‘We’ve got a rather nasty saying for it (the attitude and mentality of the black population in South Africa): “We took them out of the bush, but you can’t take the bush out of them.”’

With that a fellow hiker on the Otter Trail, a lady in her mid-fifties, South African born and raised with Portuguese roots concluded her view of black South Africans. We were lost for words although it wasn’t the first time we had heard this saying.

Apartheid was wrong, but we never ran the country into the ground, she continued. ‘Whenever they’re unhappy, they burn down absolutely everything. The teachers go on strike, they burn their school, the bus drivers go on strike, they burn tires on the streets; burn their own stuff all the time, it’s ridiculous!’

After our cumulated visits of two months to this country, these views – the frustration and exasperation of many South Africans – were not new to us but we’d never heard them voiced with this much candour. I have no doubts that racism in South Africa is still omnipresent. It is, and directed towards the black and white population.

Before her grandfather arrived in South Africa, he emigrated from Madeira to Zimbabwe, she told us. What happened to him there, a white landowner under the presidency of Robert Mugabe in the early 2000s is a great worry of white South Africans nowadays: land expropriation without compensation.

Under the ‘fast track land reform’ programme her grandfather was forced off his land within a week and like him several thousand other white farmers who were often subjected to death threats and physical violence.

Whether ‘his land’ was in fact his or the wrongdoing of a racial hierarchy and just compensation for colonialism to be reclaimed by its right owners remains hotly debated. Mugabe defended forcible land grabs in his speech to the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000: ‘In Zimbabwe, and only because of the colour line arising from British colonialism, 70 per cent of the best arable land is owned by less than 1 per cent of the population, which happens to be white, while the black majority is congested on barren land.’

White farmers countered the land they owned was uncultivated before and no different to any other in Zimbabwe until they made it more arable. The effect of the forced exodus of white farmers on Zimbabwe is indubitable however. Once dubbed ‘the breadbasket of Africa,’ Zimbabwe turned importer of food and recipient of food aid and suffered a $12 billion loss in agricultural production from 1999-2009 (Bloomberg).

By 2015 only 300 white farmers remained in the country and all land had been redistributed in compensation for colonialism. But during the 2014/2015 cropping season more than 1/3 of that arable land wasn’t cultivated. Severe food insecurity and chronic malnutrition left more than one in four children stunted and less than every fourth child received an adequate diet (wfp). Within as little as a 10-year period, life expectancy at birth declined by almost 20 years – from 59.6 in 1990 to 41.7 in 2000 (HDR 2016).

With a European passport and house on Madeira our fellow hiker could leave the country if things got much worse, we learned. But South Africa was home, even when corruption and crime, in her opinion, changed the country for the worse at breakneck speed. ‘When I get back, first thing I’ll check is how many disasters struck during five days of hiking.’

She talked of wilful traffic police controls that she was subjected to at least twice a week. ‘They see an old car, they pull you over. Then they walk around your car, very slowly and try to find something wrong with the tires, the brakes, the lights, whatever.’ She shook her head in frustration and said, she would rather pay any kind of fine than bribe. A bribe would almost always take care of a random fine and drawn-out inspections of the car, ‘but bribe the wrong person, they’ll lock you up.’

Also bribes absorb you into the spiral of corruption that runs so deep in South Africa nowadays that the country ranked 72nd on the Corruption Perception Index in 2017, well behind Botswana, Namibia and Rwanda.

‘What people from abroad don’t understand, is that black people in Africa are not like black people in Europe or the States. They don’t think further than here,’ and she lifted her palm to right in front of her face. I was speechless at first in view of such awful open racism, but then asked her to elaborate on ‘the mentality of black people in Africa’ that in her opinion set them apart from other (black) people. She named their entitlement mentality, lethargy and disinterest in contributing to society.

I didn’t reply anything to that but was uncomfortably reminded of my own lengthy rant about the striking boredom and disinterest the park ranger at the trailhead reception the previous day had displayed. ‘At what time is sunset?’ ‘Is it safe to cross the Bloukrans River in the dark?’ (And if not) ‘How long is day four with the escape route going to take?’ ‘I don’t know,’ was her stock response to every single question. Her skin colour had not led me to anticipate her behaviour. But I wasn’t surprised either. On many occasions especially in national parks we had been treated the same.

In the shop she and her husband once owned, black South African workers were a constant source of hassle, she claimed. ‘You ask one to move a crate from here to there, and they tell you: “It’s not part of my job description.”’ Then the next person knocking on your door will be the workers union. She would always rather employ a Zimbabwean immigrant than a unionised black South African. That mind-set on a large scale, I thought, was certainly fuelling the xenophobic violence spreading in the country.

A culture of fear and crime is omnipresent in daily life. South Africa has the highest homicide rate in Africa and is in 5th place worldwide (World Bank 2015). It also has the highest rape rate per capita in the world (United Nations).

‘The first thing I do when I get in the car is lock all the doors,’ our hiking companion said, ‘and I never open the window more than this wide,’ and she indicated a narrow gap with her fingers. That still didn’t help her when a black youth with a crowbar broke the driver’s window and stole her valuables. In Pretoria, she lives nearby a nature reserve but cannot go running or mountain biking there by herself. Or get out of the car without checking the driveway where most hijackings apparently occur. Her daughter who walks home from work stays on the phone to her mother the whole way for safety reasons.

Did we know why the top of many highway bridges was closed in with meshed wire? No, we didn’t. It’s to stop black youth from dropping stones on cars passing below. ‘You have no idea how bad it is.’ At 120kmh, a stone smashing the windshield may easily kill you. If it doesn’t and only stops the car, the rest of the gang will be waiting below the bridge. At best, she pointed out matter-of-factly, you’ll only lose your belongings and car, not your life.

‘Even when they find this little shit, that high,’ and she indicated a 1.20m off the floor, ‘what are you going to do? No point locking them up, there’s tens of thousands of them. The problem is that they have nothing to lose. They get locked up, they’re better off, at least they’ve got a warm bed and proper meal.’

I was shocked to learn of these incidents but far more by the hopelessness of the situation. As long as people are better off in prison than outside, moral consciousness is not going to stand in the way of crime.