The anguish of the exiles

Now that I’ve been in a foreign country for two months, and despite the fact that I’ll return sooner than comforts me, I have begun to understand the enormity of relocating from the land of your birth.

Irrespective of the details, every South African I have come to know while staying with my family in Virginia left their homeland because it failed in the first duty of a motherland — it failed to offer them the future of which they dared to dream.

Yes, crime has been a factor, but not the cause. Yes, reverse racism and affirmative action have left deep scars, but didn’t do much more than raise options. Yes, some left to take up new posts, but had South Africa really been alive with possibilities, they would have returned. And so the list of symptoms continues. But they’re still only symptoms.

All the tattered, tawdry twaddle about being part of the solution, being the change you want to see, not cursing the darkness but lighting a candle and making a positive contribution and so and so forth are, like most of the promises, charters and pledges, meaningless and empty.

Ten or so years after the best and brightest, the first waves of the brain drain left amid rancour and condemnation to find hope, they have established themselves, raised families, created futures and are happy. The enormity of their courage is mostly overlooked back in SA — probably for the same reasons so many good people who have stayed behind to keep a candle in the window feel expats of this diaspora relish dissing South Africa, oblivious to the anguish of the exiles.

Nostalgia is ever-present, but it’s become more like well-controlled hypertension or depression — ever-present but way back in the shadows. Besides, most are by now wealthy and successful enough that they can return to visit “the family” at least every second year. That eases the pain.

Futurist John Naisbitt predicted back in the late 1970s that the more hi-tech took over face-to-face interactions, the more humans would seek ways to interact face to face. He presciently called it “hi-tech/hi-touch” and it is my daily reality. But with an exquisitely ironic twist, most of us have found hi-tech to be a great hi-touch ally. Facebook, Skype, MySpace and family websites and the plethora of other telecommunications revolutions such as iPhone make it infinitely easier to keep in touch, even “live”, with events. We watch Super 14 rugby matches live, with delicious home-made biltong — and can squeeze in a round of golf afterwards too. And in the developed world, all this is incredibly cheap.

The prospects of communist centralism under a morally bankrupt majority party with an increasing propensity for self-aggrandisement, inertia and corruption in every conceivable way are now serving to entrench the reasons for leaving SA in the first place. Very few of us see much HOPE in the future as long as the African National Congress holds sway. We see more and more Communist Chinese influence and neo-colonialism worming its way invidiously. We see more window dressing, more spin-doctoring and more economic devolution. We see the inexorable shift towards labour-intensive grunt-work, more brawn over brain and the rapid widening of the rift between bullet-train progress in the developed world and the slow shuffling drudge of what was once proudly referred to as the “African way”.

And no one wants their children to grow up captives of what Bill Cosby called “slow class”, doomed forever to a life of backwardness. This is what affirmative action has done and what so-called “broad-based black economic empowerment” (there is always a direct correlation between the length of a name and the amount of idiocy it embodies) is doing. They dumb everything down. They drag everything down to the gutter-level of the lowest common denominator. Ask the SABC, SAA, SAPS … for that matter ask Jimmy Manye.

The G20 Summit in London now will be watched closely, but most fear it will more clearly delineate the frontrunners from the also-rans. The reality of global economics (despite the romantic pipe-fantasies of the anti-globalisation movement) already dictates that the First World continually reach further and further back to grab the lagging nations — which is all of Africa, including SA — and drag them along the road to progress and prosperity. The fact that Africa still has such vast natural resources will always keep the developed world interested. Invested, but not involved.

There is no doubt the US is already beginning to turn the great ponderous ship of its own economic crisis around. That turn will take a long, long time still, but progress is already being felt. However, because ordinary Americans are really feeling the pinch, they’re not feeling too generous. They are letting their government and their long-established institutions from Washington to Wall Street and from Detroit to Las Vegas know how they feel. And this is already having its negative impacts on development agencies such as USAid.

So, while Africans can kiss the big-time handouts they’ve come to expect year after year and become so comfortable expecting goodbye, the myth of ubuntu or Africa-solving-Africa’s-problems remain enchanting tourist legend, but elusive spindrift.

The growing certainty of a destitute ANC government under the shadow of Jacob Zuma and his triumvirate further erodes what little hope has remained. And, if the past decade has taught us anything, it is the lesson of history that people without hope at home seek another home with hope — even if it is elsewhere. That’s why more and more the cream of South African talent will look across the oceans.

In the 1996 movie The Rock, Nicholas Cage’s character, Stanley Goodspeed, complains that he is trying his best. Sean Connery’s character, John Patrick Mason, turns on him and says: “Losers always whine about doing their best. Winners go home and fuck the Prom Queen.” South Africans have had enough of their moribund government and quicksand philosophies “doing their best”.