When I first went to South Africa, apartheid had been dead a year or two. Estate agents were struggling to sell huge gated mansions with pools at knock-down prices. There were armed guards on the metal gates that led into restaurants where white people discussed the latest carjacking and which part of London they were moving to. On the road from Cape Town airport, fenced off from Gugulethu and Langa townships, the taxi driver cheerfully told me stories of how burning rubbish would be thrown over the barriers on to the tarmac, causing crashes. In places we could see over the fence to piles of home-made houses, thrown together from bits and pieces of random tin, wood, brick, plastic and cardboard. It looked interesting. Could I go for a walk there, I asked. The driver laughed so hard he almost forgot to watch out for flaming missiles. "They'll rob and kill you," he said. "I won't take you. They'd steal my wheels."
I'd lived for a few years in Sudan, then done long journeys in and around East and Central Africa. For long periods I would be the only white person around and, after a while, my brain simply gave up seeing the difference. I'd recognise old friend lookalikes in the market crowd and told the tea-seller he reminded me of Jimmy Carter. No one saw me any different either: if they said anything, it would be, "How did you catch that skin condition?" It was, perhaps, the worst preparation for Cape Town. Much better to have never entertained the notion that people of different skin colour might live together. Better to retreat behind the high walls and electrified wire. Once those things get put up, you can see where things are going: the outsiders became ever more alien until one day they are a different species and can be treated as sub-human, they may even require deportation, or worse. I didn't much like the country on that first visit, but it wasn't because of the very visible barriers, it was the invisible one, the poison that made contact between people of different skin colours so uneasy. I couldn't get used to that and came away with pessimistic forebodings. Things were not going to get better.
Ten years later I'm in a shebeen in Gugulethu township with Sheila, a bombshell with an earthquake laugh. The dude in the velvet cap is ruminating on Sheila's suggestion that we drink wine. "It's not a bad drink," he says, "But it takes six bottles to get drunk."
It feels like we are in someone's front room: soft sofas and armchairs, a little worn, and a hatch through to the kitchen. If it is someone's front room, I'm not clear whose. It might be the dude in the velvet cap, but I suspect not. His attitude to wine, Sheila tells me, dates from the bad old days. Cheap sweet wine, nicknamed 'papsack', that was only meant for getting drunk. She is on a mission to change that attitude, having just graduated from a scheme to train black women as winemakers. It looks like it may be hard-going. Another man, already drunk, comes over and starts bothering us for money. At first Sheila humours him, in English, but he doesn't give up and she switches to Xhosa. His face drops and he leaves immediately. When we come to leave, I ask her what she had said to him. "I just said that if he didn't go away, I would smash this bottle over his head." With forceful characters like Sheila behind it, I thought, maybe there is a chance this project could work.
In Langa township, I meet Nondumiso, another black lady on the scheme. She was a teacher when she saw the advertisement for the course in Stellenbosch University. "Wine had a negative image in our community," she says, "And I knew almost nothing about it, but I did some research and decided to apply."
There was, however, an entrepreneurial spirit in her family. Her grandfather had been evicted from his land in the early 1950s when the area had been declared Whites Only. He ended up jobless in Langa where he started selling milk and eggs, building things up to support the family.
After qualifying, her first hurdle was land. Suitable vine-growing acres in the Cape were far beyond her reach, but she managed to build a relationship with a white-owned vineyard and started her brand, Ses'fikile, which in Xhosa means 'We have arrived'. When we meet, however, the vineyard had been sold and Nondumiso was facing an uncertain future. "All my partners have given up." She seems subdued. The cheap end of the market meant buying unidentified wine from the back of tankers in quiet laybys and car parks, then bottling it up and flogging it in the shebeens. Nondumiso did not want to go down that route. In my notebook, I write, "What a huge journey these women have to make. Nondumiso seems uncertain and needs confidence."
"One of the worst things about apartheid," she says when we part, "Was that it wore down our self-esteem. That is the struggle now."
In Stellenbosch I go to meet a third lady, Ntsiki Biyela, who is working as a winemaker in Stellekaya vineyard. She had come out from Zululand knowing nothing about wine at all. "I was at high school, hoping to become a chemical engineer when the opportunity came up."
At university she was an outsider in every possible way: female and black, but also a Zulu who scarcely spoke Afrikaans. "I couldn't even ask for bread. I felt like an alien." But Ntsiki had depths of determination learned from her grandmother. She graduated and took a part-time job in a prestigious winery where she learned the trade from the bottom up. "Pruning, picking, tasting, hospitality - everything. I really learned about wine." There were challenges, however. "I remember one day a white man came in asking for the winemaker and I said, 'Yes, that's me.' He simply turned away and walked out." Her reserves of quiet determination, however, stood her in good stead. "When I entered a room full of white men, I could feel the mood but my attitude was, I'm here - deal with it."
We walk around the winery. She shows me the full process, then we taste some of her red wines. They are incredible. I leave wondering if she will be the one who finally hits a home run. Is there a bit of hope?
Fifteen years later I am idly scrolling through BBC iplayer looking for something to watch. There's a programme about the dancer Oti Mabuse revisiting her roots in a South African township. I am half-watching it when I hear the name Ntsiki Biyela. My attention is grabbed. Ntsiki has now got her own winery called Aslina and is exporting worldwide, including the UK. She sits on the board for a youth development academy and has won several major international awards. Once I hear this news I want to know about Sheila and Nondumiso and discover that they too are still doing well with the brands they set up: Lathitha and Ses'fikele. Other women I met on that trip are also succeeding: check out M'hudi and The Seven Sisters. It is possible that barriers can come down and people of massively differing backgrounds work together, but it helps to have some big characters to achieve it.
I came back to SA after 20 years of living in the USA, and I have noticed repeatedly how incredibly strong and resilient - and happy! - so many black and coloured women are. Most of the men too, but the women, especially where I live in Durban, are just a delight.