In Hillbrow, a part of Johannesburg where most people fear to venture, a middle-aged white man in a suit and tie looks around at the women in the dimly lit hotel bar. He is immediately approached by a pretty young black girl who takes him by the hand, whispering: "Let's go" in his ear. He leaves his drink and follows her towards the stairs. This is the Quirinale hotel, Johannesburg's biggest brothel.
Ten floors of prostitutes, four bars with beer to drink, soft leather sofas to lounge in and beautiful black girls to sit on your arm and whisper prices in your ear. The going rate is 50 rand - less than pounds 10 - and more and more white men are going there.
Then you want to do it again and again. Cross-colour sexual transactions may always have happened in South Africa but they were never as simple as they are now. Under apartheid, when inter- racial sex was a crime, white men would drive to Bophuthatswana or Swaziland to watch pornographic films banned by their Calvinist state, read the girlie magazines they could be fined for having in their own homes, and have sex with black girls. Now they save on the petrol.
Like the new democracies of Eastern Europe, South Africa is undergoing a sexual revolution that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. The flavours are many. Next to the sweet counter in any corner shop you can buy porn magazines; few stores bother to consign them to the top shelf. The back pages of most quality newspapers feature photographs of topless models advertising strip shows, escort agencies and massage parlours.
In rich white suburbs of Johannesburg, clubs and bars with names like Erotica, Oriental Palace and Yab Yam offer naked girls in Jacuzzis and "special delights" for rugby fans. Shops sell sex aids and X-rated videos that get puritans and churchmen all hot and flustered. People are discovering these once-forbidden things are exotic. The reason for the sex-fest is South Africa's sudden freedom from draconian laws which suppressed any form of sexuality in order to uphold a Christian view of life.
