I've Never Met a Nice South African
A Deviation - My English Traits - Chapter 38
In her girlhood she had had nothing but her pride, and since her pride had nothing to be proud about, it was only a rolled-up propriety bristling with feelers of sensitivity.
From Robert Musil’s description of Ermelinda Tuzzi, aka Diotima, in The Man Without Qualities
I’ve met nice English people, nice Afrikaners, nice Americans, nice Scottish and Irish people, and lovely folk from Wales. I’ve met nice Frenchmen and delightful Spanish women. I’ve met charming Mexicans, wonderful Brazilians, good Russians and several half-decent Canadians. I’ve met good Chileans, Argentinians and Uruguayans. I’ve met gentle and thoughtful Zulus, lovely Basothos, kind Malawians and a number of smart and likeable Chinese people. I count a Cypriot, a Palestinian, an Indian and a Pakistani among my closest friends. I’ve met the kindest, nicest and warmest people in Iceland, in Denmark, and in Poland. I’ve met cultured and thoughtful Australians. I’ve met wonderful Xhosas, Nigerians, Zambians, Finns and Kiwis. I’ve met and befriended several Germans, Austrians, Italians and Maltese. I have a great friend in Lebanon, a close friend in Alaska, and some distantly amicable Gmail and Facebook acquaintances in Jamaica, the Philippines, Kazakhstan and even in Surrey. But I’ve never met a nice nationalist.
It’s one thing to be proud of your country. It’s quite another if your country is the only thing you have to be proud of. All it can amount to then, as Robert Musil observed of his magnificent Ermelinda Tuzzi, is “...a rolled-up propriety bristling with feelers of sensitivity.”
I embarked on this little train of thought partly in the hope that the warm and kindly light of its reflections would penetrate and dispel the dark clouds of animus that broke in a flood of unsavoury vitriol over Lords’ cricket ground (cf. Podsnap in the Long Room) to spoil what, in another mood at another time, could have been written up as an entertainingly innocent spat between the spirit of cricket and the ghosts of the Tasmanian genocide. I don’t know what came over me — a rush of blood, perhaps.
I’m awfully sorry if I offended any Australians.
But mostly because, before Zadie Smith, William Blake, Wordsworth and Dickens crowded into my carriage on the way from Waterloo to Marylebone, I had been thinking about pride, especially pride in one’s nation which, along with pride in one’s culture, skin colour, heritage and history, requires less than no effort on the part of our individual selves to bask in the glow of.
Like electricity in my home country today, national pride was in short supply in South Africa in the sixties, seventies and eighties. There wasn’t enough to go round. Indeed, until 1994 we had nothing to be collectively proud of apart from some of the most magnificent geography in the world. Unfortunately, like our history, it just happened to be neither fungible, shareable nor edible.
And since pride is the psychological equivalent of bodily protein, the ingredient essential for catalyzing most chemical reactions, for regulating both the immune system and for supporting muscle growth, those of (white-middle-class) us who had grown to a more or less robust physical adulthood by the mid-1980s, found ourselves suffering collectively from a bad case of mental and spiritual kwashiorkor, otherwise diagnosable as autochthonous ignominy.
Or, to put it more colloquially: shame, man.
If you were wealthy enough and white enough you could buy the expensive version of patriotism. It would typically include a private game reserve, a splendid view from Robberg, reserved seating at Newlands, and enough overseas trips to show your South African expat friends in London, Toronto and Perth, with exhaustively documented and comprehensively narrated evidence, just how proud you were of your country.
If you were white but not wealthy you would have to rely on the Springboks, Zola Budd or Oscar Pistorius to give you an occasional charge of patriotic galvanism. But it was usually very brief, and it tended to end badly.
I remember being immensely proud to learn that we had discovered the coelacanth.
We?
Yes, us!
It’s on precisely such tasty scraps that an undernourished pro patria has to feed on or die.
If you were neither white nor wealthy you would have to make a fire, slaughter a goat, and invoke your ancestors to remind you it wasn’t always like this.
I’m not proud of these reductive, classist and racist tropes but they’re all I have to shore up the ruins of my South African self-esteem, i.e. my rolled-up propriety bristling with feelers of sensitivity.
It turns out, oddly and thankfully, that our minds are peculiarly efficient at translating our many and varied disgraces, be they personal, collective or national, into a form of pride in the shame of them. How else can one explain the ironic delight in the response of so many South Africans to the news that Cyril Ramaphosa took a sizeable armoury of deadly weapons to his Ukrainian peace talks? Or the shit-eating grins you get from the English when they hear that Boris Johnson has forgotten his WhatsApp login along with the names and the number of his children?
What else can it be other than a kind of schadenfreude that relishes the suffering of the patriotic self? — a maliciously, mirthful masochism the psychological mechanism of which might well have been designed to reassure us that our personal foibles are the fault — not of ourselves, dear Brutus — but of the stars.
Or perhaps it’s just nature’s way of preventing us from drowning in the torrid tears of our supra-national existential helplessness.
You have to laugh, they say. I’ve tried, and it doesn’t help.
The alternative is to do something you can be proud of. By your actual self.
I did in the late evening of 20th March, 1978.
I’m proud of it only in retrospect. I did it at the time because I didn’t want to get my face burned off by a Molotov cocktail thrown by some township kid into the armoured Hippo I happened to be cooped up inside of even if I strongly believed in the cause he or she was fighting for.
I packed my blue Datsun 1200 bakkie with everything I owned and drove through the night to arrive at four o’clock in the morning at the Ficksburg border post on the northern side of the Caledon River that separated South Africa from Lesotho. The friend of a friend had given me the name of someone to contact in Hlotse, just a few miles from the border. He was a Young Catholic, a member of a rare sect of Christians who believed apartheid was un-Christian. Many of them had fled long ago to the relatively safe refuge of our land-locked neighbour.
I didn’t know anything about Lesotho except that it was the ideological mirror image of South Africa. Gambling and pornography were legal there but apartheid wasn’t. A little, round vanity mirror, if you like.
In the days before digital there would have been no way for the South African border guards to know whether I was dodging the SADF, visiting the Bishop, or on my way to Maseru to see The Anal Adventures of Misty Rain, rare copies of which reputed masterpiece were selling in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg at the time for an eye-watering three hundred rands a pop.
When dawn and the customs and immigration officials arose, I opted for the story about the Bishop. They looked at my artfully cultivated Jesus-like hair. I treated them to my artfully cultivated Jesus-like smile. They must have thought bliksem-hippy-kak-fok-kaffirboetie before they waved me through the maze of green Putco buses bringing Basotho mine-workers backwards and forwards between the Malutis and the Reef.
I would spend the next two years teaching the boys at St Joseph’s Minor Seminary how to divide three digit numbers by two digit numbers, explaining why Britain was Great, how to tell a Jew from another white person, persuading them that not all Zulus were cannibals these days, why a black person could sit in the front of a bakkie with a white person in Lesotho but as soon as they crossed the border into Ficksburg the Mosotho would have to sit in the back of the bakkie; and the difference between a definite article and the indefinite article.
Cowardice aside, I’m still proud — and I still feel immensely privileged — to have been able to do what I did.
There are more stories than I have time to tell about my Lesotho years. Some are titivating, some are tearful and some are tragic. I’ve tried and failed to write them up. More than once.
Of all the terrible inequities between Africa and the so-called developed world, the one that pains me the most is the staggering epistemic inequality between the mountains of over-documented bullshit about the tedium and the trivialities of life in occidental societies when compared with the desperate paucity of published literature devoted to the extraordinary lived experience of the 1.2 billion people who inhabit the African continent.
I understand perfectly how and why it’s been allowed to happen. No one would want to believe a word of it.
It took two years for my whiteness to get the better of me. That, and the day they closed down St Joseph’s and moved the kids who wanted to be priests to the secular high school in Maputsoe. I suspect, without putting too fine a point on it, that it was for their own safety.
Which is another reason I found it not only difficult, but potentially dangerous to my personal well-being, to write the truth about my Lesotho experience when I resurfaced in white Johannesburg. St Joseph is a saint because he didn’t fuck his wife.
There was no room in the inn of my old commune in Quince Street. But some of the Quince Street communists had moved to a house in Tolip Street, Westdene, and they kindly arranged a place on a carpet for me to lay down my weary head. It was January, 1981.
The house belonged to Jeremy Taylor — not the Church of England cleric who achieved fame as an author during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell for his sensationally popular tract, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living — but Jeremy Taylor, the former Eton teacher, friend to Spike Milligan and musical accomplice to Alan Price, Kenny Baker, Pam Ayres, Peter Skellern, Cat Stevens and Isla St Clair — a sublimely cool guy, in other words, who wrote the most sensationally popular and uncool song of the South African sixties.
The Ballad of the Southern Suburbs, locally known as Ag Pleez Deddy, was written for the musical show Wait a Minim, which ended up briefly but extraordinarily enough on Broadway. We were even more proud of it than we were of the coelacanth.
The lyrics of Ag Pleez Deddy described the sum total of the cultural aspirations of the average white South African in seven blisteringly pejorative verses, the incontrovertible accuracy of which so offended the delicate sensibilities of the apartheid government that Taylor was “exiled” back to the UK.
Here’s a sample of it, as memorably chewy as ostrich biltong:
Ag pleez Deddy won't you take us to the drive-in
All six, seven of us, eight, nine, ten
We wanna see a flick about
Tarzan an' the Ape-men
An' when the show is over you can bring us back again
Chorus:
Popcorn, chewing gum, peanuts an' bubble gum
Ice cream, candy floss an' Eskimo Pie
Ag Deddy how we miss
Nigger balls an' licorice
Pepsi Cola, ginger beer
and Canada Dry
https://www.songlyrics.com/jeremy-taylor/ag-pleez-deddy-lyrics/for more
I assume on the evidence of his political sympathies alone that it must have been Jeremy Taylor himself who invited Cyril Ramaphosa to join our little fraternity in Tolip Street.
We didn’t object because we assumed he was just another political dissident in need of a way-station before arrangements could be made to get him to Botswana, Mozambique or out of the continent.
History records the following:
In June 1976, following the unrest in Soweto, Ramaphosa was again detained under Terrorism Act for six months and this time held at John Vorster square. On his release he continued with his articles and completed his Bproc degree through correspondence with the University of South Africa (Unisa) in 1981. He completed his articles in the same year, and joined the Council of Unions of South Africa (Cusa) as an advisor in the legal department.
South African History Online
We had little or no idea. We knew he was studying something. We didn’t imagine it as something as politically innocuous as Bproc. We certainly couldn’t have imagined him as our future Prime Minister. Nor less a central figure in the game of cat-and-mouse diplomacy that looks today as if the global bullies are picking their teams in preparation for WW3.
We didn’t object when he was still holed up in his room two or three weeks later because we assumed the arrangements were taking longer than usual.
We began to get suspicious when it emerged from our brief conversations in the kitchen that he had no intention of going anywhere.
We began to get annoyed when it became clear that he had no intention of doing the dishes, mopping the kitchen floor or mowing the lawn.
I got really annoyed when I came back from work early one Tuesday afternoon to hear my girlfriend’s voice, partly muffled by the door to his bedroom, saying more urgently than I care to remember, “Oh, Cyril! Harder Cyril! Deeper, Cyril! Yes, Cyril, just like that, Cyril!”
And his darkly muffled voice croaking, “Oh, Misty…”
Perhaps not those exact words. But time, regret and envy play all sorts of tricks on cuckolded minds.
By the time of my second visit to London in the summer of 1986 I had renounced communism, cut my hair, and switched from writing government propaganda to writing propaganda for several fast and many not so fast moving consumer goods. I was, in short, a promising young advertising executive from the Johannesburg office of J. Walter Thompson, then one of the world’s most respected advertising agencies, on a pilgrimage to kiss the rings of my creative and strategic masters in Berkeley Square.
The world was at my feet. I was just too busy admiring my brown and navy Timberland docksiders with their white leather laces to see it.
I was thirty-three years old, the age when you discover that the world does revolve around you after all — when you believe you know everything anyone needs to know, and that if there are things you don’t know they can hardly be very important simply because you don’t know them, i.e., the age of peak epistemological solipsism.
Yes, I was a citizen of the world now: a high-flying, jet-setting, all-knowing, internationally sophisticated man of countless qualities.
A black cab whisked me five blocks to Tower Records in Piccadilly, my pride swelling in anticipation of being able to return to Joburg with my sexy leather briefcase brimming with the hottest LPs from London’s musical Mecca long before they reached the envying shores of my nominal homeland, the memories of which, suddenly and unexpectedly, had now begun to tug on my heart-strings with an annoying nostalgia of the kind described by Nathaniel Hawthorne during his stay in London 125 years prior:
He began to feel the deep yearning which a sensitive American – his mind full of English thoughts, his imagination of English poetry, his heart of English character and feeling – cannot fail to be influenced by, the yearning of the blood within his veins for that from which it has been estranged.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Etherege,” The American Claimant Manuscripts (1861)
I dismissed the nagging discomfort of them. With a racing heart I crossed the sacred threshold. The smell of vinyl, the glare of neon, the ecstasy of unimaginable abundance, the salivation of seductive surrender. I stopped to drink in the song that all of post-swinging London was swinging to. I tapped my feet to the anticipatory beat of it.
This is what I heard:
Intro: P. W. Botha]: My fellow South Africans, I feel it is time for me to tell you the facts as they really are:
1. Bananas are marsupials
2. Cars run on gravy
3. Salmon live in trees and eat pencils
4. Reform in South Africa is on the way
[Verse 1]
I've travelled this old world of ours from Barnsley to Peru
I've had sunstroke in the arctic and a swim in Timbuktu
I've seen unicorns in Burma and a yeti in Nepal
And I've danced with ten-foot pygmies in a Montezuma hall
I've met the king of China and the working Yorkshire miner
But I've never met a nice South African
[Chorus]
No, he's never met a nice South African
And that's not bloody surprising, man
'Cause we're a bunch of arrogant bastards
Who hate black people
[Verse 2]
I once got served in Woolies after less than four week's wait
I had lunch with Rowan Atkinson when he paid and wasn't late
I know a public swimming bath where they don't piss in the pool
I know a guy who got a job straight after leaving school
I've met a normal merman, and a fairly modest German
But I've never met a nice South African
[Chorus]
No, he's never met a nice South African
And that's not bloody surprising, man
'Cause we're a bunch of talentless murderers
Who smell like baboons
[Verse 3]
I've had a close encounter of the 22nd kind
That's when an alien spaceship (pop) disappears up your behind
I've got directory enquiries after less than forty rings
I've even heard a decent song by Paul McCartney's Wings
I've seen a flying pig in a quite convincing wig
But I've never met a nice South African
[Chorus]
No, he's never met a nice South African
And that's not bloody surprising, man
'Cause we're a bunch of ignorant loudmouths
With no sense of humour
[Verse 4]
I've met the Loch Ness monster and he looks like Fred Astaire
At the BBC in London he's the chief commissionaire
I know a place in Glasgow which is rife with daffodillies
I met a man in Kathmandu who claimed to have two willies
I've had a nice pot noodle, but I've never had a poodle
And I've never met a nice South African
[Chorus]
No, he's never met a nice South African
And that's not bloody surprising, man
Because we've never met one either
Except for Breyten Breytenbach, and he's emigrated to Paris
Yes, he's quite a nice South African
And he's hardly ever killed anyone
And he's not smelly at all
That's why we put him prison
Outro: P. W. Botha, Mr. Welldone]
Frankly, Mr. Welldone, I'm fed up with people from Britain attacking my country for Apartheid
We treat the blacks very well indeed!
I actually employ several k——s here in my own home.
But Mr. Botha, I haven't seen a single black since I entered this mansion.
Haven't seen one? My God, man!
What do you think you wiped your feet on when you came in?*
From a sketch in the British television series Spitting Image (series 2, episode 5). It was written by John Lloyd and Peter Brewis and was sung by Andy Roberts. In 1986 it was commercially released as the B-side of the chart-topping "The Chicken Song"
The writing was superb even if the language was and remains outrageously offensive. The sentiment was justifiable, and the hyperbole was excusable. But still my rolled-up propriety couldn’t help bristling with feelers of anguished sensitivity.