‘We are here to see your maid, Lunamiel,’ said Jimfish, ‘the girl you rescued in Monrovia.’

The minister was more embarrassed than ever. ‘I’m afraid that’s impossible. She’s left.’

‘But why?’ Jimfish was horrified.

‘I don’t know why,’ said the minister. ‘We treated her kindly, paid her promptly, fed and clothed her, gave her an afternoon off once a week. But then, you know how it is with domestic staff, one minute they’re fine — the next they’ve gone. Maybe she had challenges’ — the minister paused delicately — ‘coming from a formerly privileged group.’

Jimfish was flummoxed. ‘I don’t know how you can call her privileged.’

‘He means white,’ said Soviet Malala briskly.

‘I must find her,’ said Jimfish. ‘Please help me.’

The minister sighed. ‘I hear she’s living in a shanty town. In a shack of tin and tarpaulin. Without lights or running water and just a bucket toilet. I’ll give you the address. If you see her, please say that her job is still open. She’s a good girl and I was sorry to lose her.’

The informal settlement where they would find Lunamiel, the minister warned them, was crowded with poor whites and notorious for drugs, robbery, rape and drug addiction. Tour buses took black families to see for themselves what happened to whites who had lost everything; much as whites once toured black townships for glimpses of life on the other side of the colour bar.

The minister had not overstated the conditions in the camp where Jimfish and his companions found Lunamiel stooped over a zinc washing tub. It was not easy to recognize her. She looked so much older and her luscious skin, once as downy as a ripe peach, was deeply lined and she had lost much weight.

‘My darling Lunamiel! How do you manage to live here?’

Jimfish put his arms around her and she felt as thin as a starving bird.

‘As you see, I take in laundry,’ she told him.

Soviet Malala was not particularly sympathetic. ‘She comes from a life of pampered privilege. Too bad if she learns how our people had to live.’

Zoran the Serb said simply, ‘Isn’t it strange how things go around?’

Jimfish was so overcome with guilt that he covered his long-lost love in kisses and did not notice the looks he was getting from her brother Deon.

‘My poor, dear Lunamiel! Can you ever forgive me for abandoning you to the mercies of Brigadier Bare-Butt?’

‘It’s an ill wind that blows no good,’ said Lunamiel sweetly. ‘It was when he was with me that the brigadier heard the call of the Lord and turned overnight from homicidal maniac into a holy man.’

‘God works in mysterious ways,’ said Jimfish.

‘Amen to that. And nowhere are His ways more of a mystery than right here,’ said Lunamiel. ‘The brigadier passed me on, briefly, to a Rwandan politician of the Hutu tribe, but the poor man was far too busy with the civil war in his country and soon dropped me. I was on the streets when this rich South African saved me, flew me home and gave me a job amongst his domestic staff.’

‘What generosity!’ cried Jimfish. ‘And he wants you back. Your job is still open!’

Lunamiel shuddered. ‘Never! I don’t deny he was a kind employer. I had my own room in the backyard, a spoon, an enamel plate and a tin mug. But I had to scrub, wash, iron, cook, sew and look after my employer’s children six days a week — things no normal white woman has ever in her life done for herself, never mind doing it for people who just the other day were doing it for me, whose mother kept a fleet of staff and assigned separate servants to each hand when her nails needed painting. Worse still, my boss had advanced political views and his domestic employees reflected the demographics of our country. He kept ten black staff to one of me and the others mocked me for being useless at the simplest jobs, telling me I hadn’t a clue how to do anything except give orders. They kept asking how it was that whites had run South Africa for so long when we were so useless. One night I ran away and here I am in this shanty town for very poor whites, whose numbers grow each day, but at least I’m back amongst my own people.’

Listening to the story of Lunamiel’s decline and fall, Zoran sighed his Serbian sigh. ‘This talk of togetherness is all very well,’ he said. ‘But it’s going to take a long time before it works.’

Soviet Malala regarded Lunamiel’s plight as nothing less than the punishment the settler entity deserved. ‘You’ve at last felt the angry lash of the masses,’ he said. ‘The rage of lumpenproletariat has blown you on to the rubbish dump of history.’

‘I don’t care about any of that,’ said Jimfish, and he took Lunamiel in his arms. ‘I have deserted you too often, and I will marry you tomorrow and we’ll go home to Port Pallid!’

That was when Deon Arlow stepped forward and angrily separated the lovers.

‘Now, listen here,’ he said. ‘I’m ready to adapt and I’ll never oppress another because of race or colour. As our new President said in his speech, what is past is past. OK? I love every last colour in the rainbow, I swear to God. But I also swore on the family Bible that I would never let my sister marry a black man, not even one who might be white. Over my dead body.’

Lunamiel flung herself at her brother’s feet and begged him to reconsider.

Deon Arlow repeated that Lunamiel descended from the purest Dutch and German and Scandinavian stock; she was Aryan to the nth degree, and love across the colour bar was a rainbow too far.

Jimfish wheeled on him, yanking his pistol from its python-skin holster.

‘Aryan?’ he said. ‘What nonsense! Your family probably descended from slaves and pirates, and Hottentots, Malays and Bushmen. If there is any German or Dutch blood in you it’s from the press-ganged scum of the Berlin gutters and the dross of the Amsterdam pot-houses. Rogues who sailed to the Cape of Good Hope, slept with their slaves and told themselves they were the master race. You leased my dearest Lunamiel to a brace of black Congolese cabinet ministers and a naked Liberian brigadier, without thinking twice. Well, I saved your life in the Comoros and brought you home. I’ve already shot you dead once and I’ll happily do it again!’

But Soviet Malala stepped between them just in time and took Jimfish aside.

‘I have a better use for him,’ he said. ‘Yes, he’s an unreconstructed racist of the old school: cynical, meretricious and stupid. But the old white mindset aside, since his recent transplant he has an African heart. In the new South Africa we need people able to speak out of both sides of their mouths. His combination of boneheadedness and ubuntu would make him an excellent ambassador.’

And so it was — after Soviet Malala dropped a few words in the ears of his powerful friends in the governing party — that Deon Arlow was appointed ambassador to Rwanda, where terrible massacres had begun. There it was that the founder of Superior Solutions would come face to face with the wholesale murder of the minority Tutsis by the majority Hutus, and witness the racial cataclysm that those of his kind had been ready to risk — and promote — in South Africa, where, for decades, one tribe ruthlessly ground all others into the dust and where bloodshed of Rwandan proportions was about to happen, had not the miracle of messy compromise arrived at the last moment.

Everyone praised the brilliant idea of sending Deon Arlow to Rwanda — except Zoran, who thought it might make matters worse.

‘At the moment in that sad place Tutsis are being slaughtered by Hutus,’ he said. ‘But what if the tide turns and the Hutus are stopped and defeated? Won’t Tutsis take their turn at the top table and make life hell for the Hutus? They will need arms, advice and military contractors. That’s when Ambassador Arlow’s former skills as Commandant of Superior Solutions will come in handy.’

Soviet Malala announced that he was shocked by such cynicism.