Goodbye Perthurbia: An Introduction to Why I'll Never Live in Oz Again
by Daniel Ford
Hands up all those who’ve thought about emigrating. Oh yes, that includes you at the back pretending not to hear the question. Thank you.
A common talking point in South African daily life – whether it’s dinner-party conversation, chatter around the office water cooler, serious talk with our partners late at night, or merely the voices in our heads – is the one about moving on. To a “better” country, a “safer” country, a country that offers our children “more opportunities”. It happens everywhere and every day. At times, it seems to be a constant barrage. And while it might once have been an idea that was firmly associated with the privileged white population, the so-called chicken run, it’s pretty well accepted now that the notion of moving on has more to do with money and skills: if you’ve got them, then you’ve got the luxury to consider emigrating; if you haven’t, you’re probably too concerned with the basics of finding a job and a house. But if you do have the means, then chances are you have at the very least thought about life in another country. In fact, I’d venture a guess that there isn’t a person in this country who has the means to emigrate who hasn’t at least pondered the idea of nice life in Perth or Sydney or Auckland or Toronto or wherever – Perthurbia, I like to call it.
There are, of course, the one-eyed patriots who tell us they’re committed to South Africa forever and it’s actually good that those who’ve chosen to leave have done just that. “The fewer people here in South Africa then the more opportunities for the rest of us,” you’re likely to hear.
Or they scoff at the idea of emigrating. “Who wants to live in a country where a dog shitting on a lawn makes front page news?” they might ask. “We’re watching history in the making right around us in South Africa. It’s boring everywhere else.”
But all that reasoning like this tells us about the person spouting it is that they themselves have grappled with the thought of moving on; that they’ve made the decision to stay and need constant reassurance that it was the right one. They might even toss in a comment like, “Our friends Dave and Julie moved to London last year and you know what? Someone broke into their house the first week they were there and stole everything they owned.” Somehow it diminishes our crime statistics in a flash. Our ever-transparent Ministry of Safety and Security would be proud.
And this constant justification is the exact opposite of what the ex-pats will argue once they’ve moved into their quiet home in suburban LA or Vancouver. Every time they’re invited to a dinner party with locals, the topic will come up and they’ll rattle off a recent horror story they picked up on the net or from phone calls back home, or they’ll relate the latest economic figures (but only if the rand has just taken a hit). As with the South African who stays, the South African who goes wants to reassure himself – and everyone else – that he’s made the right decision…
Every country has its share of people who move on to live elsewhere, looking for a new and different life, but there can’t be many nations in the world as wealthy as ours where the possibility of emigration underscores daily life so emphatically. There are millions of Brits, Germans, Swiss and others who don’t even contemplate leaving the country of their birth, while the few who do decide to ship off overseas are seen as modern-day adventurers. To us, the immovable people seem like boring stay-at-home types – they’ve probably never spent more than a week or two at a time overseas. But the mere fact that these types are in the majority provides a sense of stability in those societies that simply does not exist in our lives here. If a family moves to another country, it is a major event to them; for us, it may be disappointing to lose friends, but these things happen. All the time in fact. Meanwhile, it’s unlikely that many Americans even know that other countries exist, let alone consider emigrating to them. But that’s enough with the American bashing. At least until later in the book.
So why is it that South Africans seem to live in this constant state of flux, never sure which of our friends will be the next to announce that they’re off “for the sake of the children”, or indeed if the next people in our circle of friends to utter those words might be us? Why this constant idea of moving on?
Perhaps it’s because we are a nation of immigrants ourselves – Europeans, Indians, other indigenous Africans. The Xhosas migrated down through southern African, the Afrikaners trekked into the unknown interior, the English arrived off the boats in the 1820s. There has always been social flux in our part of the world; perhaps we see moving and moving on as a logical extension of who we are and how we were created as a nation. It’s natural. Unlike the Brits, Germans and Swiss mentioned earlier, who are bound to their countries by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years of heritage, we all come from stock that has no special regard for remaining in one location.
South Africans also seem to consider success abroad to be that much worthier than success at home. We venerate locals who have made it overseas, like Charlize Theron or Dave Matthews or Gary Lubner of Autoglass or Brent Hoberman of lastminute.com, as proof of what Saffers can achieve in the “bigger” world, elevating them above those who have achieved the same levels of success at home. It’s as if South Africans who’ve done well in England or America are winning in the premier league while the rest of us are still plodding along in the second division. We revel in the idea that there are hundreds of thousands of South Africans (more, according to Andrew Donaldson) taking over London/New York/Sydney as further proof of how our nation can thrive anywhere it chooses. And, of course, even our president and many other of our political leaders were moulded outside of our borders. So who’s to argue that moving on is a bad thing?
Our perceived isolation at the tip of Africa also drives many of us to seek out life “where it’s happening”, and probably explains why more young South Africans have been to Manchester than to Mooreesburg. New York-London-Paris remains the axis upon which the world seems to spin. You might add Berlin, Hong Kong, Sydney, LA to that list – but Cape Town and Johannesburg? Despite our country’s current popularity among the Euro jet set, and some lame attempts from the fashion industry and the like to elevate us to that level, we’ll never be that sophisticated – that “in”.
The isolation reason is not unique to South Africa, as anyone who has spent time with the huge backpacking community of New Zealand, Australia and even Scandinavia will attest to. In fact, in 2001 it was estimated that nearly 15 per cent of people born in New Zealand were living outside the country of their birth. This perceived isolation will, for the foreseeable future, continue to drive people, especially young people in search of bigger, brighter things, to explore at length abroad. (Of course, an irony of Perth’s vast SA ex-pat population is, as Rick Crosier mentions later, that it’s considered to be the most isolated city in the world.)
As a note to the above, it is worth remembering that many of those who leave South Africa to live and work in other countries, particularly young people, don’t leave with the intention of staying; rather, they are travelling to gain new experience, to “see the world” and to get themselves a financial head start – especially if they can do it earning pounds. Some of them end up staying, but those who return do so armed with new skills, and hopefully cash, which are injected into the country. This is to be applauded. (Except for the irritating habit of many a returnee who seems to think he was the first person to have visited London, and that serving pints “down the pub” for two years somehow endows him with a wealth of worldly knowledge – to be shared with all and sundry – and entitles him to a cushy job back home. To those people we say, please get over yourselves and humbly put your foot on the bottom rung of the career ladder.)
Of course, we cannot overlook the practical results of our recent past as a primary reason for leaving South Africa. The apartheid years saw a constant stream of locals packing up and shipping out to escape violence or persecution, or for moral reasons. And the former reason, as evidenced by our exceptionally high crime statistics, continues to drive emigration, or is at least used as the reason for leaving. Even if this reason is less significant than it was in the seventies and eighties, anecdotally at least, it does continue to provide a core justification for emigrants. But possibly not the core justification any more.
There is a strong current belief that many South Africans – of all races – are leaving our shores simply in search of better job prospects. Whether they are motivated by the perceived discrimination of affirmative action, the scarcity of jobs here or the notion of earning good money quickly, the research seems to suggest that foreign currency is the greatest lure these days. Just take a look at our rugby players if you still have doubts.
But enough with the reason why we leave. Just how many of us are leaving? Though the figures are notoriously inaccurate, because most emigrants don’t advertise the fact to the relevant authorities, they all seem to suggest that our dinner party conversations are not just talk. According to the South African Migration Project (SAMP), 2003 saw 16,165 “self-declared” emigrants leave the country, the largest figure since the 1994 elections. At the extreme end of the scale, some estimates – admittedly disputed – suggest that a million South Africans have left our shores since then.
But – and here’s the important but – after all the talk of emigration, the whys and wheres, the interesting trend these days, as reported by the international moving companies, seems to be that more and more South African are returning home to live. And they’re flying in with an influx of foreign immigrants who have also heard about life at the bottom of Africa. Having arrived from the UK in 1994, I include myself on the last list. I’d visited South Africa and Zimbabwe several years earlier, and met a girl – now my wife – before making the move out here. To the absolute disbelief of the people heading the other way, I honestly felt Africa offered me more opportunities than England, and I haven’t looked back.
So it was in early 2006 that I sat down over a beer with my managing editor, Tim Richman, who had recently returned from a year in Sydney to take up the job. We got to talking about life in Australia and he described his stay there as a memorable and amazing one. He couldn’t recommend the city more. Thing is, it just wasn’t Cape Town. It wasn’t home. And for all their First World attractions and benefits, the Aussies have their share of problems that you just don’t know about until you’ve lived among them for a while. He’d never intended on staying there forever, but he sure was glad to step off the plane in South Africa again. Just as I am every time I return from a trip back to the UK to visit friends and relatives.
Our conversation was not an isolated one. We’d both started hearing phrases like “Perth/London/Auckland is okay, but it’s really not as good as South Africa”, or similar sentiments, from people who had been there, done that and got the T-shirt. The more we heard the stories, the more it confirmed that not only is life not perfect in Perthurbia – washing up is washing up, no matter where you are – but, more importantly, life in South Africa is good. It’s vibrant, it’s exciting, it’s real. And having a shop that sells boerewors and Mrs Balls half an hour’s drive away just isn’t the same.
The end result of our little chat is this book, Why I’ll Never Live In Oz Again, which uses as its premise the fact that life is not always rosy in Perthurbia. It is written by South Africans who have lived in Australia, New Zealand, England, America and Canada, the five destinations most favoured by those leaving our shores seeking a new life. Three of them are natives, the other two are naturalised, but they all call themselves South Africans and they all call South Africa home (just as I do). If you’d heard that they had hated their times abroad and had failed to make a go of it, then you might be excused for being sceptical. But the truth is they were all successful outside of South Africa and, in fact, they quite enjoyed their time there. And contrary to our title, never doesn’t really mean never; it’s just that South Africa beats the pants off Perthurbia any day. So they packed up and shipped out again – to South Africa, to live where they really felt at home and happiest.
First up is Andrew Donaldson, who spent two years in London as a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times. He has written a suitably eloquent piece that offers some surprisingly harsh words for a country veritably inundated with South Africans, and which still carries the dubious tag of “Mother Country” for many. Teen thuggery, Tony Blair and an ironic English bigotry all feature in his cross hairs. Despite these feelings, and though he feels that he could never live in London again, Andrew wouldn’t mind “returning there now and then for a spot of shopping and taking in the odd gig at the Borderline”.
Then, recent Mondi-winner Josef Talotta writes a series of letters to a fictional (but actually not-so-fictional) long-lost acquaintance: a South African who left for the US many years ago, around the same time he moved here. Appropriately, they capture a fantastic, almost American ebullience for his adopted country. There can’t have been too many Americans immigrating to South Africa in the early nineties, but Josef was one of them, and our magazine industry (and the Johannesburg social scene) has been far better off for it. In one of the letters, he asks, “beyond family and friendships, what is life?” His answer is, “a series of places, events, moments, experiences and memories. And, in my opinion, South Africa delivers far more than most places…” I couldn’t agree more.
England-born John Wardall spent 23 years living in Canada, and his montage of Canadian life is bone dry and spot on. He still has great admiration for the country where ice hockey is an obsession but, having married a South African and moved here fifteen years ago, he has found a more exciting home, where locals don’t have to drive around frozen lakes, or fish through holes in them, for fun. Plus it’s warmer here…
Then onto the title chapter, which is provided by Rick Crosier, who spent four years on and off living in Australia, a country that harbours much of his extended family. His piece is suitably Australian: bawdy, funny and telling it like it is. Rick spent most of his time in Brisbane and Melbourne: the former he likens to “Bellville with a different accent”, while the latter is “the jewel in Australia’s crown”. So you can be assured of a subjective overview… or not.
Finally, we move on to New Zealand, where the rugby fans (which is to say everyone in the country, sheep included) are even more passionate and demanding than the nutjobs back home. Despite his recent year in Sydney, Tim Richman preferred to write this chapter, having lived in Auckland in 2000/2001, and having made the trip halfway around the world many times over the years to visit family. Though he has a fondness for the place that “has much to do with memories of my grandmother’s Christmas pavlova and trout fishing with my grandfather on Lake Taupo”, he believes that the country is only suitable for short holiday visits: “beyond that, you will go insane”. Read his piece to discover what an amazing building the Auckland Sky Tower is – and why it is totally out of place in New Zealand.
So, if you are one of those people who has considered leaving South Africa, read this book to remind yourself what a clever chap you are for staying. If you’ve been there and returned, read this book to remind yourself what a clever chap you are for coming back. And if you’re still considering leaving, read this book for a reality check. And if you still insist on seeking out a place in Perthurbia, remember: the grass isn’t always greener.
Daniel Ford
Two Dogs Publishing Manager
P.S. I am, ironically, writing this introduction while back in the UK. Just to reassure you, the weather hasn’t got any better,
Buy this and more great books at www.twodogs.co.za
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A must read for all SAFA's abroad (or thinking of going)
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