The new generation trying to overhaul a once racist and sexist club

WHEN ALICIA THOMPSON was a student in Johannesburg before the end of apartheid, she would often walk past the beautiful cars parked outside a club she was not allowed to join. It was not by chance that the Rand Club, the oldest private-members’ club in the city, was filled with old white men. It was by design. Women and blacks were not admitted as members until the early 1990s. “It was not my space,” says Ms Thompson. “That was the power of apartheid: you never questioned where you couldn’t go.”The Rand Club was once a centre of power in Johannesburg, the haunt of financiers and mining magnates, including Cecil Rhodes and Lionel Phillips, who in 1913 was inconveniently shot by a trade unionist on the way to lunch (he survived, but missed his meal). Its official history calls it “a civilised refuge for good fellows”. Rules imposed decorum; no ice in drinks in the billiards room, for example, lest clinking distract players. At the same time the longest bar in Africa (31.2 metres) encouraged inebriation.