Why do we avoid South Africans?

I have just done a survey among fellow ex-pats of other countries, via email or on the phone, including those who are not in China. The question was: Do you feel, as an ex-pat of sorts from your country, that your countrymen feel you have “deserted” or “betrayed” your country?

On the whole, to boil down their answers to a word, the answer was “no”. The sentences in which the negative was put sometimes showed considerable puzzlement as to the daftness, the irrelevance, of the question. The world’s an oyster; go explore. Yet it is not an irrelevant question to many South Africans, both current residents and those who have left, “born but fled” as I love to put it in my blogs. So why, oh why, is it not an irrelevant question to SA citizens? Well, at least to a lot of them?

I will attempt to answer that but would love to hear readers’ comments.

It would be tempting to do this survey among South Africans living in SA. The questions would be:
1) If a country of your choice offered you a secure job and, down the line, the chance to be granted permanent residence for you and your family, would you take the opportunity?

2) If any country (i.e. not a country of your personal choice) that was “first world” offered you a secure job and the opportunity to be granted permanent residence for you and your family, would you take the opportunity?

3) The same question above, but the country had to be an emerging economy, not first world?

What would make the survey even more interesting is that the examinee must state what his race is. I am fairly certain virtually all whites would leave and the response of the other race groups would be most interesting. By and large I don’t think blacks would leave as they enjoy their BEE status.

Perhaps I digress. Chookie and I find ourselves avoiding South Africans. Most of the ones we tend to meet in China, and sometimes elsewhere, are real whingers or just plain weird, I am very, very sorry to say. And I mean that. For example, when in New Zealand we met a couple from South Africa in a shopping mall who were on holiday for several months visiting their son. They would not stop complaining about South Africa. Marion and I had to politely pull ourselves away from them. Too much negative energy*.

All too often, in my experience, South Africans seem to have a deep, emotional connectedness to their country that is destructive, not productive. Either they complain too much or they simply cannot accept criticism, especially if they are members of the ANC and you criticise their political party. And inevitably and boringly, those ANC members always play the race card, obfuscate the real issues. They act like children, not adults. Thus we have Gordon Brown with his jaw dropping when Thabo Mbeki said there is no crisis in Zimbabwe. We have Obama phoning Motlanthe to ask him what he is going to do about Zimbabwe. I can just imagine Motlanthe’s mumbled response as he is actually asked to take responsibility and make a decision; he cannot; he is a “cronyist”, if I can coin the word. Both the British leader and the US leader give me the feeling of a school principal scolding particular naughty and irresponsible children.

Yet of course I still have very good South African friends, both from long ago to ones I have made since leaving SA. They don’t whinge; they get on with life; they are constructive and usually have a keen interest in travelling and learning from other cultures. That is to say, they are not parochial.

My reason for avoiding other South Africans, or perhaps a better way of putting it, not actively seeking them out, I realised was going on at a subconscious level. This indicates denial, dishonesty and unresolved issues. Too true. I had too many nightmarish experiences as a schoolboy being brutally caned, bullied and generally humiliated. I did not want to play rugby at school but was forced to and was jeered for my incompetence. My first year in the army was another nightmare. As I grew up and my thinking matured I abhorred the way other race groups were treated by whites, including, sometimes, my father. I disliked the narrow-mindedness of many South Africans at Rhodes University. They were childish, spoilt and irresponsibly racist (I realise saying “irresponsibly racist” is excruciatingly redundant, but I wish to emphasise it). Or they “struggled” for the “liberation cause” because it gave them a false sense of meaning; a puerile glory.

For a long time I went through a Christian phase (SA happy-clappy style based on the bible-belt version in the USA) and battled to be a good Christian, especially, believe you me, honey, in the area of sex. Shucks, when I look back now I missed out on about a decade of happy, healthy humping, the bedsprings jangling like wound-up toys or squeaking like mice, because of that religion’s dim view of sex. Well, I still bonked quite a bit with consenting partners but struggled with the guilt associated with doing something perfectly normal and healthy with a consenting partner. An organisation has really got a person by the short and hairy when he can’t relieve his body’s most powerful and natural urge. Hooah.

This is not to say there were not fantastic times in my life (including most definitely the sex). Not at all, there were many. But the above experiences are just stuff I want to put behind me. And I have. It’s like the saying: family you are born with, but friends you make. The world is my oyster; go explore. Somehow that has meant putting South Africans (and I refer to the mentality of too many of them, said dejectedly) behind me too. Except for a few really good friends.

Lank sad.

* I realise this blog may also come across as negative but an article tends to be defined by what it is about.