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In South Africa I find myself to be excessively polite.

The meal takes an hour to arrive? Oh hey, I wasn’t hungry then anyway, I cry, fixing a 100-watt smile on the black waiter.

The food isn’t what I’d ordered? A surprise? Wow thanks.

The offering closely resembles the regurgitated slops of a camel? Mmmm, lekker (Afrikaans for delicious). Can I help you with those plates?

Only at the end of our trip does our group compare notes and admit that yes, we’ve all been guilty of the same thing, which is guilt. Buckets of it in fact.

As a result we’ve all adopted a desperate, almost wincing gratitude which the critical amongst us would say was a kind of reverse racism. Well, okay, but would the waiter have felt better if I’d snarled at him instead?

It just goes to show that the mental landmines left by decades of apartheid cause most European visitors to tread very carefully through this former racial war-zone.

Our guide is equally as nervous. He’s very sensitive to the nuances of language, and well he might be with a name like Mark Shagam. It’s a name that sends Australians and New Zealanders into fits of giggles while Americans can’t understand what the joke is about.

However, says Mr Shagam, it is Americans who are the most thin-skinned when it comes to the South African penchant for labeling. They don’t like the distinction made between blacks, coloureds, Cape Malays or Cape coloureds but there are also English-speaking South Africans and Afrikaners and eleven official languages just to confuse matters in this Rainbow Nation.

Mark Shagam is none of the above. He’s a Jewish South African who lives in Cape Town and was never taught about Hitler and the Holocaust at school.

“Everything was done from the Afrikaners point of view,” he laments.

Now you can get almost everybody’s point of view, only these days it’s called tourism. I sample a little of what’s on offer at a braai at the Cape, a tour of Robben Island and a walk round the Bo-Kaap.

A braai is a South African barbecue, but the grill is larger and hotter than anything I’d seen at home, and the same goes for the meat. Boerewors is a favourite which literally translated means farmer’s sausage. In fact it looks like the intestines of an elephant but when cooked the boerewors changes from a spiral of swollen pink to a delicious, tight brown spicy sausage.

My hosts are English-speaking South African and, perhaps because we are guests, do their best not to complain. Some work in publishing and show me recent magazines where the pros and cons of immigration to Australia are discussed.

They make favourable comments about Mandela even though he’s just upset white folk by berating them for leaving South Africa, and almost every white taxi driver has said his regime is corrupt. The only hint that anything is amiss is the gloomy observation of one man who says he is worth nothing now that the rand has collapsed.

The meal finishes with koeksisters, plaits of deep fried dough dipped in syrup. No doubt you will be shuddering with revulsion by now convinced koeksisters are not the sort of thing you like at all. All I can say is, try one, and then tell me you don’t like them.

After the pale polite restraint of the braai, the Robben Island tour is a blast of fresh air. Europeans are in the minority and the guide even indulges in a little light humour. “Remember that in this new South Africa if I don’t know the answers I still have the democratic right to lie,” he announces at the beginning of our two hour bus tour.

Nelson Mandela’s suffering here made this gritty circle of land off the coast of Cape Town a household word and a symbol of apartheid evil. Ever since European colonization Robben Island had been employed as a prison for criminals and political prisoners, a quarantine centre for the chronically ill and a place of banishment for lunatics and lepers. Our guide, Patrick Matanjana, spent 20 years here enduring great physical privations but also, against all the odds, helping to create a place that honed some of the finest minds in South Africa.

Mandela himself said that had he been alone at Robben Island he would have impressed no one but that because he was in the company of highly developed human beings, their studies and discussions uplifted and inspired him.

Although visiting the quarry where the prisoners worked, the visitors’ centre and the cells are a sobering experience, Matanjana does not tolerate self-pity. Asked by one visitor if it were not too traumatic for him to be working here, a worker replied that the new South Africa has no time for such sentimental ideas.

“Today I am friends with the old warders. Our families braai together, eat together, drink together, enjoy together. You cannot correct a wrong thing with a wrong thing. Fighting doesn’t build but it destroys. Let’s join hands and make it not happen again.”

We are suitably subdued as we make the eleven kilometre journey back on the boat with arms full of Robben Island books, t-shirts and bags bought on the island, hoping, I suppose, that a little unrestrained western consumerism might help us all.

We can’t get away from that damned spot. Even on a stroll around the Bo-Kaap or Malay Quarter of Cape Town, the spectre of Robben Island hangs over us. Cape Muslims, generally called Cape Malays by whites, first came to South Africa 400 years ago as political prisoners, slaves or exiles from the Dutch East Indies. Their lingua franca was Malay and their religion Islam.

Somehow, I’m not surprised to learn that some ended up as prisoners on Robben Island and that while they were there the island fostered a rarified intellect. Not only was an important work on Islam written here but one man copied the entire Koran from memory while on Robben Island (apparently quite accurately) and established the first mosque.

Today the Bo-Kaap, on the north-eastern side of Signal Hill, forms a distinct area immediately recognizable by the brightly painted exteriors of the houses and the mosques. It’s the sort of photogenic chic that sends us all madly snapping red geraniums against purple walls.

Our instincts are suitably shallow and spot-on. It turns out that the Bo-Kaap is fashionable, and has been ever since the apartheid régime forced the removal of Muslims from the area. Since then, whites and Cape Malays have been fighting over who owns the place.

Our guide, the elegantly turbanned Shereen Habib, fears the yuppies are winning, buying houses, pushing up values and making the place too expensive for young Cape Malays.

“It’s monetary exploitation,” she sighs, “but still I wouldn’t want to go back to the time when we said Malays only.”

At her mother’s restaurant, ‘The Noon-Gun Restaurant,’ so named for the china-rattling effect the daily blast of the cannon below, we experience a truly happy cultural blend - Cape Malay cuisine. It’s an intriguing mix of Dutch and Malay; in other words, sweet, spicy and often fatty.

I wolfed down the bobotie, a sort of South African mince pie with either dried fruit such as apricots and currants, or jam.

What did I think of it? “Mmmmm. Lekker,” of course.

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