SA thrives even as its politicians battle to keep pace

Four years ago, journalist, writer and film critic Neil Sonnekus, his wife and two children emigrated to New Zealand. He describes the good and the bad of his first return visit to South Africa

WE were going to South Africa for the first time in four years to see family and friends. I was also going to restart the investigation into my octogenarian father’s murder, but I was determined to go with an open mind and not judge the country by its news.

In fact, being in that business, I was determined to avoid it as much as possible and experience it at ground level as such.

The softening-up process started at Dubai International Airport. We decided to have breakfast at a restaurant called Giraffe because its colours were warm compared with the rest of that sanitary limbo.

The waiter who served us was clearly a South African and said his name was Stephen. I stupidly asked him what his real name was and he said it was Stephen. He wore dreadlocks, was from Pretoria and said making big money in Dubai was a myth. He also said the only place to be was South Africa. His service was good, the food pathetic.

Next we had to walk and commute for what seemed like kilometres past sleeping, staring, wandering travellers from all over the world waiting to con- nect to the rest of the planet. We sat down in a post- and pre-longdistance daze and, like everybody else, slept or stared.

After a while, it dawned on me that there was something recognisable about our fellow passengers-to-be. I was looking at a man with a checked shirt, droopy moustache and boep. There was a woman with an African butt in a business suit. There was a man in a djellaba, speaking Afrikaans. There was a bossy woman in a green sari speaking on her cellphone. For better or for worse, these were the people I cared for and therefore wrote about.

The first thing that struck me outside OR Tambo International Airport, literally and figuratively, was the light. There is no other light like this on earth. The second thing that struck me was the colour. Black people were dressed in beautiful colours and looked good, confident, at home.

Later, in shops, the service was generally good, professional. You could talk to people. This was not how it had been when we left. Then, they had been rude, drowsy, indifferent. Middle management had obviously woken up. On the streets, young people of all races were min- gling quite naturally.

At a get-together, friends asked me who I shouted for watching rugby. The Springboks and Cheetahs, I said. Then the All Blacks. Increasingly, however, I said I could not be bothered shouting for anyone.

I told them about the hue and cry there had been when we got to New Zealand. A politician had been named and shamed for

The first thing that struck me outside OR Tambo Airport, literally and figuratively, was the light

blowing a whole $70 of taxpayers’ money on a bottle of wine. That was how banal democracy was (and ought to be).

I also told them that I avoided the South Africans who lived on the North Shore of Auckland because a lot of them used every bit of negative news about the country to justify their decisions, which often reeked of racism. They did not have a good name. Deservedly.

The next day, I got talking to my hosts’ domestic worker and gardener. Stella English, further proof that not all black Africans have African names, said she could now wear a Democratic Alliance shirt openly in Orange Farm. Earlier, she would have been killed for it.

Hlonipani Valoyi said today’s children would not vote for the ANC when they grew up. They would not be swayed by food parcels.

“What about Julius Malema and his Economic Freedom Fighters?” I asked.

“He wants to nationalise everything,” he replied, adding with great understatement: “It is not wise.”

The roads were potholed, many traffic lights did not work and our previous suburb, Brixton, seemed well on its way to becoming a slum. There were power outages and problems with connectivity.

At the Xai-Xai bar in Melville, I met a scrawny Namibian human rights lawyer who said the country’s original inhabitants, the Khoisan, were still being completely ignored.

One night I ended up in the artist Wayne Barker’s studio. He showed me a book that featured him and asked me what I thought. I flipped through it and said that, unlike white Kiwi art, there was colour, movement, passion, engagement.

“Carry on talking like that and I’ll give you another whisky,” he said.

On the night when Bruce Springsteen hit town, we went to support a band called the Goldilox Zone. They were brimming with ideas, even if they suffered that perennial South African problem: bad sound.

Afterwards, one of the band members’ parents and I went out for supper and drinks at the Sophiatown bar in Melville. Feizel Mamdoo had pap en vleis, and his English wife, Nancy, got all risqué and had a coffee.

A Congolese band was plying rhythms that might have impressed, if not embarrassed, The Boss himself. There was a whole lot of shaking booty going down, lots of laughter.

We flew to the Cape and went to Slanghoek in the Hottentots-Holland Mountains — a contested name, the word Hottentot considered derogatory by the people. The vast laager of surrounding blue mountains was breathtaking and we might have been living in any other decade, except that things felt much more relaxed all round.

A guest editorial in Die Burg- er, however, said if the coming elections in May were going to be predictable, then the 2019 elections were going to be determined by people in places most middle-class people had not heard of: poor, desperate people who still had not seen the fruits of liberation.

In Cape Town, we watched a Trevor Noah clip that had us in stitches, sending up the present

The ANC, like its Christian-National Party predecessors, tries to steal the future from our youth

government’s absurdities and, equally impressively, sending himself up on the Late Show with David Letterman.

I called a friend and asked her how she was. “Bad,” she said. Her sister-in-law had just been murdered near Storms River by her tenants, for no apparent reason. A few nights later we all had some excellent red wine from Stellenbosch and laughed in that particularly visceral South African way.

I felt at home, almost completely relaxed.

I bought a Johann Louw drawing and ended up in another gallery that was brimming with desirable, intelligent art. There were the old stalwarts like Kentridge, Victor and Mashile, but there was new stuff too. Excellent stuff.

A few days before we left, that cunning fool Jacob Zuma told the nation that he would tell them what his plans were, but only after the elections. He is cunning because he knows how to talk down to his particular tribal constituency, and he is a fool because he knows he is seen as such from the outside but does nothing about it.

As we got on the plane, I thought about a conversation I’d had with the crime novelist Deon Meyer. He had said a democracy took more than just a few decades to perfect. I had not agreed that it was possible in South Africa at all, but I do now. Judging by the art, comedy and continuing debate inside South Africa, it is well on its way. All that has to happen is that its politicians have to catch up with their people, even if they still have to realise that if you want results you have to vote with your head, not your hide.

In the very meantime, the country’s education and corruption figures remain appalling. But, then, it is not in the ANC’s interest to create citizens of the world who will vote it out of power and a police force that will hold the party — and itself — accountable.

This is why I removed my children from South Africa. Not because my father was murdered seven years ago — like thousands of others of all races, his killer has still not been convicted — but because he had given me his blessing to protest against the fact that the ANC, like its Christian-National Party predecessors, constantly tries to steal the future from our youth.

Landing in Auckland, I thought I did not feel anything. New Zealand would never be home, but as we walked towards that arch of Maori carvings — meaning we were now entering the marae or community of Aotearoa — I felt oddly welcome. It was like a child who quietly insinuates itself into an unguarded corner of your heart.