My grandmother, Edith Esther Werner, came from Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic.

She and her father immigrated owing to the uncertainty created by the Austro-Prussian war. I have a lot of my grandmother in me. I would rather be an actor than an engineer and my life, as it is, is fairly bohemian without the more extreme aspects.

I think these traits are handed down, in the blood – they cannot be learned. Thus, I think, it is with Germans. I want to write about the Germans, not to mock or caricature, but to show how they have a genuine way of thinking differently.

No better than to do this by example. We had a student, Hans, from Cologne. He wanted to spend two months with us so that he could improve his English. No salary needed but had to have proof that he was in South Africa to study, else he could not claim his air ticket off his tax.

Okay, I said, come for a holiday and I will sign a letter to say you worked here for two months. He sounded surprised on the phone: “Vat iff they check up on me?” Well, I said, I’ll just tell them you worked here. “Vat iff they as for your employment records?”

Well, I thought, we do not have one of those but . . . As it happened, we had a hideous project. Eskom had been overcharging our client on his power account for three years. The meter was wrong but the one before had been wrong too. The tariff had changed three times. Our brief was to work out how much our client had been overcharged. Over five years: 60 accounts, some of which were estimates, some actual.

Hans sat in the corner and, after two months, produced a one-page document which showed clearly how much Eskom had overcharged. The utility paid my client, who paid us.

Candidly, there was nobody in our office who would have the patience to work it out. But Hans did, since he is German. The Germanic streak manifests itself in other ways – the first diesel engines, modern luxury motor cars, the first high-quality optical lenses, superaccurate radars, the first rockets and flying bombs and, to this day, high-quality machinery.

I am writing about this because I am puzzled. Of all the European nations, only the Germans have produced, over the years and for a long time, high-quality engineering. You can hand it to the French for style, the Italians for beauty, the Swedes for safety – but the Germans get the good engineering prize every time. There are other European pockets of excellence but none so consistent.

My puzzlement is: Where does it all begin? Does the German nation just have a bred-in or long traditional ethos of getting it right? Was our student Hans so bred that he would have found it impossible to fail in his task of decoding the Eskom accounts? Or is it in his genetic makeup? Or was it in his education?

I guess the last. An example from our neighbour, Namibia. Once I was in Omaruru, a town 230 km from Windhoek. We were drinking beer at a hotel. After a while, some drank schnapps, some wine. At the end of the evening we were trying, drunkenly, to split the bill. An old man, an Ovambo, appeared from the depths of the hotel. He took out a notepad and then, very swiftly and accurately, told us who drank what and how much each of us owed and . . . in what order.

In a moment, I could see he had been trained by a German because to note the order of each person’s drinking was hardly necessary . . . unless you were German. All this went through my head recently with the Medupi power station contract. For years, Eskom boilers were designed by Steinmuller, with boiler software by Siemens, both German companies. Medupi gave the boilers to the African National Congress-Hitachi partnership and the boiler software to Alstom, a French company. Hitachi messed the boiler contract up and Siemens has now been awarded the software contract since Alstom could not get it right. Makes you think.