I’ve spent a lot of time in Southern Africa, it’s my favorite part of the World. Much as I love France, had there not been significant political and personal safety risk I might have retired there.
I’ve watched with sadness as the euphoria that I had the privilege to live through in the mid nineties descend into despair as corruption took over and nothing changed for the people scraping a living in the townships.
Unfortunately I agree absolutely, loved SA, there was so much hope and I tried to help make a difference as part of the Transformation (not a word one hears anymore) but then it started to turn bleak and certainly things are far worse now.
Eventually left after deciding that although I’d managed to live for years with burglar bars over every window and an armed response panic button in every room, things were becoming too dangerous even in supposedly sleepy Grahamstown. In addition to an increase in local farm murders, people had been killed on the university campus and then the head of a local private school was hijacked and shot. Besides all that there was suspected to be over 20% HIV positives in the SA student population (no anti-virals) and because we’d just attended his wife’s funeral service, I knew one of my doctoral students was also dying of AIDs
I had a detached bungalow with indigenous bush on two sides so felt increasingly unsafe. Was often waking up in the middle of the night because the security lights had come on (usually it was wildlife like leguans going to drink at next door’s pool) l and had been thinking about getting a Glock for the bedside table, but decided I couldn’t live like that.
My SiL and her husband are still in JHB, living what seems to me a stifling life between malls and their up-market gated community, while like everyone else struggling through hours of outages and now the new water shortage. They talk about moving to the Cape, or even the UK (he has a British passport) but despite everything, I’ll be surprised if they go anywhere. So depressing.
One of my former lecturing staff introduced me to the phrase ‘happysadland’, which coincidentally was the title of one of his books - sums it all up - such a beautiful country and such a tragedy
It’s so sad Mark. So much hope, so much potential, all squandered.