Support for South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress, has just fallen below 40 per cent, which makes it very likely that, come the May election, there’ll be a coalition government. I’m surprised that support for the ANC is as high as it is. Across South Africa, states run by the ANC are failing. Infrastructure has collapsed and unrepaired sewage systems mean the water is polluted and poisonous. Electrical systems are down and the railways and ports are often closed. Property prices in Cape Town soar as South Africans flee here from all across the rest of the country. Because South Africa’s rand has collapsed against the euro (and even post-Brexit sterling) everything’s a bargain. In Checkers, the big supermarket, Germans pile their trollies with boerewors, beer and wine. My basket of non-alcoholic beer causes consternation, mirth, then pity.

I’ve reported from the Cape over many decades. It’s always been dangerous and it’s always been a paradise – if you’re white. That hasn’t changed much since democracy came 29 years back. The racist apartheid regime forced non-whites out of the city and onto the swamps of the Cape Flats, the hunting grounds for gangsters like Ernie ‘Lastig (tricky)’ Solomons. Ernie was a so-called ‘coloured’, meaning mixed race, and leader of the 28s gang. He ran a wildly violent organisation born in South Africa’s prisons, that preyed largely on the poorest of the Cape, peddling drugs and people, selling ‘protection’. We got on well, Ernie and I. When I first met him he shoved the barrel of his shining revolver in my mouth – that made me gag but it also made me laugh, which Ernie liked. Ernie was shot dead last year and his successor as gang leader is living in the city’s poshest suburb, Constantia. At lunch there, my host tells me that the new gang leader has his advantages. Four people, perhaps connected with the Bulgarian mafia, were whacked here a few months back and now local street crime is down. Gangsters have kids too.

Before his folk were forced out of downtown, my father Dennis loved Cape Town. District Six, at the centre of the city bowl, was the cauldron of the nation’s demi-monde. My dad jolled with jazz giants Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela and Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim). He wrote for the Golden City Post, smoked pot with politicians and bantered with Albie Sachs, the South African lawyer, activist, writer and former judge who was appointed to the first Constitutional Court of South Africa by Nelson Mandela. District Six was levelled more than 50 years ago and it is still waste ground, but mercifully the music survived and lives on elsewhere.

My father was an enthusiastic violator of the Immorality Act, which banned interracial leg-over. That was one of the ‘petty apartheid’ laws of the absurd system. More dangerous was ‘grand apartheid’. This involved the denial of South African citizenship to most black people. They were forced to become citizens of Bantustans, discontinuous ink blots of lousy land where they were given the ‘right’ to ‘separate development’ and local administration.

South Africans are abuzz over what’s happening in Gaza. There’s glee at Hamas’s ‘operation’ from my dad’s old friend Ronnie Kasrils, a founding member of the ANC and a former intelligence minister. He is an old commie and a devotee of global ‘resistance’. Israel’s supporters, though, are uneasy. Cape Town has a proud Jewish community, and many are small ‘z’ zionists.

South Africa is about to enter its 30th year of democracy. It’s more than 60 years since my father, tipped off that he was the target of a state murder plot, fled into exile. It’s 35 years since Albie Sachs lost his left eye and right arm in a car bomb attack launched by Pretoria’s agents in Mozambique. A few weeks ago, Sachs joined my brother, the artist Beezy Bailey, and others to release my dad’s ashes into Kalk Bay. The urn containing Dad rapidly sank to the sound of the usual hubbub from the packed chippy at the end of the pier. Dad, Ronnie, Albie and their fellow travellers loved it here. It was one of the places during apartheid that non-white people could enjoy the sea. The nicest beaches were always reserved for whites only. After we’d said goodbye to my father, Albie picked up a vast order of chips for his vast boxer son and predicted that the ANC will lose this year’s elections. ‘We’ve seen corruption exposed, the president interrogated, the corrupt jailed – and the army’s weak. But if they lose, the ANC will leave power peacefully,’ he insists. Albie’s faith comes from decades in the ‘struggle’. One hopes he’s right. He has always been a rebel with a cause, unlike my father, who Albie says ‘was just a rebel about everything’. Modern South Africa is complicated – it’s no longer black and white.