Author and journalist Graham Boynton's new book, Last Days in Cloud Cuckooland, has been widely labeled a pessimistic prognosis for South Africa. But Boynton, like the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, denies he's pessimistic, insisting the slant of his stories about the last days of white rule in Africa are those of a "passionate skeptic" for whom blind faith is a form of negligence.

In the United States, where the book was published in October, critics have given the book excellent reviews, and compared it with the best writing on Africa, including that of Joseph Conrad and William Boyd. But they have also concluded that the book, sub- titled Dispatches from White Africa, bodes ill for South Africa. The book covers a 30-year span from the desperate flight of white Belgians from the Congo until the elections in South Africa in 1994, describing heroic figures on the political left and right, as well as the "staggering decline" of good government in Africa.

Although the only aspect of the new South Africa under ANC rule that is described in the book is a segment on crime, the overall impression the book leaves on American critics is a sense of gloom. That has surprised Boynton. "I never intended it to be gloomy and I don't even see it as such. Look, it's not a celebration, but it is full of wonderful characters and big African stories -an anecdotal autobiography inspired by my own experience."
The book's title refers to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher's comment in 1987 that anyone who believed the ANC would rule South Africa was living in Cloud Cuckooland (from a fantasy "Cuckootown" created by Greek comic playwright Aristophanes in The Birds.) Surprisingly, in the United Sates, where optimism is in the national character and faith in Nelson Mandela’s South Africa is fervid, the book's cautionary prognosis and obscure title ("Cloud Cuckooland is not a common expression in the American vernacular) have not hindered sales and many people are buying the book. Boynton points out that he specifically wrote the book for Americans to help explain the complexities of the white experience in Africa -"that whites are
not just a bunch of ghastly people who have lost their colonies and are now having a bad time."
"If my book. has been successful it's because it is a form of Story telling about rich heroic characters confronting large social, economic and moral issues: it is not a dry socio-political treatise. Americans who've read the book have said to me they knew about Steve Biko. But they never heard of the assassination of (Natal University professor) Rick Turner and the events surrounding that episode. No one has ever fully told that story. And Americans have said !hey were moved by the stories of people on the Afrikaner right - people whose forefathers founded the country, who had been told by their church they were living <I way of life determined by their God, and who were then told it was all inappropriate and they had to give up power. This is cataclysmic stuff."

Boynton is not just a raconteur with a pen: "he is a journalist of international standing. The landscape onto which he draws his portraits is made by the historical facts and statistical figures surrounding the devolution of white power on the bottom of the African continent. Although reviews have called his book accurate, some have also said is reactionary and one Canadian critic has even wondered if there was something sinister about Boynton because she had counted greater use of first names for right-wing Afrikaners than for left-wing activists. (He is used to that approach: a few years ago he was called a white government stooge after he wrote a scathing expose of Winnie Mandela and her involvement in murders in Soweto.)
More controversial, courageous and impolitic is hi out- spoken yearning, his confessed nostalgia, for a "secure orderliness" that he associated with the years under white rule. In an episode in Johannesburg when fear of criminal attack left him in a "white sweat of terror", he writes, "suddenly, vividly, the white Africans' inglorious past appeared to me as a glorious memory." Boynton does not ask to roll back the clock or bring back the colonialists. "They made a mess of it. But life isn't much better under black rule.

"I know people who argue that western democratic standards are not appropriate for Africa. That is patronizing. Ask middle-class blacks in Zimbabwe what kind of government they want - ask them in Nigeria or Kenya. Don't ask academics or politicians, ask the average middle-class person. We have to set our standards against the most successful countries in the world, and it so happens success has been in democracies.

"My book also deals with the argument, popular among conservatives, that the past 30 years have proved a kind of malaise endemic in the African soul that makes them incapable of governing. This is also absurd and ridiculous. Colonialists left a mess; but African governments are taking too long to make things work."

It has been common in Africa, no less in apartheid South Africa than elsewhere, to equate critics with enemies - especially critics from the outside. Does Graham Boynton, with a Manhattan apartment and locus in the world of New York publishing, have the authority, the credentials or the right to make prescriptions for a country in a tremulous period of transition? Boynton's authority, he says, 4 comes from his personal encounters with j modern history. He claims his credentials come from his passionate concern for the region. His right, he laughs, is no less than
that of anyone who has an opinion -"and all whites in Africa have strong opinions." J
He was a youngster when, in 1960, refugees from the Belgian Congo surged into his home town of Bulawayo. Later he fled Rhodesia to avoid being drafted into an army fighting a civil war. He moved to Natal where he went to university and then worked as a journalist. In Durban he became closely associated with anti-apartheid activists, many of whom were later assassinated, detained or put under house arrest. These connections, he believes, led to his expulsion from South Africa by the Nationalist government in 1975. He moved to London and has worked as a journalist in the UK and the US ever since. He considers himself a white African and has taken more than 20 t research trips to Africa -Zimbabwe, South s Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia -in the s past few years. His repertoire of African stories -dark, witty, poignant, shocking and full of human drama -are, like those of the white hunters of the old days, the trophies he brings from his many expeditions. Several years ago, when he was working as an editor at Conde Naste Traveler, a magazine based in New York, these stories about Africa snagged the influential ear of the former editor of the London Sunday Times, Harold Evans, who was then running the American publishing giant, Random House. Evans asked Boynton to write a book for Random House about the end of white rule. Over the following few years Boynton spent almost half of every year in Southern Africa. He became so steeped in the developments unfolding on the subcontinent that he began to yearn to live in Africa again. He rented space in a remote clapboard cottage on the shores of Long Island -as visually and culturally distant from Southern Africa as it's possible to get. Spending days away from his wife and two small children in New York, he molded his material into a book. A gregarious man, he found the process hard and lonely. "Sheer hell, actually." The book was finished a year ago, and the most recent events covered in the book took place in 1995 -too early to pass judgment on the success or failure of the new government in South Africa. However, says Boynton, South Africa is different enough from the rest of Africa for there to be some hope for the country. "No other African country has first-world infrastructure, telephones, and roads - all the scaffolding necessary to attain economic success." Indeed, Boynton concludes that if South Africa's future is more promising than that of the rest of post-colonial Africa, it is in part due to the presence of a highly productive white community. But while President Nelson Mandela has been unequivocal on the subject of whites remaining, "his successors are not expected to be as conciliatory," says Boynton, noting that Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe, was unable to persuade white Rhodesians to stay and, following the flight paths of white Kenyans, Zambians and South Africans, their numbers shrank from 230,000 to 80,000. "In the long term, I'm not an optimist about South Africa," says Boynton. But he is not a pessimist either, he says, reverting to his favorite philosopher, the "passionate skeptic" who preached the importance of doubt. "What is wanted is not the will to believe," said Bertrand Russell, "but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite."

In some circles "the will to believe" in the new South Africa takes primacy: at least one British publisher declined to take the book into paperback on the grounds that the west wasn't ready for the pall that the book casts on hope for the new South Africa. Readers in South Africa are not expected to need such cosseting - Jonathan Ball is publishing the book in South Africa in December.

Published in Leadership, 1999.