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.”