Old Takkies Indaba

I asked a couple of friends when they realised they were South African; most of them had a definitive moment (“when we won the world cup” being a popular answer), but my story is more an ongoing journey of discovery.

I have been aware of my South African status ever since I was first introduced to the concept of countries and borders and I am constantly being reminded of it when I have to apply for visas. On the other hand, understanding what it means to be South African is a concept I am only now beginning to comprehend. For me, appreciating my South African nationality only started once I left South Africa’s borders. Comparing my culture, beliefs, values and heritage to other nationalities enables me to realise that I am South African.

My first introduction to my “South Africaness” occurred at Fishermen’s Wharf in San Francisco one rainy day just after I matriculated. I was trying to hide from a downpour in a warehouse when I heard somebody shout at me that this area is not open to the public. I apologised, but as soon as they realised that I’m a South African I got invited for coffee. I had to explain to Americans what it means to live in a young democracy such as South Africa and for the first time I started to realise that growing up in South Africa in the 80s and 90s was a unique privilege.

Not only have I realised that being a young South African means that you have been exposed to such a historical event, that you are part of the rainbow nation, but also that we, South Africans, are a unique bunch. I was traveling to work through London early one morning on a rather packed tube when I spotted a very pregnant woman standing in front of an occupied priority seat. I told the youth to get up for the lady and after a few moments of awkwardness he got up. A businessman then commented “only South Africans would do something like that”.

A few years ago I found a small pub in a French village that was broadcasting the French Rugby tour to South Africa. Naturally when South Africa scored the first try I had to cheer, informing the entire pub that I was South African. We lost the game, but afterwards I got given a beer and received a huge cheers from the French patrons – “Au Sud Africains ”. While traveling through Europe I have realised that as a South African we have inherited so many traditions from other parts of the world, yet we also have such a rich African heritage, helping me to understand the European/African traditions I was brought up with. A white Christmas is so foreign, yet so familiar.

On a daily basis, while sitting on a red bus, chatting to a cab driver in Belfast, going through customs, meeting up with friends for a braai, hearing the expressions ja and now now, I am reminded of the fact that I am South African. Discovering my routes and heritage is a wonderful experience; so my only wish is that I will never stop discovering that I am a South African.

I was attending a private school from the age of 3. My brother and sister, both younger than me, soon joined the same school. This meant that my parents, both of whom were schoolteachers, had to work very hard to ensure that they could make ends meet. This also mean that there was no time for them to sit us down and explain the countries political climate, especially since it would mean that they would destroy our otherwise wonderful lives. I was very happy living in my little bubble, completely oblivious to the reality, which was South Africa.

Historically it has always been the upper class that has the luxury to sit and discuss political issues, laws and whatever else may tickle their fancy. On the whole the working class is far too busy dealing with the reality and trying to survive from day to day. So my parents lived the reality so that we may relish the fantasy. I enjoyed a childhood the way any child should. I had friends of all different races and I would attend their parties and even go to the odd sleep over. I grew older and I discovered women. Looking back I notice that I actually only had white girlfriends and they ranged from Italian and Jewish girls to Afrikaans girls.

Of course there were incidents that could have tipped me off, such as stay aways, the constant police harassment, marches and the occasional ‘toy toy’. Even when Nelson Mandela was released, I didn’t truly understand the magnitude of it all. This would all change because we would soon be studying South Africa in History…

Up until now my life read like a happy E True Hollywood Story. I had come from nothing, but because of opportunities made available by my parents (through immense sacrifice) I was now a quasi-TV Star. With appearances on KTV, Kids Cooking and Kids Can, I was earning good money, loving all the attention and I was re-defining the term ‘living it up!’ Every circle I socialized in was within its own bubble and this kept me ‘protected’ from ‘the truth’. These were the days when I was just another teen having a great time. Things were less complicated because we were all just ‘Redhillians’, playing together, learning together and sticking together. Unfortunately for us, things were about to fall apart!

I recall the day when I was sitting in History and we began tackling the subject of South African History. With each lesson, layer after protective layer was being peeled off and the truth was beginning to rear its ugly head- and it was hideous! I remember how we (the fortunate black students) began talking amongst ourselves about how messed up the country was. Some of our peers began feeling superior to us. We had no right to be treated like this because we were South African dammit! Thus began the rude awakening, which also marked the departure of a new journey of self-discovery…

I was discussing the first topic for www.oldtakkiesindaba.com, being “When was the first time you knew you were South African” with my family, and my mother, on pondering for a while, said: “I don’t think I ever realised it”.

That was something of a revelation for me, in terms of now analysing my own feelings about South Africa when I was growing up. As I cogitated on these words I realised we had never grown up in a “South African” family. No emphasis was ever placed on the fact that we were South African; no one in the family was sports mad, no one was glued to televisions shouting support for our team; no on waved flags; in fact we never even owned a flag. I was never taught the anthem until I got to primary school; speaking Afrikaans was quietly not done, we never had and were never encouraged to have Afrikaans friends.

Both my maternal and paternal extended families were throwbacks from England and the culture and ideals we were taught or which came to us through osmosis, were very English. We were exposed to a much more Eurocentric culture too, in terms of the films we were taken to watch, the music and theatre we were exposed to, and the pursuits we followed.

Without any specific instructions or directions being passed down, the idea of South Africa and of being South African was understood, somewhat sub-consciously, to be infra-dig.

Thus it was that I spent the first twenty six or twenty seven years of my life being slightly embarrassed to belong to such a backward country (I was not thinking here or really aware of its politics, was thinking chiefly of its culture) and I knew that should I ever head overseas the last place I would claim to come from would be South Africa.

To my mind – which had (I now see) been smoothed and pointed and guided down the emerald green paths of the English countryside rather than into the khaki grey ochre bosveld of my homeland – I’d far rather be taken for English or even Australian than being connected with boorish backwater people from a land no one knew existed.

Slowly as I grew older and started to read and be exposed to South African poetry, ideas, film and stories, I came to understand that my land did have its own story to tell, but I was still resistant to the idea of identifying myself as South African. All of these feelings existed on a subtle plane within my mind – not often acknowledged, certainly never inspected or analysed – and were never an active part or conscious part of my growing up or day to day experiences.

In 1994 in the midst of the greatest changes we as a country had ever seen, I was a young mother, alone in South Africa while my closest family lived in England. I was pretty caught up in my own day to day experiences but I do remember the day I read that we were to have a new flag.

I was suddenly outraged, maybe there was something of the dog-in-a-manger about my reaction; certainly I had never realised or thought I was attached to the previous flag in any way, but now that I knew they (uncertain who they was, in my mind) were taking it away I wanted very much to be a South African, and I wanted to understand my country, and I wanted to learn about all that I had missed. I felt a new flag would mean I had lost this country I had suddenly come to love.

In all this emotional upheaval and confusion, I realised one thing clearly: I am now a South African, if I never was one before.

It’s too simplistic to end here but I have reached my word limit; I shall explore this reaction at greater length in articles to come.

This topic has made my last two weeks hell. It has been like a hookworm in my heel that is festering and driving me batty! No matter how hard I reminisce, daydream, force my memories to appear, I simply cannot remember when I first realized that I was South African. This means one of two things: either I am suffering from the early onset of Alzheimer’s or I have never realized that I was South African. Neither of these possibilities satisfies me, because well, I have just returned from my annual medical check-up (compulsory in Japan) and the doctor assured me that my brain was functioning perfectly well by Japanese standards, and I am South African, and I know this fact about myself with absolute certainty. It appears that I just simply cannot remember when this information was coded into my brain.

My cognitive trouble starts as soon as I start thinking about the topic. It seems obvious that it would stir memories related to feelings of South African-ness. Alas, not for me. I can only remember pieces of my life that made me feel completely un-South African…

I grew up in somewhat unusual circumstances. My father is Serbian (way back in my youth it was known as Yugoslavian). He watches Disney cartoons instead of rugby (the Disney addiction is the direct result of a deprived communist upbringing). He bakes bread and baklava instead of braaing boerewors. He speaks English with the thickest Slavic accent where every second word is punctuated with a Serbian swear word. He swims in a Speedo instead of baggies.

My mother on the other hand, is the powerful matriarch (some would call it the fishwife of the household). She and all her friends seem to have a penchant for foreigners, so I grew up hanging out with family friends who included Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, Lebanese, Yugoslavians and all the other peasants who fled Europe hoping that the Apartheid system of white privilege would help them to make their fortunes.

I do not remember being aware of The Struggle or of the political turmoil that was playing out in South Africa, not far from my idyllic, sheltered life. The closest my mother got to being an activist was dating a Japanese man in the 70s. She would regale me with stories of her Japanese “friend” who had given her a snakeskin clutch, and a sewing machine (that ten years later, was still in the box, unused). I knew a lot about the foreign communities that rocked Johannesburg in the 80s, but black people, other than my nanny, were foreign to me.

No, I most definitely did not have a typical South African childhood. Even at 28, I still don’t feel like a typical South African. I have absolutely no interest in sport, I think rugby is boorish and cricket is boring, I can whip up the most fabulous fusion food but cannot cook pap, babootjie or even a melktert. I think Castle beer is unpalatable and well, my Afrikaans is English spoken with the hardest, most guttural accent I can muster. As for Xhosa, I am still trying to pronounce the click correctly.

OK, so I don’t feel like a typical South African, but I most certainly identify myself as being a South African. And, what is a typical South African anyway? I honestly have no idea! I think perhaps that one thing my peculiar childhood taught me, is that there is no such thing as a typical South African, that to be a South African is to defy stereotypes. We are this multicultural, multicoloured mix of people from all over the world. I cannot remember when I realized that I was South African because to have such a defining memory would imply that there is some definitive characteristic that all South Africans share, which I think doesn’t exist.

Even my dad, who was born in a village far away from Africa, is a South African in my eyes. I remember coming home one day to see that our garage had been cemented closed and that inside were cages of chicken fencing, raw meat, spices and fans. In the cage, was my dad hanging up chunks of meat and telling me that he was going to make a fortune selling biltong! At that moment I realized that even my dad, the most un-South African man I knew was really a Seffrican at heart!

To be South African is to feel South African, to embrace South African things, and well to share a South African history. So, I cannot remember when I realized this, but I know that I am South African and proud to identify myself with a place that is so diverse that it defies stereotyping of any kind.

Oh, and before you write me off as being anti-South African produce, I must add that I am fanatical about South African wine and I think that South African soil puts any French terroir to shame…

Chapter 1

And there it fell – the square peg through the square hole.

It was lucky, because at any moment, after the years of grinding, its corners had so worn away it was almost about circular.

The problem of my low self-esteem was my puzzle.

I’d always used my father as the answer, and tried to work my way backwards as to why this was so.

But, being forced to rewind here has revealed a different solution.

Because my father was a racing driver, we never saw much of him when were kids, and that unexpectedly vaporized him from the equation.

The actual reason is this:

One day my father took us to America.

Chapter 2

We stumbled off the airplane, jetlagged and disoriented, like little drunks being carried out of a bar after a Big Night Out.

We were dumped out of our cab on the sidewalk outside the New York Hilton – a hallucination of the tallest building we’d ever seen in our lives, so real our ears popped in the elevator on the way up to our floor.

We fell into our room not knowing what to do first – cry, sleep, vomit, or spinaroundincirclesanddropdownontheflooranddie!

But suddenly, something cleared all that up for us.

Everything else in the universe warped backwards into the vacuum of a giant black hole…

Out of its centre emerged a super-terrestrial object we’d only read about in comics…

We stood there in a catatonic stupor… at our first close encounter… with a television of the first kind…

That was the beginning of a six-week race for the remote control.

Which in retrospect is probably the reason we never came home morbidly obese – until then the only food we’d been exposed to was home-cooking and the Airport-Star Roadhouse before Friday night’s Drive-In movies.

We went to Hamley’s Toy Shop.

All four stories of it!

We bought so much stuff.

For so cheap!

Because two American Dollars cost one Rand.

RollerskatestheMuppets[eventhoughwedidn’tknowwhotheywere]modelcarsandmotorbikes
cowboysandindiansandtheirhorsesBarbieandKen[eventhoughwedidn’tknowwhotheywere]
andtheirhousestheircarstheirtenniscourtstheirgymnasticbarsmonstersandaliensandallothe
renemiesofBatmanandSupermanandIronmanandeveryotherManMarvelevercreatedScaletrix
[!!!]Artari’sSPACEINVADERSPACMANASTEROIDSbabydollsthatcriedandpeedintheirnappies
fakemoneyfakemonstersfeetthatglowedinthedarkfakevampiresteethfakebloodfakemachine
gunsthatshotfakebulletshugefakerocksfakefakesofeverythingfakeIcouldimagineinmyknown
world…

We acted like wedding guests at a buffet.

Where had we been while all of this had been going on behind our backs???

How could the world have hidden this from us all of this time???

Chapter 3

But I also remember seeing a fruit stall with pickings we’d only seen in illustrations of Eden.

It’s sign read: ‘…from South-Africa’

[!]

And I remember a restaurateur running to summon one of his staff that hailed from our ‘home town’.

He was from Kenya.

[!!]

I remember my father’s acquaintances asking how we “got around what with all them lions and tigers in the streets and all”.

[!!!]

I remember the Disneyland Parade – that was really a storm cloud in disguise, which would eventually come to rain heavily down on ours.

Chapter 4

We cried ourselves to sleep almost every night back home.

And awoke every morning to the soundtrack of ‘It’s A Small World’.

But I realise now that it was not.

The only world that was small, was ours.

Epilogue

Now, with my self-respect restored, I realise that America’s like the A-Team – great when we were young.

I’m sorry, that’s realiZE.

I’m South-African.

Isn’t it funny how people often want something purely because they can’t have it? Some times the girl across the road becomes all that more appealing when she gets a boyfriend. Some writers call this cat-string-theory: The idea that a cat is only interested in a ball of string because you’re holding it high up in the air, out of reach. Once you drop the ball, and the cat gets a hold of it, the interest is lost. Other writers may sight the basic laws of supply and demand for this. When supply is low and demand exists, a commodity is considered precious or rare and desirable.

Increase the supply (make it freely available) and suddenly the commodity is no longer considered rare or precious. What-ever the reason for us wanting what we can’t have, we can not deny having touched this part of the human experience at one stage in our lives. You may be asking yourself, what does this have to do with realizing I am South African? Well everything. For me it
was a case of, I didn’t know how good I had it till I left.

All our lives we are lead to believe that certain pursuits in life are noble, admirable and worth having. For some reason we think we will find all these pursuits somewhere other than where we live. The grass always looks greener on the other side; until we see the bottom half of the picture with the garbage dump next to the green pasture. The allure of a life overseas is something that will always play on the mind of someone whose ancestors have their origins far from the shores of Africa. I got to taste this European life for 7 months when I went to Sweden for studies in 2007. I was living in a city called Jonkoping, in the centre of Sweden, and the reality of a life outside South Africa had begun for me.

Within the first month I knew something inside me would not conform to the “Swedish” way of life. Everything was regimented and organized with instructions appearing on every toilet stall though-out the land on how to wipe your ass without offending the local population (The manual of a well manufactured IKEA flat packed coffee table comes to mind):

Step 1: Undo buttons 1 through 5 and then pull down pants.
Step 2: Relax orifice A (as opposed to orifices B & C of course).
Step 3: Take dump. Quietly!
Step 4: Assemble Danish flag toilet paper wads in an orderly fashion.
Step 5: Wipe orifice A using single, evenly pressured strokes until color no longer appears on paper. Discard lightly marked toilet paper in trash-can A; Medium marked paper in trash can B and heavily soiled bog paper in toilet.
Step 6: Flush. Quietly!
Step 7: Return pants and buttons 1 through 5 to original positions.

All hail the modern developed community for its foresight and instructional manual prowess. When did the idea that I am South Africa get cemented in my head? When I found myself rebelling against every pointless freedom constricting rule I could find (with the “How to poo in a Swedish bog manual” being the exception).

During my stay in Sweden, I can recall “borrowing” the communal furniture from the student residency study rooms and lounges for my private use. This was done without a question of whether this
was the right or wrong thing to do. Swedish legislation dictates that one must separate one’s trash. Five different trash cans are required for this and recycling is fundamental to not getting crapped on by the land lady. I used a single dustbin for two months regardless. My opinions on several different topics further proved my South African habits to be juxtaposed to those of the European persuasion: TVs are for throwing out of windows, bicycles left unattended are subject to the finders keepers rule of 1884, public transport was implemented so we could drink on the way to the club and a police force that can not be bribed is blinded by the rigidity of a system that punishes those who wish to grow plants in their garden.

The Swedes found themselves living in black and white while I came from a completely grey area. The friendly petrol attendant or socially inept waitress was no longer anywhere to be found. The beggar on the street who set off your daily guilt trip about how you were born with a silver spoon shoved up your pooper was simply not there. Traffic flowed, strikes were unheard of and every store closed and opened at precisely the indicated time. If you arrived late for something, there was no nope that you might catch the beginning because it was already underway. Front doors all over Sweden were cluttered with piles and piles of shoes because the back-breaking, economy flaccid-ising exercise of mopping up your own floor has as much appeal as having your prostate exam being carried out by Captain Hook.

Do theft, disorder, bribery, corruption and general dysfunction make me South African? Certainly not. While my behavior speaks more to the escapades of student life than to being South African, the things I was doing is not the point I am tying to make.

I do not enjoy or want dysfunction, that is, until I can’t have the choice. It is the desire to exercise my own discretion and freedoms in a way that is fulfilling to me that makes me South African. For years our country was given no choice on how things were run while being so occupied with laws and rules they soon forgot about the truth. It is an aversion to such a society that makes me South African. I want to choose how I live and not be instructed in every detail on how to do it. It is, however, also the little things I love about this country that makes me South African. The friendly people, the good sense of humor they posses and the idea that no matter were you meet a South African in the world, you feel like kin. But out of the all the things that made me realize that I am South Africa, and love being so, the three Bs of life closed the deal:

I realized I was South African when I found my self half way around the world, “borrowing” the communal braai from the student residency grounds for an undisclosed period of time, at the end of a cold, snow soaked Swedish winter so I could Braai meat on my balcony, with a Beer in one hand and a chunk of Biltong in the other.

From as far back as I can remember I have been Greek – with as much English blood in my veins which has at least contributed to my convoluted accent and good looks. During my formative years I was surrounded by just enough of my father’s culture to take a liking to it, from the food and hearing the language to the occasional trip to church (once a year on Easter only). I wasn’t exactly immersed as much as being regularly introduced.

And even though I was born in South Africa in the heart of the East Rand in Germiston City hospital (which I hear now is one big ARV clinic), I didn’t understand the concept of being South African for a very long time.

I was privileged in the sense that my parents worked very hard and spent everything they had practically to send my brother and I to private schools, the majority being spent at Catholic schools (without the baptismal badge of honour to be fully accepted). Being a predominantly “European” school, and I say this because there were not many students with a long family history in South Africa.

I believe there’s an identity crisis lurking in the mind of a first generation child, they cling to their parents culture as the one they respect and know – it defines them for a very long time, and it also sets them apart to an extent. I, for one, always found it very interesting visiting my Italian and Portuguese friend’s houses, having different food and hearing different languages – we were all special and unusual.

At the age of eight I had the amazing opportunity to go to Greece with my father. He was working on a long contract in Australia at the time and we actually met at Athens airport – not something I would recommend to a seasoned traveller, let alone a pre-teen who doesn’t speak a word of Greek.

This isn’t story of cultural differences, however, that would be way too simple.

It was, during that trip that I really started to realise that the country I had been born in was different. I had heard of some problems and questioned every now and again why there would be days on end when the black kids in our class didn’t come to school but I never remember getting a satisfactory answer. I also heard about things like the Equity Ban and riots every now and again, but I was obviously sheltered enough that it didn’t affect my daily life, never mind the fact that I could barely tie my own shoelaces.

What made me open my eyes happened in a sad little hotel room in Lisbon. Portugal wasn’t on our itinerary, except for a brief stopover, but problems arose with my father’s friend’s Mother (we were escorting her from Greece to visit her family in South Africa).

So what was meant to be a few hours ended up becoming a two (maybe three) day bonding experience for us at the Hotel Presidente (2 stars and as dirty as you can imagine a downtown Lisbon hotel to be).

Our luggage was already in South Africa and we really didn’t want to do much, so we sat around in the hotel room and talked a lot.

It was September I believe in 1988, just a month after Adriaan Vlok banned the ECC (End Conscription Campaign) which spurred on protests by UCT students and the confiscation of the Weekly Mail by security police.

It was essentially a blow to my future because as it stood I would still be doing two years forced army service after I finished school. My father explained to me the importance of going to university and getting a good education which would at least make my stay bearable.

I remember asking something along the lines of why my dad didn’t go to the army. And he explained it quite briefly, in that he wasn’t South African when he arrived in the country, he simply didn’t send the papers back and they didn’t bother him.

I wouldn’t have had that choice if the law stayed in effect. I couldn’t even comprehend what it would have been like, it was ten years away and a concept I couldn’t grasp, but even so at eight years old I secretly resented my country.

The thing about realising that you’re South African, is that you have to realise that the rest of the world exists, and have to understand it in a very meaningful way

As a kid growing up, the rest of the world was geography, and maybe some news. And so, although I was from South Africa, and I knew South Africa, I never fully appreciated being South African, simply because patriotism is a relative perception.

There’s a dirty word. Laboured as it is with images of gun toting mentalists running around the world killing everybody, “patriotism” has acquired a terrible tarnish. In the words of Bill Hicks “I fucking hate patriotism man. It’s a round world, the last time I checked.”

It was my first trip overseas, in August of 1995. We went to Poland, on a rowing tour, and it was just about the best introduction you could hope for to the rest of the world. Rowers from all over the world congregated for two weeks in the (as I remember it) small town of Poznan. Everybody was there with a common purpose (to beat everybody else), and this gave us a bridge across all the nationalities. Regardless, it also made everybody very conscious of where they were from.

Now I’m not a big believer in the “sudden flash” way of life. Stuff doesn’t hit you like lightning one day while you’re wandering around on Aliwal beach drinking Old Brown Sherry from a plastic packet. Stuff hits you slowly, many times over, and one day you wake up to a filthy hangover and the realisation that the stuff’s been there all along.

That said, If I had to identify the moment I first became proud of being a South African, it was on that tour. We were standing outside our residence, waiting to go to the course, and one of our guys who was still inside unfurled a massive South African flag from the window. We were one of the first teams to be competing under the New South African Flag, and I remember looking up at it and feeling immensely proud, and wanting to tell everybody how great our country is.

But I was very young, and such overt sentimentality came easily.

To say that I fully realised in that moment what it meant to be South African would be a blatant lie. I am still realising. These days, I live with a group of people from all parts of the Western world, in a small city in China. Small enough that Westerners are still freaks to be stared at. Understanding how different we are, and all of the good things and bad things that come from being South African – all of the big things like the colour of our skin (Small town Chinese people often believe I’ve become white because I stayed out of the sun), and the little things like having two ways of spelling sentence/ance – all of these understandings are making me realise day by day what it means to be South African. And it’s cool man. It’s fucking cool.

Anyway, that doesn’t matter. Patriotism is what I felt the first time I fully appreciated being South African, and I’ll admit that just once. Right, now I’m off to kill some people who don’t look like me.

There is no greater burden than the burden of opportunity. That is the best way to sum up the emotion underpinning the day I first realised I was truly South African. Never discounting the sacrifices of those to afford us the liberties we now all have, the challenges still remaining cannot be ignored. The first two sentences sound overly political, for which I apologise, but follow me here: sitting with a group of friends fast approaching the end of high school and discussing what our future plans were, most of them spoke as if their plans were limited to that which they could do, as opposed to that which they wanted to do. Some spoke of working in mines, others banks (as tellers) and the others resolute to whatever they could get. Here I was plotting how to get my record label off the ground, as well as the additional businesses I had in mind, and also when exactly I intended on actually getting round to university. Two very different sets of outlooks, obviously.

See, the thing is, I grew up very well educated and with tons of opportunity that my mother worked hard for. Political developments meant that my generation was the first generation whose formative years were spent in suburbia and who went to “model c” schools. Yet, obviously, one’s entire history does not move in one generation, and therefore I spent my entire holidays in a township called Thlabane on the outskirts of Rustenburg. So I had two sets of friends whose worlds never mixed, my friends in the hood and my friends in the ‘burbs. As a result, two sets of outlooks, two sets of perceptions, two sets of expectations and perceived entitlement.

My story, not being at all as unique as it sounds in writing, meant I was exposed to two worlds – at times wholly different and at times overlapping more than some think. Yet, the whole “feeling South African” stems from realising that not only is this country’s greatest challenge general disparities, but also the human condition. The liberal in me believes that all should have the same opportunities sensitive only to their ambition and not to their social condition. It also stems from the realisation that nowhere in the world can people – individuals and groups – do more remarkable things than in this country. South Africans are awash with opportunity within the bounds of the most remarkable (borderline unbelievable) culture, and maybe, just maybe, as South Africans, our identity stems from this.

I knew I was a South African almost as soon as I could talk but I never had any real love for South Africa. It was the country I lived in, but not my country. I had no love for the flag and ‘Die Stem’ did not make me feel like dying for my country.

I do not think I ever realized what it meant to be a South African, though, not until the post apartheid years. Not until the channels of communication with the outside world were opened and I started hearing more and more from other countries. Not until I heard what the outside world really thought about ‘us’.

Eventually I did realize that my country was ostracized by the rest of the world and eventually I understood why. But there was no defining moment, no sudden epiphany, no dawn of realization. It was a slow process that started after I moved to Port Elizabeth (PE).

PE was not as conservative as Upington; we were not forced to use different doors, toilets or park benches to the extent that people were up north. I remember going back to Upington for a funeral in my early teenage years. This was when apartheid was on its way out but before Madiba became president.

Things were changing slowly. I accompanied my uncle, also from PE, to the butchery and waited in the car while he went into the shop. There were two doors. A minute later he stormed out of the butchery, looking as if he was ready to commit murder. My uncle had apparently used the door for ‘Europeans Only’. The shop keeper had told him to go back out and enter through the non-European door! Separate doors to buy the same meat from the same shop. The stupidity of some of those apartheid rules still makes the mind boggle.

I remember that my family bought into the ‘Swart Gevaar’ (Black Danger) propaganda before the 1994 elections. Leading up to those historic elections my mother stocked up on canned food and we were told to stay close to home. I could not see how Nelson Mandela, a man who had been in prison for longer than I had been alive, could possibly come out of prison and rule South Africa, as he was sure to do. I was petrified of what would become of SA once ‘the blacks took over’. It was part of who we had become under apartheid. Part of what we had been taught: To fear black people. I realize that now. We clung to the past because we were made to fear what we did not know.

The first time I felt patriotic was during the 1995 Rugby World Cup. I was in my first year at Technikon. It was the first time in my life that I interacted with people of all races. During the start of the World Cup I remember walking to take a taxi home one afternoon and a car drove past, hooting loudly, the new SA flag flying out of the window – South Africa had just won their first match. I never had any interest in Rugby before that, although I knew who Naas Botha was, but I started watching the games.

I sang along to the theme of the world cup, ‘The world in union’ and had arguments with other coloured people who supported the All Blacks. I wonder how many readers realize that the All Blacks have quite a following in the Port Elizabeth coloured community, even today.

By the end of the World Cup I was sold – Nelson Mandela was the best thing to ever happen to our country and there was hope for the future.

Things were changing for the better.

They had to – right?