In his heart though, however much he wanted to, he didn't believe it.
"
"Yes," Hamilton answered. He'd been expecting to be picked up. Almost he offered his hand to the driver before the endless hours of drill in South African customs reasserted itself. "I'm De Wet."
"Caruthers told me to say, 'Hi,'" the driver said, in Bronx-accented English. Hamilton immediately felt a profound sense of relief. "You'll be working for me. My name here is Bonginkosi Mathebula . . . and if I see you almost offer me your hand again, I will break it. Control yourself,
"Officially," Bongo continued, "I am your indentured manservant. Unofficially, I'm in charge. Don't forget it. If we didn't need a reliable white front man, you wouldn't even be here."
* * *
The drive to the company guesthouse on the outskirts of Cape Town was long. Bongo drove while Hamilton sat in back. The black used the opportunity to lecture.
"A century and a half ago, the whites were on top. You should already have known that but one can never tell what the idiots at Langley may forget to pass on.
"They'd have stayed there, too," Bongo continued, "through a combination of pigheaded determination and bloody-minded ruthlessness. Ultimately, they were pretty sure that as long as the black opposition was supported by and in turn supported the communists, the west would never let white South Africa go under. That was true, too, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century. This made the value of the white regime to the anti-Soviet coalition drop like a lead weight.
"The Boers and the Cape English saw the writing on the walls then and, facing a desperate race war with no possibility of help from their racial kin, they made the best deal they could.
"Unfortunately for South Africa, while not all the whites' fears came to pass, enough of them did. After majority rule was instituted, whites fled the country in droves. Some of them left because of the crime. Other got sick of nepotism and corruption masquerading as affirmative action. I'm sure still others left in sheer funk at not being the local master race anymore.
"Whatever the cause, the white portion of the South African population dropped substantially, about in half, even while the black and mixed populations grew. Even worse, it was the most technically skilled and capable whites who left, while those who stayed tended to be government flunkies and corporate bureaucrats."
Bongo slammed on the brakes and cursed at a black couple crossing the street in front of the company car. The couple just smiled at him and waved.
"Two factors changed that rough demographic stability. One was the roughly one third of the black female population of child bearing age that was infected with HIV, the virus that caused AIDS, the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. This not only killed them in disproportionate numbers, generally in their most fertile years, it caused a very serious social breakdown because of the number of orphans produced. Still worse, it put financial strain on a government that had difficulty enough eking out tax dollars from the many sticky fingers, white and black, those tax dollars passed through. The government, hoping for yet more money in foreign aid to pilfer, even denied that HIV caused AIDS, which of course let the problem rage out of control.
"Still, with low white birthrates and white flight from the country, one could have expected roughly similar proportions to be maintained.
"And so they would have been, had there not been a different wave of white flight in the world, commencing in the 2020s. That wave emanated from Europe. Some of it washed up in Australia and New Zealand. Some small part was allowed into the United States and its possessions. But only South Africa found itself in really desperate need for immigrants. Thirteen million Europeans found their way here."
Bongo's voice grew contemplative. "I have often wondered if the barbarian migrations that wrecked the Western Roman Empire didn't start just that way, one group in Mongolia raiding Chinese living north of the Great Wall, thereby causing the Chinese to push the first offending group right off its lands, starting a chain reaction. Whether it did or not, it sure worked that way here. First the Moslems nudged us, then we made their lands uninhabitable, they in turn went to Europe, which drove the Europeans here, which further fucked the blacks here, in the ass and without grease.
