“Characters like Ayanda and David would not have existed.”Now they do, inhabiting on screen a halfway point between what de Lanerolle calls the real and the ideal. The urbane son, who, until recently, ran a media company in Morocco, apologised for the lack of furniture. Since the door of national reconciliation was wedged open, the monied exiles have flooding in.”It is good to be home,” said Nzanga at the riverside villa returned to his family this week. A transitional government uniting rebels and government has been cobbled together in Kinshasa.

Enemies were ruthlessly suppressed, often with the connivance of Western Cold War sponsors.When rebels toppled Mobutu in 1997, the ailing autocrat fled to Morocco, where he died four months later. Standing outside the family’s recently reclaimed villa in Kinshasa, 33-year-old Nzanga wore a green shirt with his father’s beaming portrait. Nzanga Mobutu stared out over the chocolate-brown sweep of the Congo river, and remembered his father Mobutu Sese Seko was one of Africa’s most reviled dictators. For 32 years he ruled the Democratic Republic of Congo, then called Zaire, with an iron rod and stolen wealth. Then rebels toppled him, sending him to exile and death.
Six years later, the “Leopard” is back.

At a time in South Africa’s history that is full of possibilities, good and bad, Soul City portrays a vision of a better, kinder world which – fortunately for the Mandela dream – at least 13 million South Africans would like to recreate and inhabit.. David emerges oozing gratitude “You’re a really brilliant doctor,” he says, shaking hands with Tshabalala.In a spirit of wisdom and generosity, a white man has been taught an important lesson. “Such an encounter with such an outcome would have been impossible 10 years ago, because no one would have believed it,” says de Lanerolle. “We did a lot of testing before the episode was made,” Goldstein said.

“Our audiences convinced us that Dr Tshabalala’s response was just right” As it turns out, of course, the operation goes swimmingly. In South Africa, the tolerance and forgiveness that Mandela has shown to white people is not, as he himself has often observed, a personal aberration. Terribly uncomfortable, David stammers something about going elsewhere for a second opinion. Dr Tshabalala, an older man who might have reacted in a rage, seeks, with an amused glint in his eye, to reassure him.”Unlike other TV programmes, we do try and address race issues head on,” explained Goldstein, “but on the other hand because of the nature of South African society, and black South Africans in general, we knew it would not have been realistic for the black doctor to explode with indignation” – as might have been the case if a similar exchange had taken place in, for example, the United States. The doctor, David, is an obviously enlightened new South African whose political correctness is put to the test when he develops a hernia and goes to see a surgeon whom he imagines to be white – only to discover that in fact he is black. The love relationship between Sipho and Chantal works because both are good-looking and because both are young, twentysomething children of the post-apartheid world. Such a relationship between a couple in their fifties would be too far removed from viewers’ notions of plausible reality.A recent sub-plot concerning a young white doctor at the Soul City clinic offered an eloquent picture of progress in race relations, while showing that there is still some way to go before the non-racial utopia is reached.