I am Leaving South Africa Because of the Conversation…
If I have to hear one more comment blaming the ANC for South Africa’s woes, I am going to be ill.
Conversation is a strange thing. There are some topics that one shouldn’t talk about ever, and then there are those topics that seem to create immediate bonds — even with complete strangers.
When I came back to South Africa nearly six years ago, I wasn’t sure what I would find. I was delighted that the country now had a middle class black population, and I thought the country had vastly improved since the time I had left twenty years earlier.
Of course, I left for a combination of reasons — I couldn’t find work, I wasn’t happy, and I was extremely uncomfortable with the topics of conversation. In my late teens and twenties (the 60s and 70s), when I mentioned that apartheid was wrong, there would be a frozen silence, and like any other refined human being, I used to take the hint and not mention it again.
In the time before the first elections that would allow people of color to vote, there was constant talk of the ‘swart gevaar’ — the black danger. We had to group together as white people and vote because there were so many of ‘them’ that they would outvote ‘us.’
