First published in Daily Maverick 168

South Africa is a battered cooldrink can, scuffed and sun-bleached after 110 years of being kicked down the road. When Jan Smuts, through sheer force of untiring industry, shoehorned reticent British colonists and hostile burghers of the erstwhile Boer republics into this thing he called South Africa in 1910, he kicked off a chain of events that he could never have foreseen.

The Mini Countryman.

Nobody bothered to ask black people about all of this, and Smuts acknowledged what he referred to as the “native problem”. Smuts’ dissonant legacy is as a pioneer of human rights pretty much everywhere except at home, where he studiously avoided coming up with solutions to what we might these days call democracy and justice for black South Africans.

In any case, as we can see with the latest budget, we’re still kicking that can down a road that’s running out. Over the coming years, our constrained fiscal circumstances will force us to have the discussions that Smuts was so afraid of, about how to make this country work for everyone. The thing is, Smuts was neither a coward nor a dimwit, and in the reflection of that truth we can see the scale of our challenge.

In the past “lost decade” much has been broken. As we have seen at the National Prosecuting Authority and SARS, fixing institutional atrophy is the work of years, but fixing something cultural might not be possible at all. The social compact around tax is trashed and, as the PPE scandal has shown, the culture of public service is also gone.

These two realities will drive us to a point where we can no longer do the Smuts Shrug and delegate this problem to the next generation. The government will need to spend less money and that means the jobs of the more than two million public servants will come under scrutiny.  This could manifest as a nasty showdown between barren public finances and organised labour.

Can the whole house of cards hang together? Societal homogeneity and unity usually carry countries through trying circumstances, but in South Africa, we are vulnerable to crass racial and tribal distractions.

In the early 1950s, when those first legislative depredations of apartheid were rolling out, there were voices from Natal demanding secession. 

“The Union [of South Africa] has failed. We have not been able to build a nation. Let us accept the divorce, end the dogfight,” said MP Heaton Nicholls. Secession reared its head again in 1960, after Hendrik Verwoerd’s Nationalists demographically gerrymandered and won a referendum on removing South Africa from the Commonwealth, the first step to the formation of the republic in 1961.

Chatter recently about Cape independence was generally met with derision. It is indeed a bad idea but, according to one poll, there may be some minority support for such an idea in the Western Cape, with 36% of those polled apparently being in favour of it. That is to say, the idea has seeded reasonably well, and that with its chief proponents being peripheral figures.

It’s good to have a chuckle about this, but as countries have seen recently, seemingly outlandish nationalist ideas can balloon into full-scale crises if taken up by serious, if malicious,  people. Scottish nationalism and Brexit are good examples.

The harm and distraction of the Scottish nationalist cause and Brexit to the UK is real and ongoing. Yet, the union of 1707 seemed immutable for centuries. The Scottish Nationalist Party was a minority party in Scotland until 2007, and the notion of independence wasn’t even a topic before the 1960s. And as for Brexit, well, who would have even imagined it just 10 years ago? It was considered to be such a marginal idea that a sitting Conservative prime minister felt confident enough to offer a referendum on it. 

To avoid discussions about Cape independence attaining any serious level, as much as it may feel like a fringe notion right now, the solution is to start making sensible and coherent arguments for the republic, for unity and homogeneity. This is not generally what we do here, though.

Laughing at people who feel so detached and upset with the direction of the country that such folly seems attractive isn’t going to help, and the looming test of the social fabric brought on by the theft of R1.5-trillion by the State Capture gangsters is not going to make these ideas go away, nor despoil the fertile ground in which they grow.

Overseas they always ridiculed the secessionists, but it’s Nigel Farage and Nicola Sturgeon who are chuckling now.

Smut’s favourite place was Table Mountain, and every morning I skirt its edges on the wonderfully cambered Philip Kgosana Drive in our Mini Countryman. It’s mine, a hangover from a past life (I worked for BMW for a while), but it is also more than a Mini. It is, under the skin at least, also a BMW 1-Series, BMW X1 and a 2-Series Active Tourer.  That is to say, a product built on a BMW Group platform.

Fortunately, it’s a good one. The Countryman, in basic Cooper spec, just about squeezes enough power out of its three-cylinder, 1.5-litre engine. The chassis is a cracker. Like its stablemate the X1, it is remarkably poised for a crossover vehicle, able to carry impressive pace through a corner if you turn like a gentleman.

We have three kids, but we all got from Cape Town to Knysna the other day with all our beach gear for a week of splashing around in the lagoon. The Countryman coped with the extra weight and we were all comfortable enough, although the sporting seats get a little uncomfortable for those broader in the beam after a few hours in the saddle.

The interior is fun and typically Mini, and seems to have been very solidly nailed together.

We’ve had the Countryman for several months now and its life is solidly urban. Like all small-capacity turbocharged motors, the BMW 1.5-litre unit is hardly fuel-efficient, averaging around 8-9l/100km on an average tank. Recently, with the sudden arrival of a Cape summer, it’s deteriorated as we’ve had to rely on the air-conditioning to overcome the lack of a proper cover for the car’s sunroof.

A base Countryman will set you back more than R550,000 before you’ve gone anywhere near the options list. That’s quite a lot of money but, in this day and age, it’s actually important to see what’s under the skin, and for a BMW Group platform with a 7-speed dual-clutch automatic, it’s verging on reasonable.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given his political achievements at the United Nations and in South Africa, the core of Smuts’ ideas of holism was “the tendency in nature to produce wholes (i.e. bodies or organisms) from the ordered grouping of unit structures”. As a brand, Mini would be nothing without the BMW Group. Perhaps there’s something in that. BM/DM