The Expat Confessions - Ted Botha
& Jenni Baxter
How green is the grass?
March 16, 2006
By James Mitchell
Jented Publishing R102
A colleague picked this up. "Oh, all that whining," he said as soon
as he'd figured out the subject matter. There's a section, Some call it
treachery, on this knee-jerk reaction so often voiced by stay-at-home white
South Africans.
Funny, New Zealanders don't slag off travelling Kiwis for "doing the
chicken run". Americans automatically assume you'll return one day if
born there: they're curious rather than hostile about your choice to live
elsewhere. Scots think it's perfectly normal for their emigrant brethren to
run
England
and the rest of the world.
So why so hung-up here? Ex-South Africans Ted Botha (
Manhattan
,
New York
) and Jenni Baxter (Gold Coast,
Queensland
) asked that
and many other questions about the great migration. They came up with food
for thought and some great throw-away lines.
Such as, "the grass is only greener on the other side because there's
more shit".
Catchy, but is it true? For those who integrate into their new homelands,
generally not. For those who become conscious "exiles", clinging to
likeminded, resentful exiles, there's a tendency to list all the
"shit" factors.
Statistics are notoriously skewed, with many emigrants leaving as
pretend-holiday travellers. So the anecdotal evidence included here is
probably as reliable as anything.
Much of it resonated with me.
For instance, part-time librarian Marjie saying that when she lived in the
US
,
"people naturally assumed that because I was South African, I was a
racist. They would then feel free to open up about their own racism…". This reviewer experienced the same distasteful
reaction in
New Zealand
last year.
South Africans are all over the world. In general, however, our destinations
of choice are pretty logical.
We tend, the authors say, to avoid settling in
Colombia
…the homicide
rate's even higher than back home. Or
Zimbabwe
…Mugabe.
Sometimes emigrants start to take over: Brown's Bay in
Auckland
becomes Bruins Baai, while Howick
is Howickfontein . Across the Tasman,
Sydney
's St Ives is called St Africa, and in
Taiwan
there's even an area of
Taipei
nicknamed
Egoli
Heights
because of all the SA teachers living there.
This little book distills 500-plus replies to an Internet questionnaire.
More than half the respondents were women, the overwhelming majority were white, and no black expats replied. Wonder
why not?
Some embrace their new countries whole-heartedly, blind to any defects.
Others are realistically critical: they find
New Zealand
beautiful but dull,
dull, dull; they miss our passion; they miss our smiles.
One well-articulated response came from a nurse now living in the US: "I
miss the Afrikaners who will feed and shelter you, as well as repair your car
by torchlight when you break down; the English professors who are always
looking for a cause; the poppies at the bank tills; the Indian shopowners;
the wonderful mamas who break out into the broadest smiles and jive up a
storm as soon as some kwela tunes strike up. It's easy to cry for the beloved
country."
So why go if that's how you feel? Crime…
You can massage the statistics all you like, condemn those who complain as
traitors, but what do you say to this Canadian-based expat who wrote about
his brief return: "My mother was murdered, so technically my return
wasn't a holiday."
Baxter is a web designer and activist with a heart who left this country 16 years ago. Botha, who quit in 1995 but returns
regularly, is a writer (two previous, first-class books and plenty of
articles), with another on the way.
He calls it a "non-fiction thriller", about a forensic
anthropologist-type who reconstructs faces from skulls, and it's due to be
published by Random House. Watch this space.
· Although published by a one-off outfit,
The Expat Confessions is already available here in many bookshops. Otherwise
contact www.theexpatconfessions.com or www.sareunited.com. In addition,
Botha has his own website, worth visiting, at tedbotha.com
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