Occasionally, living in South Africa, I pick up snippets of what the cultural life under apartheid was like, and the affirming myths that circulated in Durban. Like the one that Commodores’ front man Lionel Richie was a coloured man born in Cape Town who made it out, and made it big. Alas, Richie’s from Tuskegee, but the fact that he’s not from Cape Town (unlike Jonathan Butler) isn’t half as interesting as the fact that so many people wanted to believe that he might have been.
Website of author, film-maker and academic, Raj Patel