Notes from a fractured country

Award-winning author Jonny Steinberg probes, with characteristic insight and empathy, the schisms, ironies and anomalies that continue to plague South African society. Join Steinberg as he meets a poverty-stricken old man who spends most of his state pension maintaining a black Mercedes Benz; as he comes to the conclusion that Thabo Mbeki is an Afro-pessimist; as he walks through Pollsmoor Prison on the eve of the invasion of Iraq and believes that he sees in the jail's corridors the reasons why America's impending war in the Middle East will fail; and as he chastises the Constitutional Court for trying so hard to be politically correct that it ends up entrenching the very AIDS stigma it sought to fight. For the past five years, Steinberg has been recording the events and situations, some of which are deeply disturbing, that he has witnessed on his travels across South Africa in his fortnightly column on Business Day's leader page. Here is the best of that journalism.