Msinga was declared a location, or Zulu reservation, in 1849. Whites couldn’t bear to look at Msinga because its devastation was to some large extent their own fault. That was white South Africa’s usual response to Msinga’s problems: avoid them. South African Airways solved the problem by rerouting its flights. Thermals rising from these zones of devastation caused such turbulence at 30,000 feet that white businessmen jetting between Johannesburg and Durban were losing their lunch over Msinga. In some places, there was no soil at all, just sheets of grey slate and clayey subsoil baked hard as concrete by the sun. The earth at their feet had washed away down gaping erosion gulleys and into the river, leaving the first nine inches of root dangling in thin air. The last big trees looked like mangroves, stranded high and dry by a receding tide of soil.

The deeper I drove into Msinga, the worse it got: less grass, less hope, more goats and more hopeless black people sitting motionless as stones in the roadside dust. This is Msinga, a magisterial district in the self-governing homeland of kwaZulu, the place of Zulus.Īs white South Africa fell away behind me, the countryside grew barren and dusty. From the rim of the escarpment, it looks as though some mad god has taken a knife to the landscape, slashing ravines and erosion gulleys into its red flesh and torturing its floor into rugged hills. And then you round a bend, and the tar falls away beneath the wheels, and you’re looking down into Africa, into a vast, sweltering valley strewn with broken hills, mud huts, and tin-roofed shanties. The white centreline vanishes, and the road itself starts rearing and plunging, like a turbulent river rushing towards a waterfall. You know you are coming into a different country, a different world. The border isn’t marked there is no need. Some ten miles beyond the last white town, you cross the border between the First and Third Worlds, between white South Africa and black kwaZulu. The road to Msinga begins in white South Africa and runs for hours through neat and orderly white farmland, not so different in appearance from parts of central California.

A tale in the desert knap a slate blade