Birds, Beasts and Relatives : a summary of my trip to South Africa

"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered."

Nelson Mandela, ''A Long Walk to Freedom'

I am standing in a slow moving line for passport control. In front of me is a row of counters, each one housing an immigration officer busy checking the passports of my fellow travellers. On the walls I can see posters in English and Afrikaans. I'm trying to fit the Afrikaans posters to their English versions when a heavy-set official motions me to move forward -a space has opened up at one of the counters, and I step up. I give a cheery "good morning" to the black lady sitting behind the counter, and get a blank stare in return, making me wonder how many hours she has been sitting there. She scans my passport with a bored expression, then stamps it and slides it back to me. I thank her, take my passport, and go through the opening next to her counter. This is it: for the first time in 33 years I am now back on South African soil.
I was 13 years old when my family emigrated from South Africa, and this is my first time back. Oh, it's not that I didn't have opportunities to make the visit, rather that I didn't want to. My sister was the first one to visit South Africa, a year after we emigrated. I can still remember her telling me how she felt when she described her visit back to the old neighbourhood, how shocked she was to see how quickly our house had become dilapidated (the people who bought it were obviously not as house-proud as my parents), and at that moment I resolved not to go back even for a visit until it had become a different country to the one I was born in. Now, 33 years later, I had decided to take the plunge and have a holiday in South Africa.
I'd heard all the horror stories about the rising crime rates, the gated communities, the fact that people don't even stop at traffic lights after dark for fear of being car-jacked. And if that wasn't bad enough I got a double dose from my sister a couple of days before my flight (it seems that one of my aunts had been mugged in her own garage in broad daylight). "They don't call it Darkest Africa for nothing" she told me. "There are hardly any street lights, and it is very dark at night. And dangerous" Here followed a story about some friends of hers who had been mugged in Johannesburg just a few meters from the entrance to their hotel. "I don't understand why you would even want to go there" my brother in law added. "I was so afraid for my children I just couldn't wait to get them out of that place".
My visit to Johannesburg is a surreal experience. Most of the street names haven't changed, and I found it hard to restrain myself from exclaiming every time I recognise a name. "Oh, this is Sylvia's Pass! We used to take the bus this way to school every day!" (Of course, in those days there was always a wise guy who would go down the street and paint over the "P" on all the street signs....). But when we actually drove past the school I had to struggle to fit it to the picture in my memory.
My second moment of deja vu came when I met my cousins (some of whom I have not seen since we left South Africa). Some of them look so much like the aunts and uncles that I recall from my childhood that it is disorienting. But it is amusing to note that all my relatives from my father's side insist that I look like them, whereas all my mom's relatives think I look like their side of the family.
So without further ado here are some of my impressions:

1. I think the single thing that made the biggest impression on me was the people. The blacks used to act in a sort of servile grovelling manner when talking to the whites, and it always made me feel uneasy. I was happy to see that they have a self respect that was missing back then, and they look prosperous. A few of them told me that the crime is mainly committed by immigrants who came from neighbouring countries and couldn't find work.
2. Was everybody there always so friendly? It is a pleasure to be in a place where people are so friendly and hospitable.
3. I remember many of the places and street names, but I didn't recognise almost anything when we drove around Johannesburg. I remember walking down streets and seeing houses with front lawns, flower beds etc. Nowadays all you see are 2-3 meter high walls with electrified fences at the top, and signs for armed response firms next to every gate ("We live in prisons, while the thieves walk freely in the streets", one of my relatives moaned).
4. I cannot say this from personal experience, as I was lucky enough not to have any bad experiences, but the crime rate in Johannesburg is very high. Muggings, carjackings, robberies are very common and just about everybody has either been attacked or knows someone who was.
   
5. I have an issue with names. I'm still adjusting to the fact that Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe and that South-West Africa is now Namibia. But in South Africa all the names are changing. Witwatersrand has become Gauteng Province - you can see the abbreviation "GP" on all the car license plates
   
   (local jokers say it stands for Gangster's Paradise). And if that isn't bad enough, The Eastern Transvaal ( a place where we had many happy holidays in my youth) is now called Mpumalanga - which means "The Place Where the Sun Rises" (as opposed to Petach Tikva, which is The Place Where the Sun Doesn't Shine....), and Pretoria is becoming Tshwane. I can understand that people want to distance themselves from the old Apartheid regime, but....
6. In contrast to what people say, you *do* stop at traffic lights at night (well, maybe in the high crime areas like Central Johannesburg you don't). All my relatives who took me around every evening *all* stopped at traffic lights and even at stop signs.
7. Against all the dire warnings of disappointment from my sister and my parents, I did take the trouble to go to see our old house - and I was disappointed. It seems so much smaller than I remember! It, too, is blocked from the street with a high wall, and while it didn't look as bad as I had thought it would it doesn't look anywhere as nice as it did when we used to live there. While we were standing looking through the gate, an elderly Asian gentleman came out and asked who we were. I explained that we used to live there, and he filled me in about what has changed in the neighbourhood. He told me that they get a lot of fruit from the trees in the back yard, and was impressed when I told him that we were the ones who planted them. He did look a bit skeptical when I told him that my mother was the one who dug the hole for the pool in the back yard (but it is true).
8. The thunderstorms were exactly the way I remembered them: Very sudden and quite spectacular :-)
9. One thing I didn't see is African women walking around with a huge bundle on their heads.
   
   You used to see it all the time, nowadays you can see it mainly in rural areas.
   


10. I went into a shebeen, and I had boerewors and mielie pap, and I enjoyed every mouthful. When I told the waitress that it was the first time in 33 years that I was having real boerewors and pap she looked at me with a mixture of incredulity and pity.
    

Next: Hunting the Big Five