Back in the Motherland
Unusually enough for a many-generation African, this is the first blog I am actually writing and publishing from the Dark Continent. It’s March 2010, late summer in Johannesburg and still quite sultry on occasion (as indeed I myself am, in a dim light..). I’m in a pretty decent office park in the Northern suburbs – a place called Woodmead – and luckily enough given the ferociously congested traffic on the motorways, live in an adjacent community so my daily commute is around 15 minutes. When the family arrives I’ll add quite a bit onto the commute but gain the safety of living in a secure estate in Midrand.
It is indeed strange and yet familiar to be back in Mother Africa after an absence of almost ten years. Some of my ancestors first got here in the early 1700’s although their sun-resistant Afrikaans genes have been diluted by later infusions of Celtic and Saxon blood, giving me my delicate pink complexion, suspiciously ginger beard and lack of tolerance for the sharp ultraviolet here. Perceptibly sharper than in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia I can tell you, although not reaching the levels of lethality of Brisbane where “burn time” is around a dozen minutes.
So what’s changed since my last major visit in 2006? Bearing in mind I was a little distracted back then, introducing my new fiancée to my family without, or so I thought anyway, revealing the true reason for her strange attacks of morning nausea and habit of wearing very large shawls and wraps about her upper body. As it transpired, pretty much all of them knew we had a baby on the way but thought it funny to say nothing.
Anyway back then I think there was far more pessimism in the country than there is now, and of course the Joburg airport was a complete nightmare back then. We were decanted onto the tarmac at around 06h00 of a Highveld winter’s morning and then left standing without a shuttle bus for about 20 minutes, during which time Marcela went an interesting shade of blue and I finally realized (much too late, as usual) that she was wearing a little summer dress for her first trip to Africa.. she never expected it to be close to freezing and with a stiff wind blowing..
This time the airport is much better, if still a bit shy on travelators, bookshops and so on. The scenery is still verdant and lush, although when my poor wife arrives we will be in winter again and back to brown and dusty and dry. Every single major road is stitched with roadworks, cones, piles of earth, haphazardly parked heavy equipment and, at the intersections, hilariously un-synchronised traffic co-ordinators from some private organization I suspect. Internet speeds are better, although the country is still well before the tipping point where sufficient connectivity forces a boom in e-commerce and, hopefully, an improvement in website design (most of the commercial sites are truly dire examples of “brochureware” with very limited search and online purchasing technologies, I have already been guilty of firing off irascible emails to estate agents and second hand car sales sites that look like they were designed by primary school kids).
Politics is still, along with crime, probably the dominant source of local news although I hope the World Cup will temporarily alleviate that. I’d love to be able to get politicians doing stuff to improve service delivery instead of grandstanding, scoring cheap points off each other and generally enriching themselves. That of course applies to everywhere I’ve lived, Zimbabwe, the UK, South Africa, Kuwait and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – absolute power corrupts absolutely. I reckon politicians should get a low base salary during their term in office, and at the end their constituents should vote for their bonus and severance payment based on actual work done not rhetoric.
Mild headache, I must remember to drink a lot more water than in the UK. Could also be a result of the six inoculations yesterday as preparation for next week’s trip to Abuja and Lagos. The cheerful little SRN, unbowed by either her forty years experience or by the sight of me with my shirt off and no sports bra, used 4 needles in total and was emphatic that she’d like to have given me more immunizations but accepted that I was settling for the bare minimum. Of course I have to take antimalarials too, the new ones which cost almost a UK fiver a tablet.
It’s good to be back. Strange, scary, very different to the last decade or so – but still good.
It is indeed strange and yet familiar to be back in Mother Africa after an absence of almost ten years. Some of my ancestors first got here in the early 1700’s although their sun-resistant Afrikaans genes have been diluted by later infusions of Celtic and Saxon blood, giving me my delicate pink complexion, suspiciously ginger beard and lack of tolerance for the sharp ultraviolet here. Perceptibly sharper than in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia I can tell you, although not reaching the levels of lethality of Brisbane where “burn time” is around a dozen minutes.
So what’s changed since my last major visit in 2006? Bearing in mind I was a little distracted back then, introducing my new fiancée to my family without, or so I thought anyway, revealing the true reason for her strange attacks of morning nausea and habit of wearing very large shawls and wraps about her upper body. As it transpired, pretty much all of them knew we had a baby on the way but thought it funny to say nothing.
Anyway back then I think there was far more pessimism in the country than there is now, and of course the Joburg airport was a complete nightmare back then. We were decanted onto the tarmac at around 06h00 of a Highveld winter’s morning and then left standing without a shuttle bus for about 20 minutes, during which time Marcela went an interesting shade of blue and I finally realized (much too late, as usual) that she was wearing a little summer dress for her first trip to Africa.. she never expected it to be close to freezing and with a stiff wind blowing..
This time the airport is much better, if still a bit shy on travelators, bookshops and so on. The scenery is still verdant and lush, although when my poor wife arrives we will be in winter again and back to brown and dusty and dry. Every single major road is stitched with roadworks, cones, piles of earth, haphazardly parked heavy equipment and, at the intersections, hilariously un-synchronised traffic co-ordinators from some private organization I suspect. Internet speeds are better, although the country is still well before the tipping point where sufficient connectivity forces a boom in e-commerce and, hopefully, an improvement in website design (most of the commercial sites are truly dire examples of “brochureware” with very limited search and online purchasing technologies, I have already been guilty of firing off irascible emails to estate agents and second hand car sales sites that look like they were designed by primary school kids).
Politics is still, along with crime, probably the dominant source of local news although I hope the World Cup will temporarily alleviate that. I’d love to be able to get politicians doing stuff to improve service delivery instead of grandstanding, scoring cheap points off each other and generally enriching themselves. That of course applies to everywhere I’ve lived, Zimbabwe, the UK, South Africa, Kuwait and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – absolute power corrupts absolutely. I reckon politicians should get a low base salary during their term in office, and at the end their constituents should vote for their bonus and severance payment based on actual work done not rhetoric.
Mild headache, I must remember to drink a lot more water than in the UK. Could also be a result of the six inoculations yesterday as preparation for next week’s trip to Abuja and Lagos. The cheerful little SRN, unbowed by either her forty years experience or by the sight of me with my shirt off and no sports bra, used 4 needles in total and was emphatic that she’d like to have given me more immunizations but accepted that I was settling for the bare minimum. Of course I have to take antimalarials too, the new ones which cost almost a UK fiver a tablet.
It’s good to be back. Strange, scary, very different to the last decade or so – but still good.
posted by Shane Hodgson at 10:43 am
2 comments
