OPINION
Why we leave
Andrew Donaldson |
14 August 2024
Andrew Donaldson on a familiar story many South Africans take with them to the UK, and the polite English indifference to it
A FAMOUS GROUSE
A FRIEND has a familiar South African story. Shortly before their move to the UK, he and his wife were tied up and blindfolded in the bedroom as armed men trashed the house, looking for valuables. There was not much to steal, most of their stuff had recently been taken in the previous two home invasions.
This, of course, made matters somewhat worse. You don’t want to be subject to the wrath of angry invaders, desperate types suddenly faced with the disappointment of wrapping up the night’s work with little or no reward for the time and effort they’d put into the job.
Frustrated, one of the men asked my friend’s wife where she kept her jewellery. There, she said, on the dressing table. He seemed unimpressed with her collection of necklaces, rings and other baubles and demanded to know where she kept the valuable pieces. No, she said, that’s all there is, there’s nothing else. The man appeared stunned. “But this stuff is rubbish,” he said. “It’s cheap shit.”
My friend says that his heart practically stopped when his wife replied, “Well, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to take it, you know.”
The men left shortly after that. Whether they took the jewellery or not is immaterial. My friends were unharmed. They freed themselves. The police were called as a matter of routine. They jotted down a few details, doled out a case number for insurance purposes and that seemed to be that; just another night in the suburbs.
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How the investigation proceeded is not known. That is, if there was indeed an investigation. It’s not an important element of the recounting of these traumatic events.
There was talk, though, that the gang could be University of Johannesburg students. The campus was around the corner. The men were young, my friend says, and reasonably well-spoken; they seemed “educated” and “learned enough” to recognise that further assaulting or even murdering their victims would not improve matters.
As South Africans, we are used to such stories. We are defined by these accounts. We understand their meaning and why we are compelled to repeat them. We recognise their truths and the context in which they are related.
As an expat, though, I’m not sure the same could be said of the society in which I now find myself.
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For all their professed worldliness, the English seem extraordinarily incurious about life beyond their borders. From time to time, I’m asked why I chose to move to the UK. They’re not really interested in the true reasons for leaving, and I’ve now learnt to joke that I came over for the weather. There is no point in mentioning the crime; the violence is simply beyond their ken.
My wife finds it extraordinarily frustrating, for example, that her academic colleagues are unable to comprehend the full extent and brazen nature of a criminal enterprise like state capture. Their eyes glaze over, and they offer, by way of a response, some glib piffle that, oh, well, you know, there’s a bit of corruption in all governments; all these questions about dodgy Covid contracts and the like, we have that here too…
It’s just not the same, we could say. But we don’t. We drop the subject and keep to ourselves. Perhaps it’s for the better. Especially as it’s not done to bore others.
Certainly, there would be no point in mentioning this disgraceful business of the 5.4 million unresolved case dockets that the police have closed since 2018 due to what they claim is a lack of evidence. The truth of the matter is that these cases have probably been abandoned due to a lack of police, for the SAPS is simply not capable of doing the job.
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The former police minister, Bheki Cele, revealed in May that the dockets had been closed. With that, the Cat in the Hat announced he was retiring from politics. Nothing like leaving a tidy desk as he closes the office door behind him, or what?
Last week Cheek Bile’s successor, Senzo Mchunu, provided the Democratic Alliance with a detailed breakdown of these dockets. The information was disturbing, to say the least.
From 2018 to the end of 2023, the unsolved cases summarily abandoned and closed included 76 655 murders, 40 089 attempted murders, 141 026 cases of gender-based violence, 256 162 cases of aggravated robbery, 61 740 rapes, 5 523 sexual assaults and 9 114 cases of kidnapping.
I’ve done some rough calculations here, and put it this way: every single day for six years, almost 40 different murder cases are summarily closed and dumped into File 13. That, presumably, is if the police work on weekends and public holidays.
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I feel though for the ordinary cops on the beat. They deserve our sympathy; it can’t be easy having to inform scores of grieving relatives every day that, sorry, no go, case is closed, the killers are still at large…
According to the DA MP Lisa Schickerling, there was information that suggested that most dockets stolen from police stations were open cases of rape and sexual assault — all of them coming from Limpopo.
“This,” she said, “raises a serious question about the effectiveness of docket management within the SAPS and the maintenance of docket safety.” Reports that there are plans afoot to amend such “critical failures” in the SAPS do little to allay fears or boost much confidence in this regard.
Sometimes, when I hear the locals complain of asylum seekers invading the UK in their rubber dinghies and little boats, and how they leech off the system, I point out that I too am a refugee.
But you’re not like them, I’m told. You’re different.
No, I want to reply, I am just like them. True, I would say, I didn’t come over by boat. But no matter. We all want to be safe, and have a better life than the one we left behind. But I say nothing. What would be point in arguing?
Sticks, stones, labels, insults, contumely, etc
What is the opposite of wokeness? I ask only because James Marriott, a columnist with The Times, suggests there is a need for such an antonym. “There should be a word for it,” he argues. “It would describe the kind of politics prevalent on the right that is oddly reminiscent of zanier elements of the progressive left. The policies are obviously different but the mood is similar: pessimistic, ideological, intolerant, puritanical, often pretentious.”
According to Marriott, the “puritanism” of the “woke left” — a disturbing ideological piety — is now complemented by a puritanism on the right. He cites recent developments in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign: “a revived obsession with sexual morality, a loathing of single women (‘childless cat ladies’) and a creepy veneration of ‘trad wives’.”
As it is, and in response to the crude attacks on Democrat presidential contender Kamala Harris (“Is she Indian or is she Black?”) and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, a counter term has emerged and that is simply: “weird”.
As insults go, it’s fairly vague and not particularly offensive — especially when compared to other labels applied to Trump in the past: liar, cheat, fraud, megalomaniac, despot, adjudicated rapist, misogynist, convicted felon, fascist, xenophobe, racist, etc.
But it is proving to be extremely effective — the Republicans’ “kryptonite”, according to an opinion piece by critic Mary McNamara in the Los Angeles Times. Republicans regard the label as “childish and mean”, but it is nevertheless unnerving the Trump team simply because it is not a term of self-identification embraced by those who has sought positions of authority. As McNamara writes:
“‘Weird’ does not convey a sense of power. Indeed, in its current usage, it is a dismissive term, a labeling of bizarre behavior or beliefs that implies not a threat but a diminishment. ‘Weird’ is not a shout of outrage or fear but a shrug of derision and disdain. ‘Stop being weird’ is what one says when another’s actions and attitudes are so ridiculous that it honestly isn’t worth explaining why.”
More importantly, the term flips the middle-American narrative that the Democrats are extremists and the Republicans are sensibly normal. But when a conservative commentator on Fox News suggests that men who vote for women have “mommy issues” and run the risk of transitioning into women themselves, well, that’s way-out fringe nonsense. As the novelist Stephen King described it: “This is weird.”
Fascinating as all this may be, is “weird” the opposite of wokeness? Perhaps not, but the latter’s roots are nevertheless worth noting.
The first documented use of the term appeared in Scottsboro Boys, a 1938 recording by the American folk singer American folksinger Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly. The song concerns the ordeal of nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a train near the town of Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. The nine escaped lynching, but spent years in the Alabama penal system fighting to prove their innocence.
At the end of the recording, Lead Belly explains the song’s Jim Crow context: “I made this little song about [the situation] down there. So I advise everybody, be a little careful — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
From this, the original meaning of “woke” is clear: be alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.
That definition, however, is now redundant. Weaponised by right-wingers and those who claim to do their own research, “woke” has become an all-encompassing pejorative in the 21st century, a label to mock the compassion of others.
It is, however, quite true that the mindful often open themselves up to abuse with extremely silly behaviour. One example of many, I suppose, is the plastering of warnings of “distressing themes” on productions of Shakespeare’s plays.
It’s the same on TV. Once it was just sex, nudity and violence that made up graphic content on the box. But now viewers are told that scenes in which adults swear at one another, toss back a few cocktails and smoke cigarettes could trigger a mental breakdown. Drama is accordingly blanched from drama. (Where are you now, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton?)
Darker still are the contortions of identity politics and critical race theory. Consider the case of another young singer-songwriter, Johannesburg’s Tyla Seethal. Known simply as Tyla, she burst on the global music scene last year with her hit, Water.
It is not only her storming of the R&B charts that has made waves in the US but her description of herself as “Coloured”, a term with a “painful racist history”, according to the Guardian, and one that is no longer in use by Americans.
It does seem a bit of fraught about nought. Back in 2020, the teenaged Tyla posted a brief video on TikTok in which she twisted her hair into an African style. In text over the clip, she wrote, “I’m a Coloured South African. Which means I come from a lot of different cultures … I’m exploring my African heritage by wearing Bantu knots.”
Americans were quite upset at this, and many said they would never refer to the singer — who has Zulu, Irish and Mauritian-Indian heritage — as “Coloured”. Furious debate followed, if squabbling on social media can be classified as such. There was this pearl of a claim, for instance: “Coloured is not a race. It’s an apartheid ethnic classification which they used for people of Lebanese decent in the early 1900s.”
Gratifyingly, many black South Africans rallied behind the singer, their arguments much along the lines of this contribution (from a Brit, apparently) on X (formerly Twitter):
“You are ignorant as hell. Ignoring the cultural identifier of someone because YOU feel triggered? You do understand that being ‘coloured’ is completely different than the NAACP/American understanding of ‘colored’ right? If you’re too lazy to do the mental math just say that.”
I liked that. Could it be a return of sorts to the snobbery of the English “U and Non-U” class distinction of the 1950s? That, spelling aside, it’s one thing to be Coloured, but quite another to be colored?
In her attempt to put this hoopla to rest, Tyla posted a statement on X: “I don’t expect to be identified as Coloured outside of [South Africa] by anyone not comfortable doing so because I understand the weight of that word outside [South Africa]. But to close this conversation, I’m both Coloured in South Africa and a Black woman.”
One aspect of this saga is that it does bring into focus American dominance in the discourse of what it means to be Black, a presence that arguably marginalises the histories and identities of other groups. But, whether woke or weird, that is perhaps a matter for another day.
