Living as a South African in the UK is an interesting experience. Yes, there are all the usual reasons, like the novelty of the food, the people, the travel and so forth. But it is also interesting in terms of the picture of your own country with which you are presented. At first, what interested me most was the reaction of the British when they heard you were South African. The older generation would usually launch into a story of a visit there, or an aunt or uncle who emigrated and now lives in Cape Town. The younger generation would remember “Free Nelson Mandela” concerts, the 24-hour anti-apartheid picket outside South Africa House on Trafalgar Square, and boycotting South African fruit, while eyeing you with suspicion as if just waiting in vain for a terrible racist outburst to confirm their ideas of white South Africans. But after almost 13 years of vigorous democracy, interest in us has waned and I seldom feel the need to defend the country from slander by the Brits.
But the South Africans… now that’s a different story! If I had ten cents for every piece of bad news that my South African friends and family gleefully send me from home, I would have made my fortune and be spending my days kicking back on Robberg Beach. People forward on pictures and news stories and websites and the news is all bad bad bad. I speak to the older members of my family and all they say is “don’t ever come home – it’s so dreadful here now! You just don’t understand how much it’s changed.”. Yes, of course I am not denying that there are huge problems to overcome in terms of crime, the gap between haves and have nots, and HIV/AIDS. But the way the media manipulates things (abetted by gleeful members of the doom-mongering public) it’s total anarchy down there. Everybody hates everybody and you can’t leave your house for fear of death.
And if I had another ten cents for every South African expat/emigrant/whatever over here peddling horror stories as to what is going on in South Africa, I would be rich. It is as if there is a certain slice of the diaspora that is desperate to go home but feels for a variety of personal and professional reasons that they can’t. But instead of saying “I yearn to go back to our beautiful country and one day I hope to do so”, they seem to feel they need to justify being over her and being miserable. They are the people who will collar you at a party and in a pub and as soon as they hear you are also South African they will launch into a diatribe about how they will NEVER set foot back there and how awful it is now, not like the good old days. Every sentence starts with “apparently…” and you just know this is going to be a 3rd hand skinder story, embellished at each retelling. It’s enough to make you want to pretend to be New Zealander 
The good old days? Excuse me?? Here’s an excerpt from an e-mail that a very good friend of mine sent me recently about precisely that topic:
During apartheid we had the draft, army camps, no international sport, sanctions, township violence and PW Botha; travel was difficult and job options were mostly limited to SA; we could not see international rock concerts. Man this list could go on for ever! Now we have the opposite of the above, plus we are hosting the soccer world cup, the economy is booming, there is more racial harmony, more people live in proper houses with running water etc. I remember traveling to the US and Europe in 1986 and feeling shame because I was a white South African. I would watch the news in the US and see the police beating up old black ladies at train stations.
Life really sucked during apartheid. Now I feel proud to say I’m South African. Black South Africans were given freedom in South Africa, but so was I. I was finally set free to get on with my life as normal human being in South Africa and the international community.
I am 100% with him. We have so much to be proud of and thankful for and we need to be looking forward, not constantly backwards (and I apply this equally to the “good old days” white mentality and the “apartheid is the root of every problem in my life and the world now owes me” non-white mentality). And above all we have to realise that the only long-term solution to our problems is to stand together – stop focusing on what divides us and start focusing on what unites us. I read on a daily basis in the UK newspapers about how this is a society at war with itself: the British pitted against the immigrants, the Afro-Caribbeans pitted against the West Africans, the Muslims pitted against the Christians, the have-nots pitted against the haves – and I pray that we South Africans can avoid this. My personal opinion is that there is more goodwill between strangers in one square kilometre of any South African city than in all of London.
So it makes my heart glow with patriotic warmth when I read stories like this one. Apparently a few weeks ago, Zulu ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma enjoyed an informal get-together with Afrikaners including singer Steve Hofmeyr and comedian Leon Schuster. Bear in mind that on paper, this group are from such opposite ends of the cultural, political and linguistic spectrum that it would be hard to imagine a forum where they would all be happy. So where did they meet?
Around a braai fire, of course. And there, in the time-honoured tradition of South African maleness, idle talk of braai techniques broke the ice so that they could get to the serious stuff below. And although there was obviously an element of camera-friendly photo-op bonhomie to the whole thing, the story still makes me smile.
Braai, the beloved country indeed!
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