Why I am leaving South Africa (again) and don’t plan to ever move back

 

G39FXE The Battle of Blood River. The charge of the Boers to avenge Dingaan’s Daag. Date: 16th December 1838

I have spent my life cursed with a morbid imagination and, to make matters worse, it’s an unusually vivid and active one. 

As a child, I was convinced that my parents were imposters who took off their human skins at night and that I was the subject of a weird experiment by a race of spider people.

Even now, my first thoughts in most situations tend to be dark and treacherous (to my mental health at least). Someone is 15 minutes late to an appointment? They’ve obviously died in a car crash, been hijacked and shot, or are being raped to death in a tik den somewhere. A strange sound at night is never just the house settling, always a gang of depraved, murderous burglars coming to ram an AK47 up my innocent butthole. These scenarios enter my mind unbidden, played out in lurid detail. 

As I have become older, my frightening reveries have turned away from monsters and imaginary beasts and focussed on the human terrors that move among us and, in South Africa, the ground is of unparalleled fertility for my most febrile fantasies to take root.

A quick scan of headlines on any given day delivers a gut-punch of depravity, cruelty practised as a casual pastime and a simmering, seething undercurrent of hatred and bloodlust that will eventually spill over and carry us into the abyss.

As the economy keeps worsening and we sink further into poverty and hopelessness, as we spend increasing hours being molested in Eskom’s dark basement, the first thing to break will be the thin veneer of human decency that still holds back the complete chaos that many seem to await with fervid anticipation.

And I know that, no matter how South African I feel, how deep a connection I have to the geography and people of this country, regardless of the fact that I have always tried to treat my compatriots with respect and decency, I am going to be on the wrong side of the coming carnage. It is what it will be.

I have been back in SA for a year and I have seen enough to know that I want something else, something better, for my daughter. I do not want her life defined by race, her future impeded by the actions of people who died decades ago. I do not want her to feel the abject guilt and hopelessness I experience every single day in this country.

When I look at her face I am filled with an almost agonizing sense of love and a deep dread that, if we stay here, something bad will happen to her and that I will not be able to prevent it. Will she be one of those women or girls deemed lucky to ‘only’ be raped and not murdered? Will she be allowed to go to school or university without being a second-class citizen? Will she become one of the thousands of children who simply disappear in this country, swallowed by the slavering maw of a doomed, psychotic nation? Will she be hated? Will people call for her blood to wash away the sins committed before she was born?

I have frequent arguments with the #imstaying brigade. They normally insist that I have a duty to stay and help fix this country. “South Africans don’t run away, we solve our problems,” they say, usually while sitting around a braai in a suburban property that resembles a jail for violent offenders. They argue that it’s not really as dire as people say, that nothing has happened to them specifically, so things are probably not that bad. I understand the need to rationalize your existence in this country. It’s a natural human coping mechanism. But having lived in a ‘normal’ society where pensioners are not tortured to death on remote homesteads, where grannies on their way home are not robbed by tsotsis after a day cleaning the home of someone who spends more on a bottle of wine than they pay her for a day’s labour, where children are not raped and drowned in pit latrines and where there is not a permanent, roiling undercurrent of rage and anger, I know that life can be better.

I have come to the realization that I don’t owe this place a fucking thing. The colour of my skin means that I will never be an African, that I will never truly belong here. And I am OK with that. I no longer feel welcome. I want out of the fear, the chaos, the rage. I no longer want the weight of history bearing down on every moment of my life.

So it is with great relief that I say fuck South African drivers and their sociopathic need to tailgate, speed, overtake on blind corners, drive while staggering drunk, and generally act like utter cunts. 

Fuck South Africa’s political class. You are the very worst that humanity has to offer. Fuck Cyril Ramaphosa, Julius Malema, Helen Zille and especially Jacob Zuma. Fuck the ANC, the DA, the EFF, the ACDP and even the Soccer Party. 

Fuck the Zulus, the Xhosas, the Sotho, the Tswana, the Bapedi, the Afrikaners, the English, the Ndebele and the Khoisan (OK, maybe not the Khoisan). Fuck the whites, the blacks, the coloureds and every other tribe, race and nationality in this godforsaken shithole.

Fuck Eskom, oh sweet poes, fuck Eskom. Even as the country spirals down into utter dysfunction the theft, greed and incompetence continue unabated. Tenders are still being tendered and backs are still being scratched. 

Fuck the sunshine, the natural beauty, the lifestyle. Fuck Ubuntu, fuck the TRC, fuck Apartheid and fuck freedom. Fuck Table Mountain, the Karoo, the Wild Coast, the Garden Route and the Lowveld. Fuck the dream of the Rainbow Nation and fuck the reality of the broken nation.

Fuck the criminals, the burglars, the rapists, the gangsters, the state capturers, the bribers, the bribed, the racists, those who would steal the food from a dying child’s mouth if it meant they got theirs, and those who go the extra mile and actually kill the child.

And don’t imagine that you’re innocent. The rot is pervasive and every little scab is part of the leprous whole so your casual disobedience of the law contributes to the festering problem. If you’ve ever bribed a cop, ever littered, routinely ignored speed limits, bought a poached crayfish, left your dog’s shit on the beach, or indulged in any one of those thousands of tiny little illegal acts South Africans are so good at, fuck you too. You are part of the problem.

And last but not least, fuck me, for I am a South African and, despite everything I’ve said, leaving breaks my heart.