Catching up with Mandela’s dream I

T’S shocking to think that just three decades ago, South Africans were living in a segregated society.

Signs in shops and streets directed “whites” to one area and “blacks, coloureds and asians” to another.

“It’s over thirty years since I saw for myself the horrors of Apartheid South Africa,” says Sir Trevor McDonald, who was appalled by the oppression that he saw there.

To mark what would have been Nelson Mandela’s hundredth birthday, Sir Trevor now returns.

He was the first journalist to interview Mandela after his release from prison in 1990 after 27 years and saw history in the making. Mandela wanted a Rainbow Nation, but does that exist in today’s South Africa? Despite having changed massively, it is still a land defined by division, inequality and violent crime.

As Sir Trevor travels around the country, one with shocking contrasts, it’s clearly a very personal tour for him.

He visits Vilakazi Street, the site of Nelson Mandela’s family home, where he conducted the interview. He also discovers a very different Soweto to the townships of the 1980s, meeting real estate agent Matseleng Mogodi, who sells luxury houses, to the new, black middle class.

By contrast, he visits a Squatter Camp in Munsieville where white families, once protected by the economics of apartheid, are now struggling to make ends meet.

There’s also a trip through the notorious Cape Flats, known as “the murder capital of the world”, which sits not far from the gated Val De Vie, the most luxurious development in a South Africa.