I remember, too, rounding the Cape of Good Hope and pulling into the harbor at Cape Town. This is one of the most beautiful cities on earth, but it is not the beauty that I remember; it is the shock of my first encounter with apartheid. Everywhere I went were grim reminders of the deliberate denigration of one group of human beings by another. SLEGS BLANCS was written in bold letters on notices pinned to shops, benches, buses, lavatories, parks, beaches, hotels: slegs blancs is Afrikaans for whites only, and the signs were everywhere.
