South Africa, Day One By David Whetstone

We arrived in Johannesburg - me, actor and director Val McLane, theatre directors Amy Golding and Annie Rigby, historian Bill Lancaster, Newcastle University fine arts lecturer David Butler, Gateshead public arts curator Anna Pepperal and Jenny Dewar, of the Swallows Partnership office in Newcastle - after a long flight from Newcastle via Paris.

There had been an energy-sapping false start when the flight from Newcastle to Amsterdam, which had been the original first leg of the journey, was grounded due to a faulty who-knows-what? Having dutifully checked in at 4am on Sunday, we had to queue for an alternative flight later in the day. Rachel Unthank and the Winterset, due to perform in San Francisco that night, were on the same aborted flight. The glamour of international music stardom! I wonder if they made the gig.

In a bright, sunny, early autumnal Jo'burg, we were met by Peter Stark, an RGS-educated Geordie who used to run Northern Arts and was a driving force behind the Gateshead Quays development before finding a new world of challenges in the new, post-apartheid South Africa.
There was time for a lightning tour of a city I have read so much about but had no real concept of. It was teeming with people and there were hardly any white faces - just a couple of well-to-do-looking middle-aged gents in smart cars. But the streets were alive with people, sitting, talking, selling at stalls, going about their business.

Peter took us to a hill above the Jeppe High School for Boys - once 100% white, now 95% black (in the new meritocracy of South Africa, wealth rather than skin colour is the dividing factor). Beneath a Boer War memorial to the fallen of the 'Scottish Horse', we had a 360 degree view of Jo'burg. "In 1886 this was three farms with a population of 140 people - all Afrikaans," said Peter. Then gold was discovered and in came the Brits.

Fortunes were made, the indigenous population didn't benefit. The white man used the black man to make his fortune. And punctuating this panorama today are the slag heaps of the old gold mines. South Africa had gold and it had space which meant the slag heaps stayed. There was no reason to move them out of the way.

The many layers of recent history that have shaped modern Johannesburg don't make for pleasant reading. As a white man on the streets I confess I felt uncomfortable, too aware of the crimes that have been committed by my ancestors in the name of empire. But I sensed no latent bitterness or resentment and Peter, ebullient as always, calmed us with his tales of the new South Africa, keen to move forward, realise its potential, make a mark on the world after a dark, 45-year period its chequered history.

On one concrete office building was hung a huge banner proclaiming: "A World Class African Host City." Next year the nation hosts the World Cup finals, a chance to put on a confident, welcoming face to the world. Already the craft makers eking out a living in the villages are turning out souvenirs. Peter hopes the national press won't focus on problems (crime, HIV, poverty) to sneer at the achievements of a South Africa reborn after Nelson Mandela's release from prison on February 11, 1990. Whatever you might think about what you see, he urges, this is much better than it was. And we see no obvious misery.

Bill Lancaster, incidentally, likens Jo'burg to Middlesbrough, a settlement thrown up to exploit an opportunity with no particular expectation of longevity; hence the lack of an obvious and stately centre.

Peter and his company Cultures in Regeneration have helped with several high profile initiatives to restore the cultural heart of Jo'burg: developing the conceptual framework for Constitution Hill, where the constitutional court of South Africa was built alongside the grim old gaol; doing the initial development plan for a new cultural quarter; and, with Newcastle-based partner Brian Debnam, making plans for the famous Market Theatre, Dance Factory and a facility called Sci-Bono devoted to educating young people about science (under the apartheid regime, black children were not educated to an advanced degree because, it argued: What was the point? They weren't going to be getting decent jobs)

Peter and Brian are also working on a new theatre and a new music centre for the huge township of Soweto based, both conceptually and architecturally, on Northern Stage and The Sage Gateshead.

In the afternoon sunshine we took another flight to Umtata, crossing vast swathes of seemingly empty landscape and the mountainous, landlocked nation of Lesotho (which, incidentally, supplies Jo'burg with its water). Umtata is in the Transkei, one of the homelands where black South Africans were forced to settle under apartheid. We touched down not far from a stretch of water with mountains behind. It was beautiful, surely a contender for most tranquil airport in the world (though, admittedly, it is only a building and a runway.

Here tiny houses (or what would seem tiny to western eyes) are sprinkled across a grassy landscape more spacious than an English brain could imagine. It's the northern Pennies times as big a number as you care to mention.

In the evening the Swallows Partnership achievements start to dawn. I meet a playwright, Simphiwe Vikilahle, whose play, The Journey, is to be performed in Eastern Cape and the North East by a theatre company called Taproot, set by Mark Lloyd and Mark Calvert, formerly of the Northern Stage Ensemble in Newcastle.

Simphiwe, who laughs a great deal, writes a poem in my notebook and demonstrates the click which distinguishes the language of the Xhosa people. It's not easy. Peter Stark can do it - of course.

We also pay a late night visit to a craft centre full of wonderful work made from
beads, textiles, wood and other, often quite simple materials. The idea is that
talented craft makers from the surrounding villages bring their work here so it can
be sold on their behalf at a fair price, with all the money going to the maker. It
prevents exploitation and enables the craft makers and artists to make a living
from their work. We all buy. David Butler leaves resplendent in a black, Nelson
Mandela-style shirt.

A project involving beadwork is being developed by Tyne & Wear Museums under
the wing of the Swallows Partnership which is funded by the Arts Council and its
South African equivalent.