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‘South Africa belongs to all who

live in it, united in our diversity.’

– from the preamble to the

South African Constitution

I’ve decided to print all the pictures in this book in black and white, knowing that readers will allow their imagination to see the colour in each one. For me, having grown up in a black and white country where ‘Whites Only’ ruled my existence, the above snap represents one of the small signposts that changed my life.

I am on the rocks at Bloubergstrand looking towards Robben Island. Table Mountain is there as it was every day of my life, and yet each day looking different – naked rock in sunshine or misted up by cloud, like a play with a new audience each time, always fresh and shockingly intrusive. I might have worn a T-shirt saying ‘The first day of the rest of my life’. For it is 11 February 1990. Possibly at that very moment, former prisoner 466/64 Nelson R. Mandela was walking to freedom from Victor Verster Prison after 27 years, hand in hand with his wife Winnie.

The most famous person in the world would soon become my president, democratically elected by the people of my country. On this day Mandela freed me from my jail of prejudice and fear, and on 27 April 1994, for the first time ever, I was legally allowed to queue up with anybody. Who says life cannot start at fifty? My job as political satirist had come to an unexpected but celebrated end. But only for a few days: Nelson Mandela’s sense of humour would soon inspire me to find the ‘mock’ in democracy and expose the ‘con’ in reconciliation.

I hope the journey to this moment can entertain and illuminate and, while we all know there is a happy ending, reveal the small signposts in my life that changed so much. The big billboards of death, terror, fear and glory force major changes in life, and there were enough of them to remember. It was only through exposing the small signposts while researching this memoir that I started to understand a familiar childhood as it developed into a personality. I now, at last, have come to know the most difficult character among the eighty or so I have performed on stage in my chorus line of creatures, clowns and criminals.

Me.