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EXTRACT FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES
IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
EXTRACT FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES
IN THE UNITED KINGDOM The Sunday Times - Review - July 06, 2003
THE SUNNIER SIDE OF SOUTH AFRICA
We all know about South Africa - it's a hellhole and the whites are getting out fast. Perhaps not, writes a new immigrant from Britain, Luke Mills
As an Englishman living in South Africa the first thing I learnt was: look out for people who start sentences with the word: "Apparently. . ." As in: "Apparently, people have started stealing babies from shopping centres." Or: "Apparently, people have started squirting glue at your windows so you wipe your windows and then they hijack your car . . ." (and how exactly would the hijackers manage to drive off in it if you couldn't?). Or: "Apparently there are only old people left in South Africa because all the young ones have emigrated."
"Apparently" is the adverb that denotes scare stories, misconceptions and myths.
Fully paid-up members of the "apparently" brigade are alive and well and working in the British media. Apparently, South Africa is a disease and crime-ridden hellhole that white people crawl away from with their possessions in a handcart. Apparently, South Africa is going down the same road as Zimbabwe. Apparently . . . well, you get the idea.
Many of these stories find a willing readership because South African expatriates are looking for reinforcement of their decisions to leave. This suits Britain rather well.
South Africa produces well educated, hard-working young people. Her teachers and doctors are doing their best to make our public services run smoothly, her businessmen are helping to develop our economy. The more who can be persuaded to leave, the better for Britain. It is not in Britain's interest to persuade them to go back.
But hang on a minute. The number of South Africans emigrating is still increasing, but at a decreasing rate. The trend line is flattening. Figures for the number of South Africans returning are not published but anecdotal evidence suggests that this is happening.
Sharon Nixon, a company manager in Cape Town, says: "Two or three years ago you couldn't go to a dinner party without someone saying they were leaving. Now you are more likely to hear about people coming back."
Here is another story that people are not telling. The number of foreigners moving to South Africa is increasing fast. In the first quarter of this year, 25% more foreigners (1,340 people) immigrated (excluding African immigration and illegals).
I guess I am one of those brave 1,340.
I grew up in London, worked in the City for a bit, travelled, spent a few years working in London doing different jobs. I had a great time without ever really feeling that I had found what I wanted to do.
In 1999 I fell in love with a South African. She had come to England, like so many others, on a working holiday visa. When she asked me whether I wanted to move back there with her for a few years I didn't need too much convincing.
We moved here last October, I got a job as a marketing consultant and applied for permanent residency this year. I am loving it. And I'm not the only one. Is the experience of foreigners living in South Africa relevant to the thousands of South Africans who have left? Kristen Tremeer, 30, from Denver, Colorado, has been in South Africa for four years and she certainly thinks so. "I think people who left didn't give it a chance," she says.
Emigrants give crime, falling standards, economic reasons and affirmative action as the reasons for leaving. The most important reason (60%) is the fear of crime. So what is the crime situation like? Well, it happens.
I live in a relatively high crime area in Cape Town. My neighbour was robbed at gunpoint in the street when he was followed back from the bank. The guy who runs the corner shop has been held up five times in 10 years.
If you leave your radio in your car, it will get stolen - but it will in London, too. In six months, one out of 14 colleagues has been burgled. But then I worked in an office block in London that was burgled 15 times in six months.
My mother's country house in England was burgled five times in a year. I have had a car stolen in Sydney and was mugged in Auckland (two places with a fair number of former South Africans). Security is relative, not absolute. On a relative level it is worse here, but it is not a war zone.
We have a good burglar alarm and a big dog, but no prison bars. We go walking, up the mountain, in town, along the beaches. I feel safe – but it is a personal thing. People have different tolerance levels of risk.
Some who have been a victim of crime feel permanently weird afterwards and just want to leave. The thing that strikes me as weird is that when I walk down the streets people smile at me and say hello. But then I am from London.
"Crime is pretty much the fallback position for people who leave," says Tremeer. "You can be safe here if you don't do anything silly. I think the real reason is that the transition to the new South Africa for whites must have been difficult.
"It's got nothing to do with racism or not wanting a black government - it's just that the opportunities and benefits for white people are not the same as they were."
In a globalised world people (and capital) look for the maximum reward for the minimum risk. For the past few years the material rewards have been good overseas and the risks in South Africa have been high – although not as high as they have been perceived.
Of the economic migrants, some leave for good "for a better life". Here, experiences differ. Some hanker after friends and family, find their high incomes absorbed by high expenditure, worry about schools or the traffic rather than crime and wish they were back home in South Africa.
An expatriate family in Ireland recently wrote to the Cape Times newspaper saying they were so moved when a group of visiting South African Special Olympic athletes sang Nkosi Sikelel'i Africa that they wept. Guys, you're just homesick.
Then there are those who leave to travel, to build up capital and gain know-how, intending to return and build a better life in South Africa. I hope they do. Their country needs them.
If even a fraction of them came back it would make a big difference. And neither the currency differentials nor the overseas opportunities are what they were.
Here is the thing: most people - not all, but most - believe that things are getting better here. In Britain you don't read about the land handed back to displaced black communities, or the houses and shopping centres being built in the townships, or the fact that one of Daimler Chrysler's most efficient plants is in South Africa, or the fact that multinationals make higher profits in Africa than in any other continent.
You don't see the conscious efforts being made to build a non-racial South Africa through television, the soap operas, advertisements, the news. You don't see the fierce games of beach cricket being played between kids of all races and backgrounds for whom Dr Verwoerd and the Group Areas Act have no meaning. But this is all part of reality, too, just as much as Aids and crime.
South Africa has a strong economy and strong people. The anti-apartheid movement created leaders who believe that things can change for the better. They are prepared to stand up for what they want - and right now what they want is democracy, jobs and anti-retrovirals. Previously disadvantaged South Africans are coming through the excellent educational establishments in droves, forming a highly skilled, consumerist and vocal black middle class.
Inflation and interest rates are falling, putting money in consumers' pockets. There are opportunities here for entrepreneurs and multinationals, teachers and doctors.
Just as people have different tolerance levels of risk, they also have different rewards that they need. For me, money is not the most important thing in life. I have earned money in Britain in the past and I earn peanuts here.
But in London I lived in a tiny flat, battled my way to work on the Tube and had to drive for two hours to get to the country. Here I wake up in a sunny old house, drive five minutes to work, buy vegetables off a farm wagon and walk up a mountain in my spare time.
But that is not the main reward for me. Without wanting to sound like a tree-hugger, I get a kick out of feeling as if I am doing something useful, helping to bring investment to a tough but resourceful, scarred but happy country. It is a place that nobody wants to fail, where I feel as if I can make a positive difference. I am not sure I felt that in the UK.
So I'm staying put. It may not be forever - the world is a big place, time is short and things can change. But it will do for now. In fact, it will do nicely.
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