London-Johannesburg. It’s an 11-hour flight, but South African Airways makes it feel as if it’s but a minor hop – the food is excellent; the business class seats recline fully; the wine is good and the cockpit service is as smooth as you like.

We arrive at Joburg very early in the morning to find there is a lot of work going on at the tarmac in the airport – just as there has been every single time I have visited South Africa in the past 15 years. Joburg airport is a growth industry, it appears! This time, of course, they have a legitimate excuse – they’re getting ready for the 2010 Football World Cup competition. After I clear immigration and customs and enter the arrivals concourse, I find a guy holding a large white card with my name printed on it. We greet each other and he takes my bags to a trolley-car parked outside the terminal. Within five or so minutes, we’re at the spanking new Intercontinental Hotel.

The lady who checks me in is called Dludlu and we have fun wondering whether we are the “lost” man and wife that each person seeks in life. Could her name have changed from Duodu to Dludlu – or vice versa – during one of those long treks to which Homo Sapien has been subjecting himself over the past 60,000 years or so? Ach, an African is an African everywhere, man. Different languages so what?

I find that my pay-as-you-go cellphone from the UK works automatically in South Africa: when I glance at it, there’s a message welcoming me and saying I can make calls. But friends had warned me about the huge cost of “roaming” calls (the mean-minded phone company charges you for a call within South Africa as if it were an international call you had made from your base, say, London, whereas it’s technically, a mere internal call!). I only use it for text messaging, which is apparently a great deal cheaper. So I hope anyway.

One friend I contact says to me: “I shall try and organise someone to come and pick you up.” It doesn’t happen. By the time I realise he is not coming, I’ve already lost four hours. Yet I have only 24 hours before I fly again – this time, to Nairobi.

Fortunately, a second friend does arrive, and we have a nice dinner at the Intercontinental dining room.

I must tell you a secret I’ve learnt about South Africa. If you’re an African food addict like me, you might be put off by the menus you’ll be presented with in the best hotels in South Africa, which all offer the European variety of food, of course. Now, whilst I was staying at the fabulous Carlton Hotel in Joburg in 1990 (unfortunately, it’s now closed), I got so bored with the food that I blurted out to one of the African waiters, “Can’t you get me some pap, for God’s sake, man?”. Pap is made from corn dough and is like banku or akple in Ghana, only it’s not fermented like the Ghanaian stuff; it’s the same thing as sadza in Zimbabwe or Zambia.

The waiter was pleasantly surprised to find that I knew about pap. One thing I shall say for South African waiters – they are bold and adventurous. If you asked a Ghanaian or Nigerian waiter for something that was not on the menu, you would almost always be told curtly that “We don’t have it, Sir!”. Not so the South African. He remembered that although pap was not on the menu, it was prepared for the African staff at the hotel. So he went and talked to the chef. Couldn’t they give me pap with my steak, instead of the usual rice or potatoes? He came back with pap, and I swear I haven’t enjoyed a meal as much as that in a long time! Later on, I had pap with lobster; pap with grilled prawns; pap and roasted chicken, etc. I was home and dry.

Okay, so now I tried the same trick again – at the Airport Intercontinental. And again it worked. God bless all South African waiters who show initiative when confronted with foreigners who make unusual demands. For this guy, too, succeeded. The meal put me in such a good mood that I forgot about the earlier disappointment I had suffered when the friend who was supposed to pick me up had failed to turn up.

I had a good night’s sleep and then got up early next morning to file a story whose deadline could not be extended. There’s nothing as irritating as having to fulfil a deadline when you’re on the road and do not know the nature of the facilities you’re supposed to use in filing your story.

I went to the internet café at the Intercontinental. A new one had just been opened, but it cost quite a bit to use and as one is not paid heaps of money, one has to be careful what one spends money on. So I forsook its spanking new machines and decided to try the old café. Its machine was slow; it kept freezing. It reminded me of the time in Ghana that the internet nearly made me go bonkers after it crashed and ate up four hours’ work.

I called the front desk; an assistant manager came to help me, but still no use. The article I had laboured on could not be sent! I felt like crying. The assistant manager put the article on his own personal computer and tried to send it from there. Eventually, the computer claimed that the article had been “sent”. I didn’t believe it, for it hadn’t allowed me to “CC” another address to make assurance doubly sure. True enough, my article never did reach its destination! Where in the cyber world did it go after being “sent”?

I was in a foul mood when I got to the airport, but as they say, troubles run in threes and I wasn’t finished with wahala. After I had queued and it reached my turn, the SAA check-in clerk left abruptly without even telling me she wasn’t going to check me in! When it dawned on me that she wasn’t coming back, I had to go and find another desk.

Ha – then a customs officer discovered that I was carrying what to him seemed like a lot of money, and he tried to shake some of it off me.

“Did you declare it when you arrived?” he asked menacingly.

“Yes” I replied calmly.

“When did you arrive?”

“Last night.”

“You must come and see my boss,” he said.

I followed him into a lift. We were alone. He looked enquiringly at me. No word said, but I caught his drift: give me something and I will not delay you any longer. I averted his gaze and studied the ceiling.

Eventually, we got into his boss’s office. He told him about my “problem”. The boss listened to my explanations and then left the office. The customs officer now became explicit: “Give me something for the man, man. Then you can go.”

“Look,” I said, “you are talking to the wrong man. This is money I am taking to my country. I declared it on arrival here and I am taking it back without having spent any of it.” I said this knowing that he could elect to go and sift through all the cards that were brought in last night, looking for my card to verify my story. This might make me lose my flight, but I was damned if I was going to help corruption to grow in the new South Africa and become a way of life, as it has become in West Africa. Besides, if I succumbed, what would happen to travellers with less muscle than I had as a journalist? No.

Eventually, the guy realised that it was no use, and he took me back to the airport security area, where, again, I meekly submitted to having my pockets and bag checked. I was waved through, and the customs man went his way. He didn’t wave goodbye.

The SAA flight to Nairobi was fully loaded but still pleasant. I sat in the same row as Anton Harper, one of the founders of The Mail and Guardian, the Joburg paper for which I used to write a weekly column. But neither of us knew the other – we only got to know each other in Nairobi, where we were due to attend the award-giving ceremony of this year’s CNN/Multichoice African Journalist of the Year competition.

I was one of the judges of the competition, and we had spent five gruelling days cooped up in the CNN offices in central London, deciding who had won what. There had been over 800 entries from 40 African countries, including Francophone and Lusophone. These had been whittled down through a process of elimination before I got in on the act. But even so, we had a lot of videos to see, radio cassette tapes to listen to, and scripts to read.

We were seven judges altogether, and you can imagine what it was like, as seven opinionated journalists tried to decide which stories were better than others. Eventually, we had to vote – there just was no way we could reach a consensus!

After we had voted, we were sworn to secrecy – no one would know what we had decided until the winners were officially announced in Nairobi. I shall tell you about them next month, when I will no longer be bound by my “oath of secrecy”.