A black South African friend of mine was driving near Pretoria when his car broke down. He got out and began waving at passing cars, asking for help. A bearded white man drove up in a pickup truck – in my friend’s eyes, the archetypal Afrikaner, or “Boer”. The man glanced at my friend, and drove on. “Oh, no,” my friend thought. “I’m in Boer territory. Nobody’s going to dare give a black man a lift.” He stood there cursing his fate – when suddenly the Afrikaner in the truck appeared again and beckoned him to jump in. As they drove off, the Afrikaner said: “I was raised with some bad ideas. Now I’m trying to change myself.” They stayed in touch afterwards.

My parents were born in South Africa. I have visited the country all my life, during and after apartheid, and I’ve seen the double miracle that Nelson Mandela wrought. He didn’t just bring a political settlement between different colours. He also brought a settlement in ordinary South African everyday life. Mandela did something perhaps no other contemporary public figure anywhere has managed: he changed the way people in his country interact.

He achieved this on the most unpromising ground. In a terrible way, apartheid succeeded. It started from the assumption that people of different “races” were different, and it created races that really were different. Black and white South Africans grew up in different neighbourhoods, spoke different languages, went to different schools, earned different incomes and died at different ages. These divides were designed to create white contempt. I remember aged about 10, queueing at a Johannesburg ice-cream van, watching the following scene: a customer, another bearded white guy, is accusing the black vendor of being slow. “You’re so stupid!” the white man shouts. “You should not have this job! Quickly, give me ice cream!” The black man hands it over wordlessly; he isn’t allowed to talk back.