Quadrant readers will probably have some familiarity with South Africa’s unusual history of colonisation: first by the Dutch East India Company’s establishing a provisioning base at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, then by the slaves brought in from Batavia by Dutch ships plying the spice trade, then by the British imperialists in 1805 and finally by Indian labourers, brought in mostly from the state of Gujarat, to work the cane-fields of Natal. To this amalgam were added, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, European fortune-seekers following the lure of diamonds and gold, and many Jews escaping…