It's already 1.30am in the morning, but they are only going stronger: vrrrooo-pah! vrrrrooo-pah! Screeee-pah!

I've been up for about 30 minutes, having been startled out of sleep by the screeching tyres, animated whistles burdening the midnight hour. It's during the week, but the revellers do not seem to care. Vrooo-pah!

This, dear reader, is not a scene from some disorderly township or ghetto. This is lily-white, Afrikaans-speaking, super-rich Stellenbosch. Look what I've just done. I've just trotted out a stereotype: that disorderly behaviour such as this would have been understandable had it played itself out in a township.

But that's the agent provocateur in me just trying to get you worked up, once again. I've been staying here in Stellenbosch for the past month. It has not gone unnoticed to me that three or four times a week, the illicit car racing, or spinning, happens around this hour of the morning, in central Stellenbosch ...

I suppose asocial behaviour such as this can be understood, or explained away by the fact that Stellenbosch is a university town. Albeit a super-rich, super-white one. The "spinning" of cars, which in the popular imagination is associated with black and so-called coloured South Africans, is a big deal in Stellenbosch.

But it hasn't gone unnoticed to me that white students here, who are obviously in the majority, are not averse to doing things that one would associate with black popular culture. I have heard white kids here calling out to each other, "yo my nigger, yo dawg what's up".

Back home in Joburg, a friend's daughter took umbrage at white kids trying to behave black. "Why are they doing our things now?" I laughed at this - because the black kids complaining can be caught flicking imaginary strands of hair away from their faces, an affectation they copy from their white friends.

I laugh because when my kids and their friends refer to "our things" being stolen by white kids they are actually referring to things they themselves copy from African-American kids.

It's all so ridiculous.

So, these rich white kids in are imitating middle-class, model C or private school black South African kids who are in turn imitating mean, ill-educated, inarticulate black American kids. "Yo, dawg, where was you at?"

And you, as a parent, are paying R100000 a year to get the little creature to learn some sense and speak properly. He also must stop buying pants that are three sizes big, which he wears without a belt, and proceeds to drag all over town, showing all and sundry the smelly crack of his butt. And he calls all this: "urban black culture".

It's a thousand pities that white kids in many urban centres are falling for this "cool urban black culture" nonsense because they want black kids to see that they too are now "woke". Look at them, spinning cars at 1am - because it's considered "cool". There are many other ways that the kids from across the racial divide could meet culturally. But stupid, illicit, dangerous drag racing!

Thank God, the people who are hosting me here have removed me from the centre of town - to the suburban corner where there is no burning of rubber at 1am.

I have, on occasion, been tempted to get out of my apartment, stride into the street so I could watch this 1am ritual. But common sense always prevailed: mix youth, alcohol, drugs, adrenaline, the fact that this is at night and you are black and the revellers are predominantly white, you can never know how the dice is gonna roll.