Dear South Africa
I wish I could say I left your motherly arms with a heavy heart… but I can’t. As I sit, more than 14 000 kms away from you, awash in a foreign culture so strange and peculiar I should be flailing and wailing for a Black Label (which I do miss) the only emotion I can seek out from this maze of weird is relief.
Okay, let me not be a total twat for fear of being labelled a turncoat whingy whitey. I miss your abundant natural wonder, your myriad of cultures and wondrous diversity. I miss the pap and vleis, braais, beer quarts, red wine, sunshine, surfing, koekssusters, rugby, soccer. If I even had to hear the satanic blare of a vuvuzela I’d probably hunt the source down and hug him/her, that’s the extent of my nostalgia for you, as my home nation, the origin of me. But my beloved SA, when we parted you seemed tired, weary, haggard and disillusioned. That twinkle in your eyes seemed a fatigued flicker that spring in your step was more like a limp, you smiled, but I detected a grimace. You waved, then turned and hobbled off when you thought I wasn’t watching. I know why and feel, share and understand your pain, even as I sprint across the globe away from your motherland warmth seeking, not even the proverbial ‘greener pastures’, but a momentary escape from the stifling web of madness, stupidity, gluttony and desperation gripping your throat and those of your other kids.
I miss you, I really do! But I don’t miss your government – that array of buffoons (well, not all of them) that seem helpless in growing your beauty and potential effectively enough for you to be taken seriously by your mates abroad. At family dinners most pretend to love you. They stretch their arms to hug you, knives concealed in their sleeves and give you those European kiss-kisses, artificial and irritatingly upper-crust. Most of them say they love you, yet in the same breath they hurry out of the dining room to answer their iPhones, concocting and plotting vague deals to line their pockets and stomachs. They’ll insist they have your interests in mind, ‘Always trying to make you proud, Mama’. Well if pride is stealing, lying, back-stabbing then their style of love looks to me like politics, with all the garish trimmings.
I don’t miss your president, he of the many wives, children and dance moves. If only he could use his brain as well as he does his genitalia, maybe then you could be his true, one-and-only queen, the one worthy of his attention. Instead Mama Africa, you must take second… umm, third, no wait, four… nope, fifth best. I’m actually not sure anymore. But what I do know is that your best interests don’t seem to top his growing list of phoney beneficiaries and dubious pals all queuing for a piece of YOUR pie.
I don’t miss that strange, confused political movement which actually runs your home – the ANC. It’s become a mess, a complete mutant of what is used to be. It’s turned into this meat-eating monster that is cannibalising itself and scoffing down the rest of your kids for deserts. And it doesn’t even bother with chewing on the good bits first, like the arms and head. It seems to have gotten somewhat lost in its carnivorous avarice, consuming its anus first, eating with long teeth through the rectum and icky, pooey bits, where it has gotten stuck amid indigestion and tummy aches. Ag shame Ma, what a gastronomic malaise to endure.
I certainly don’t yearn for that once-was a warrior comrade, Julius Malema. In fact, let me stand and applaud the ruling partytjie for booting him into touch, at least for now. When I departed your bosom, Mom, I hoped the rest of my brethren could move on from that fattened, petulant moron. But alas, I took a furtive glimpse of a newspaper on the plane to my faraway self-inflicted destination of exile. And lo and behold, there his mug was, with his beret perched on his gleaming noggin, a Colgate smile and glam aviators finishing off his now trademark image of arrogance, wannabe-dictator-ness and quiet revenge.
Before you further label me a cowardly racist, Moeder (many a time I know in our mother/son spats you have uttered that, but I understand) let me assure I also won’t miss that strange grouping of obdurate twits who share my skin pigmentation. They don themselves in khaki, veldskoene, fly arcane-looking Nazi-ish symbols and bleat and belch our declarations of adulation and of loyalty to backward-thinking, mindless hate mongers, now departed, but not forgotten. Their insistence on a volkstaat’, their inability to think beyond 1994, their undying hatred of everything not like them leaves me, well, it leaves me chuckling, actually, as I comically pity these types.
Speaking of ‘these types’ before I fled your arms that former staatspresident of yours, FW De Klerk, also induced a mild retching reflex as I packed my bags. His clumsy defence of separate development (I believe you once called it Apartheid) on an international TV news network, almost made me find God again in a moment of disbelief. Oh, how I will never miss ‘these types’, who once dragged you into being a pariah and outcast.
God dank I’m leaving behind these poephols, the whole lot of them, black, white, coloured, orange, maroon, grey… the entire bunch who seem hell bent on slowly murdering you, Mom, killing your natural wealth, your self-grown beauty. If struck by faith again while holed up in this foreign land, I will kneel, clasp my hands together and quietly, reverently utter a prayer for you, only you, none of the above, who are quite possibly lost forever amid their greed, narrow-mindedness and power-gluttony.
Yours dearly and most sincerely
R
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