Jo'Burg; Diary: Four years on, and black still rarely meets white

THE sound of a saxophone drifts sexily down 7th Street heralding another Saturday night's jazz at the chic Bass Line club in Melville, one of Johannesburg's white suburbs.

At the rather garish Red Barrel near by, hundreds of teenagers - almost all white - are giving their all to the karaoke machine. But the candlelit Bass Line, as any humble jazz fan will tell you, attracts a more discerning crowd. The club also boasts a rare Johannesburg phenomenon: a genuine, real McCoy, racially mixed crowd.

When I say mixed, there are qualifications. There are blacks and whites in the same room but not often at the same tables. It is rather like those Venn diagrams in school maths where the circles never intersect because they have nothing in common.

Still, it is a remarkable sight in a city where most people only meet "the other" at work. After-hours, they generally head back to the old apartheid-era territories; blacks wait in long queues to be stuffed into minibuses bound for outlying townships while whites drive home to the plush northern suburbs. The most terrible shame is that Johannesburg city centre - considered by everyone as dangerous after dark - provides no neutral ground for socialising.

The enduring divisions are a source of deep frustration to outsiders. They rob life in South Africa of a great deal of its richness, for foreigners are not exempt from the racial pigeonholing. In the quest for common ground it rarely helps to play up Scottishness, femaleness or your upbringing on the council estate. Apartheid has obliterated interest in any form of discrimination or disadvantage other than that based on race. "You're just another rich white South African to me," was the way one black official bluntly put it.

Imagine, then, the sheer relief of the Base Line. The concern is that four years after democratic elections there are still so few places like it.

If music can act as a social glue, sport, too, retains a little of its adhesive potential, although nothing like the power naively invested in it in those early heady days of the new democracy. White South Africans still speak about black preference for soccer and white for rugby as if it were in the genes; and they use the dichotomy to explain the continuing divisions among pupils in some schools.

But at the local Holiday Inn last weekend South Africa's game with Egypt in the final of the African Nations Cup brought blacks and whites together. There was a touch of the old Venn diagram about the seating arrangements in the bar but never mind; there was a whiff of togetherness.

Trouble after the match was forecast. The cops were a little nervous after the New Year celebrations in run-down inner-city Hillbrow, where residents welcomed in 1998 by throwing refrigerators from sixth-floor windows. But despite the 2-0 defeat there was no trouble. Instead thousands of fans - black and white - went to the airport to welcome the boys back with Jeho Sono, the caretaker coach, who spiced up proceedings by revealing he had left the team for two days during the Burkina Faso tournament to return home to consult a witchdoctor and his ancestors about the team's chances.

It is hard to say whether that affected his popularity but the debate about whether Sono should stay on as coach has raged all week. Blacks inundated radio chat shows normally dominated by white callers; soccer has generated a rare burst of public cohesion.

But sport's limitations as national healer became clear yesterday when bitterness over the continuing "whiteness" of South African rugby came to the Pretoria High Court. President Nelson Mandela took the advice of his lawyers and delayed his appearance in court, where he was to face questions about an official investigation into racism in rugby. The South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu), which brought the case, is refusing to co-operate with the government inquiry into its finances and management.

It is far from the euphoric day when President Mandela donned the Springbok jersey, the detested symbol of white domination, in the spirit of reconciliation. Since then relations between the government and Louis Luyt, Sarfu's president, have degenerated dramatically. Sports minister Steve Tshwete says that while enemies to reform lurk everywhere, nowhere are they more entrenched than at Sarfu's headquarters.

Rugby is accused of doing nothing to encourage black talent or to darken the collective complexion of the national team. Cricket has come in for similar criticisms. A year away from the second national elections many South Africans are growing tired of the slow pace of social change.