to productivity. They have their conferences and their distractions. They are a club within a club, insulated from the very world they are employed to engage with and service.

In all this, the poor and homeless have been largely forgotten, the sick, the frail, the parentless, those who live unprotected lives on the streets and in the squatter camps, left to the mercy of those who are armed and who prowl in gangs – the police themselves or those the police are paid to pursue. They live light years away from the largesse of the state. Between these two hermetically sealed spaces lies an unbridgeable divide which separates the formal economy which provides the money for the drones of state to disburse among themselves – for their Nkandlas and their World Cups, their conferences and their pay cheques – from those condemned to poverty and hand-outs. The economically active have lost faith: they see the wastage of their taxes and they do nothing, arguing to themselves that by making their payments they have fulfilled their civic duty and that the democracy the underclass has voted for must run its course. On the other side of the chasm, the disempowered have become slaves to their despair, to the ideologies and myths which bind them to their betrayers.

If South Africa is to become worthy of the democracy that so many gave their lives for, we cannot retreat into elective ignorance, of choosing not to know what government does and doesn’t do, of the crimes perpetrated on those who are entitled to the protection of the state, of where the money really goes, of the deals done, of the quantum of the rape and pillage. We cannot abdicate to others the responsibility expected of all citizens. We owe it to South Africa to extend the e-toll protest to all forms of taxation. Until we do so we simply fuel the system. We pay protection money to keep the enforcers away and watch helplessly as the festering business of state, the mafia we have empowered, continues its evil work. DM