I returned to SA recently after an absence of two years. I had never before in my life been away that long. Some things struck me very forcefully, far more so than if I had been visiting more often.
I walked through a state-of-the-art airport, onto an efficient express train, hailed an Uber that came within two minutes, and was ferried through manicured suburbs. I had forgotten just how well serviced middle-class life in Johannesburg has always been.
In the coming days, this sense only deepened. The local bakery has five sorts of sourdough bread and fine coffee. The local restaurants are full to the rafters each night and the food is superb.
This ambient sense of service extends well beyond the surface of the world into the deepest reaches of life. A friend with a troubled teenager tells me of the help her son received from a battery of thoughtful professionals. Another friend with a dying parent described the most attentive, sophisticated palliative care. Add to that the bonds of mutual support that evolve when most people around one have lived in the same city much of their lives, a rare phenomenon in metropolitan cities.
In the past two years I lived in Oxford in the UK, in suburban Connecticut and rural France. In none of those places did I see the infrastructure of middle-class life as elaborate, as calibrated, as complete as that in Johannesburg.
That all of this has survived a decade of economic stagnation, of governmental malfunction, of calamitous political feuding, suggests a middle class of resourcefulness, power and organisation, a class that has the wherewithal to get what it wants.
The one thing missing from this image, of course, is the sense of insecurity. That the other 95% of SA is largely invisible from the suburbs does not make its presence less felt. Such conspicuously well-serviced people amid the most unequal country on earth is the very picture of foreboding.
Middle class fear is anything but new. In the wake of Sharpeville in 1960, in the wake of June 1976, during the insurrectionary period of the mid 1980s: periodically, the well-heeled have wondered whether the clock is a minute from midnight. The anxiety is as old as white settlement itself.
The difference now is that the middle-class sense of precariousness is thoroughly multiracial; ironically, one of the fruits of freedom has been the transfer of a feeling of unease from an established white to an emergent black middle class.
A decade ago, those who said without embarrassment that the governing party was destroying the country were predominantly white. Now, the most urgent and compelling voices are black. An entire middle class has lost faith in those whose responsibility is to steward the future.
History offers no hint as to how things eventually turn out. The African continent is replete with episodes of the mass expulsion of entire classes of the privileged: Uganda; Tanzania; spectacularly, Algeria; Mozambique and Angola, after a fashion.
Other histories point in the opposite direction. In Colombia, an urban bourgeoisie stamped its hegemony over politics, first in the cities of Bogota, Medellin and Cali — each as violent and unequal as Johannesburg — and then over the nation as a whole.
Either of these possibilities present themselves in SA. But so too do a thousand less extreme paths. One is that the familiar story told here will keep repeating itself ad infinitum. As growth stays flat, as politics remain volatile, as the cries of anger from the margins grow louder, SA’s extraordinarily robust middle class will use its power to get what it wants.
When the violence descended last July, the speed with which middle-class communities battened down the hatches was remarkable. Overnight, entire neighbourhoods, indeed entire towns, sealed themselves off. Improbable new alliances were born in the blink of an eye.
The spontaneous resourcefulness displayed in a moment of emergency is as good a guide to the future as any.
• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.
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