On the Manner of Practising the New Diplomacy

Abstract

On 25 April 1994, I arrived in Johannesburg at what was then still known as Jan Smuts International Airport, two days before the election of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa. On the previous day, a Sunday, a bomb had exploded at the very same terminal I landed at, killing two people. I told myself how lucky I was that the Malaysian Airlines flight from Buenos Aires arrived on Mondays rather than on Sundays. Welcome to the new South Africa, I said. Perhaps those who warned me it was a mistake to accept a posting to an African country undergoing a violent transition, instead of a more comfortable European destination, had been right after all. (‘South Africa? You are mad’, a friend had told me. ‘Why not Bosnia? You’d be safer there.’)