The life of a diplomat seems glamorous: postings to distant lands, black-tie events aplenty and history-changing backroom negotiations.
But there are numerous drawbacks too. You never “settle down”. The glad-handing and speechifying that goes into building relationships must get tedious. Your dealings with allies and enemies alike are constrained by policies not of your making.
On the one hand, the diplomatic corps seems to offer continuity. Take the US mission in SA:many of the people who served during the Obama presidency under ambassador Patrick Gaspard a few years ago are still here in the era of the New Guy whose name needn’t be mentioned, and will remain regardless of the directions that might be taken by nominated deployee Lana Marks.
On the other hand, the transitory nature of the business means that ambitious ambassadors can find it difficult to stamp their mark on local politics or see the projects they start through to completion. This mutability is a necessary mitigation of risk — it means that diplomatic duds also don’t stick around for too long.
An ambassadorial appointment is one way of getting rid of a troublesome opponent or challenger; it can equally be a reward for a career in service to party or state, a cushy pre-retirement job. For a diplomat enjoying the twilight of his or her career in SA, a Cape Town villa to complement the Pretoria residence is a prerequisite.
French ambassador Christophe Farnaud enjoys no such option; the French government has sold off many of its properties around the world as a cost-cutting measure, including the former Cape maison. But then his excellency has little time for leisure. Though he speaks with characteristic modesty about his tenure in SA recognising the work of his predecessors, Monsieur Farnaud has presided over some wonderful initiatives since his appointment in 2017, particularly in the arts and culture sector.
Indeed, readers of this column would have noted that writing about the South African arts scene regularly means writing about work supported by the French embassy, the French Institute (IFAS) and the Alliance Française. It seemed appropriate, then, to wind up the year with an evening at the ambassador’s residence celebrating the intersection of French and South African history and culture.
There are various individuals who represent this nexus; Gerard Sekoto is an oft-cited example, although his protracted exile in Paris was not a happy one. In fact, France was not consistently welcoming to black South African artists-in-exile (notoriously, Miriam Makeba was banned from entering the country).
Afrikaner dissidents such as Breyten Breytenbach and André Brink fared better there — and for many Afrikaans writers, musicians and visual artists — a passion for all things French was part of their rejection of the stifling parochialism and puritanism of apartheid. This tradition was inherited by Nataniël le Roux when he first travelled to Paris three decades ago.
Those in attendance at the ambassador’s residence earlier this week may have hoped, when Nataniël took the microphone, that he would perform a few cabaret numbers. Instead, they had to be satisfied with a brief musical interlude: Charles Aznavour’s She as a piano duet with double bass accompaniment, and with a typically entertaining set of anecdotes.
Nataniël’s speech was about Die Edik van Nantes, the TV series and cookbook that he has made with his brother Erik, a chef who “married into the enemy tribe” and enacted a “land grab” by moving with his French wife on to her family farm. With this tongue-in-cheek remark, Nataniël is alluding to a bloody feud between the Catholic and Protestant Le Roux clans.
It was, of course, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 that caused the Protestant Le Roux family — and 500,000 Huguenots like them — to flee from France, many of them ending up at the Cape of Good Hope. This narrative of persecution was exploited by Afrikaner nationalists to devastating effect.
For Nataniël, however, reconnecting with family roots has nothing to do with politically perverse nostalgia and everything to do with “the good life”: wine, cuisine, aesthetics. It’s a thumbing of the nose, you could say, at venal politicians.
Luckily the French ambassador is not one of those.
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