Returning expats can live like kings in Joburg’s suburbs

As SA expats begin to return to this country, I’m reminded of the old saying: “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it’s going to be dragging a suitcase full of dollars, which might make the friendship awkies. If it doesn’t, well, it’s also nice in Ireland, so fair enough.”

I must admit that when I first started reading about the returnees a few years ago I thought it was just clever marketing by desperate estate agents. (“Need a cheap nanny but worried nobody you know is here any more? Well worry no more! Remember Kevin from the squat in Shepherd’s Bush? He’s back! Oh, and also Cheryl! Remember? From the backpackers in Bruges? She’s almost definitely coming back!”)

Now, however, there seems to be evidence that thousands of expats are, in fact, coming home, with enough hard currency to live like kings, which is to say behind a large wall with spikes on the top. Admittedly, it’s not just the weakness of the rand or the abundance of cheap labour in SA that’s drawing them home.

Britain, traditionally a magnet for South Africans, has experienced a remarkable slide over the past decade as the landowning classes urge the working poor to think deeply about food, accommodation and medical treatment, and which one of the three they’d like to keep.

Europe, too, is getting poorer and angrier, and not just because that’s where the Eurovision song contest happens. South Africans who arrived there at the start of the 21st century now find themselves starting to look back with some nostalgia at the start of the 20th, with the project of European unity increasingly seen by many populists and conservatives as a major obstacle to states reclaiming their preferred forms of government, such as fascism and semi-feudal kleptocracy.

Even more stressful for South Africans in Europe, its fate now balances on the knife-edge of American politics: if Donald Trump wins in November, or loses and is installed as emperor in early January, the states formerly known as united will abandon Europe faster than you can say “stable genius”.

Throw into this the fact that Vladimir Putin is celebrating the start of his silver jubilee as dictator for life (it is beyond me how any reputable news agency can still refer to it as an “election”), and that the European Commission is urging the EU’s arms industry to shift into “war economy mode”, and I can understand why many South Africans might want to get well away from any fallout, either economic or radioactive.

According to the people who keep track of these sorts of things, most of the returning expats seem to be heading to Johannesburg, and not only because Cape Town has already been bought by Germans and Durban is about to become uninsurable. No, there are many other excellent reasons for why Jozi has become the destination of choice for the newly minted.

First, there’s culture shock. Uprooting a life and starting again on the other side of the world can be extremely stressful, but for those who have recently left the UK Johannesburg offers many things that would feel comfortingly familiar, like collapsing water infrastructure, potholes, a crumbling healthcare system and a government that isn’t even trying to pretend to be interested in the electorate any more.

Then there’s the fact that they simply get far more bang for their buck in Johannesburg; easily 15 or 20 bangs depending on whether the cash-in-transit heist team is using automatic weapons when it tries its luck down the road.

As property prices continue to march relentlessly higher in Cape Town and along the Garden Route, forcing buyers to pinch their pennies, expats returning to Joburg can simply walk into estate agencies, fish a handful of crumpled pounds out of their coat pocket, throw it at the receptionist and ask “how many acres will that get me?”

For those who’ve left behind the cramped, crowded cities of northern Europe, where owning tracts of green space is only for the superrich, the leafier suburbs of Johannesburg offer the prospect of living in glorious, increasingly secluded splendour, as the houses on either side of theirs stand empty but for the small garrison of guards posted inside the chained-up gates; listening to nothing but the sound of songbirds and the happy, industrious hee-haw of a hacksaw in the basement next door where the copper piping is being stripped.

I’m being facetious, of course, perhaps because I’m a bit envious. I would love to live in one of those magnificent, wooded mansions in Johannesburg. If I had the money to do it up the way I wanted. And it was in Cape Town.

One interview I read suggested that 30% of expats are coming back. I hope that’s not true because it means the entire dentistry profession in the UK is about to collapse and I don’t want my British friends to suffer. But I’d be glad for a few thousand to return, because it would mean they’d start reminding us of one important fact: unless you’re genuinely rich, things are dicey pretty much everywhere right now.

IT ’ S NOT JUST THE WEAKNESS OF THE RAND OR ABUNDANCE OF CHEAP LABOUR THAT ’ S DRAWING SOUTH AFRICANS HOME