Deux Pays, Un Cœur

14 Juillet. Bastille Day. Vive la France. Vive Mzansi.

This past weekend Franschhoek did what it’s done for 34 years running: swapped winter grey for rouge, blanc et bleu, and threw its Bastille Festival, wine, cheese, boules on Church Street, berets everywhere (not that I have ever seen a beret in France, by the way!). France marks the day itself on the 14th; Franschhoek does the nearest weekend so the whole village can join in. I wasn’t at this year’s festival myself, but by all accounts from friends who were, it was a very good time indeed. Fitting, since Franschhoek only exists because a group of French Huguenots fled religious persecution in the late 1600s and planted vines in a valley they named after themselves – French Corner. Du Toit. De Villiers. Malherbe. Look at Afrikaans surnames, look at the wine labels in the Cape Winelands, and the Huguenots are still here, 300-plus years later.

So this year, on the actual 14th, I wanted to write down why two countries – South Africa and France – sit so close together in my heart, and to name some of the people, dead and alive, quietly building the bridge between them.

I speak French. Badly some days, better on others, always with more enthusiasm than my accent deserves. I have regular lessons with Thérèse de Villiers, who lives just down the road from me here in the Western Cape but spends large chunks of her year in France – the epitome of French elegance and understated style, and the best kind of teacher, one foot in each world (I was one of her guests with the French ambassador to SA earlier this year, très magnifique). My own French teacher at school, Madame Judith Fodor, I’ve recently reconnected with, decades later, which is one of those small gifts life occasionally hands you. Same with Lettie van der Merwe, who lectured me in French at Stellenbosch. Two women who planted a language in me before I knew what to do with it, both back in my life now. Merci, both of you. You will never really fully comprehend what gift you gave me.

Just last week, the two countries were formally in the same room. President Ramaphosa was on an official visit to France from 10 to 12 July, co-chairing UNESCO’s steering committee on education with President Macron, of whom I am a big fan, dinner at the Élysée, talks with French business leaders, and on Sunday, Longueval, for the 110th commemoration of the Battle of Delville Wood, where more than 2,500 South Africans died in 1916. Trade between our two countries grew 7.7% last year to $2.7 billion. French companies have put over $7 billion into South Africa since 2003. That’s not abstract diplomacy: EasyEquities is a member of the French South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and half the businesses I bump into around Technopark, right across from where I stay in Stellenbosch, have some French thread running through them. It’s not just wine and culture either. Thales has quietly run South Africa’s air traffic radar at OR Tambo and Cape Town International for years, supplies the in-flight entertainment on SAA’s Airbus fleet, and has been here for over 40 years. Real engineering, real infrastructure, real jobs, not just chateaux and Chardonnay. This relationship isn’t sentimental. It’s also just good business, and has been for a long time.

But the sentimental part matters too, and it runs deep in South African culture. Breyten Breytenbach, one of the great Afrikaans poets, and a painter I’d argue was underrated relative to his poetry, left for Paris in the early 1960s, was jailed for seven years for his resistance to apartheid, and became a French citizen after his release. One of his paintings hangs in our gallery at KleinBlouKlip. Gerard Sekoto went into self-imposed exile in Paris in 1947 and never came home; the French government made him a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and last year his 1946 self-portrait went up on a billboard on the side of the Pompidou Centre as the face of the Paris Noir exhibition. There have been others too – Ernest Mancoba, Sekoto’s friend and fellow exile, built a whole career in French avant-garde art circles; Barbara Lindop, who kept Sekoto’s story and estate alive across decades, was herself made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres for it. And it’s not only artists from the past. My friends Mandy van der Spuy and Michele Constant, both of whom I got to know through our work together at Business and Arts South Africa, are Chevaliers too, honoured for what they’ve each done to deepen the cultural relationship between our two countries. That’s four South Africans, from four different decades and disciplines, all recognised the same way by the same country. Worth noticing.

Closer to my own life: Boussac. A village of about a thousand people in the Creuse (right in the middle of France), where South Africans have bought dozens of properties over the years and made a real, serious investment in the region, not weekend curiosities but proper contributions to the local economy and community. It started with my friends Louis Jansen van Vuuren and Hardy Olivier, who bought and restored the Château de la Creuzette two decades ago and, without quite meaning to, triggered what people there jokingly call “the revenge of the Huguenot descendants.” Hardy and Louis have done more for the SA-French relationship than almost anyone I know, and they deserve far more recognition for it than they’ve had. Louis and his long-time collaborator Isabella Niehaus wrote There’s a Vegan on My Verandah, crowned World’s Best Vegan Book at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards, twice. CN&CO made a documentary with them for DStv’s VIA called Tuin en Spens (set in their Remboucher garden, a wonderful old hunting lodge deep in the French countryside), presented by our own Rikus alongside Louis. Louis has written several other books too, Almost French among them, and his latest, Biltong en Dior, has Rikus, me and a fair few of our friends featuring in it. Get your copy, and if you’re at Woordfees, come find us at Biltong, Dior en baguette at KleinBlouKlip. Hardy, meanwhile, has become a master tapestry restorer. Their South African-French blood has properly mixed by now. We’ve visited Anet Pienaar-Vosloo at her own restored château nearby, Villebouche, and out of that visit came Mooi Frankryk, the TV series EasyEquities and CN&CO put together for VIA on DStv, following South Africans who’ve made homes in and around Boussac. Go find it on YouTube. It’s a good watch, I promise. Many of these people became close mates, not just interview subjects.

And then there’s Chantel Dartnall. Anyone who knew Mosaic in Pretoria knows what she built there. She’s since taken that same botanical, sense-led cooking to France, to Restaurant Mosaic at the Château des Tesnières near Rennes. I wrote about that meal last year, which Rikus, Michael and Nini shared with me, sunflowers from the Creuse and all. This year France recognised her properly: Chantel was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Mérite. My friend Carolyn Steyn received that same honour back in 2022, awarded at the French Residence in Pretoria, and I was there to see it happen. Both women were at the state dinner with President Macron and President Ramaphosa this past week, as, I’m told, was our phenomenal opera star Pretty Yende. Three South African women, in one room, all there because of what they’ve given to this relationship.

So many people quietly do the work of this SA-France relationship, Louis and Hardy chief among them, hosting, connecting, translating (literally and otherwise), representing us well without any of it being their job. Plenty of them, with homes in Boussac and around it, could easily have had a seat at this past week’s state dinner in Paris, and that makes me very proud.

And then there’s the fun of it. Champagne. I make no apology for loving it, and I’ll take any excuse to drink it properly rather than as an afterthought. My mate Derek at Great Domaines has arranged some wonderful visits to Pol Roger and other champagne houses over the years, and taught me much of what I know about these superb bubbles. Club Med was a CN&CO client back when we were taking teams to Val Thorens and then on to Paris for the marathon. I ran that one, and years later the Médoc Marathon too, wine glass in hand at the aid stations, as the French do. Full circle: Club Med opened its very first South African resort on the KZN coast on 4 July, ten days ago. A French institution, arriving here properly, the same week South Africa was formally in Paris. You couldn’t script that timing better.

A word, too, on the art and words we’ve borrowed and shared. Edith Piaf never regretted anything: “Non, je ne regrette rien” is one of those lines that needs no translation, and it’s how I try to live, most days. Jacques Brel’s chansons, poetry set to music really, have been translated into Afrikaans over the years, which tells you something about how naturally the two languages and sensibilities sit next to each other. On screen, La Reine Margot is one of my favourite French films of all time, Isabelle Adjani at her most ferocious, telling the story of the very massacre of Protestants that eventually sent the Huguenots fleeing to places like our own Cape Winelands. And no list of great French screen icons is complete without Catherine Deneuve, elegance personified for six decades running. Given how much French DNA quietly runs through Afrikaans, in surnames, in old wine-farm names, in turns of phrase nobody remembers the origin of, none of this is an accident. Two languages, two songbooks, one shared ache for saying things beautifully. If you know the specific Afrikaans song with the French line I’m forgetting, tell me. I want it for the next one of these.

Rikus and I keep going back to France, a country we truly love. He’s learning French now too, slower than me some days, faster on others. We stay longer each time. I don’t think that’s an accident, and I don’t think it’s just about the wine, though the wine helps!

Deux pays, un cœur. Two countries, one heart. Bonne Bastille, wherever you’re reading this from.