(Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
It is Tuesday evening. I am seated with a friend and my son in our favourite restaurant in Bloemfontein. My son listens to our conversation as I note that the 49 Afrikaner migrants (or 59 as some reports suggest) incorrectly and problematically afforded refugee status through executive order by the Trump administration have landed in the US.
Their departure is called the “Great Tsek†on social media. We laugh conspiratorially.
South Africans respond to most situations with a trademark humour that inspires much hilarity. We repeat the in-joke in multi-cultural and multi-classed spaces — taxis, buses, lecture halls, at a Sunday braai, in a coffee shop, between co-workers — we evoke the reality of co-created belonging through humour.
Our humour, a shared South African-ness irrespective of historicised divisions of race, class, creed or gender, masks our discomfort, or psychological and emotional pain. Whether we are supporting Tyla’s right to self-define as coloured — while ridiculing and stereotyping colouredness — and interrogating black Americans’ failure to unpack the context of coloured in South Africa, or vituperatively disowning Elon Musk, South Africans have a unique, enmeshed and complex affinity and loyalty to each other.
Amorphous and responsive, this loyalty is an organic response to a perceived threat, or a show of appreciation or forgiveness — recall our troetelnaam (pet name) for our president: Cupcake.
South African humour and loyalty are revealed on TikTok, Instagram and X. On these platforms we deconstruct the perceptions and slights of “ordinary†South Africans as we digest and metabolise the news together, as South Africans, and as global citizens in conversation with other global citizens. We find solace in our derision, and the truth etched onto the edges of that laughter.
The phrase “Great Tsek†is an incisive commentary on the double-edged nature of the 59ers’ departure. As South African stayers imagine saying that, they remind us of a socio-cultural memory in which white Afrikaners would chase black people from their farms with the word “voertsek†(go away, get lost). And in return, based on commentary from a few of the emigrants, we can duly imagine the 59ers exclaiming “voertsek†as they took off from OR Tambo International Airport. The phrase, Great Tsek, thus points to a rejection that is mirrored by those who stay (are left behind) and those who leave.
Amid the laughter M, a young black woman who has experienced the harrowing loss of dispossession of family-owned land in the Free State through apartheid’s legalised appropriation of land, comments: “I’m laughing, but they’re still South African, man! What are they going to experience there? It doesn’t matter that they are white. I worry about them. They are us.â€
As a national human collective — South Africans — we don’t want to be rejected, or “left behindâ€. It is a typical human response to excise the offending parties from our collective.
But still there are those among us, like my friend, who compassionately tries to understand the reasons for the 59ers’ departure, and hopes that they haven’t made a mistake that will have enduring negative repercussions.
The reasons for emigration are multiple, but this particular departure underscores a severance of ties with the land of their birth, our South African humour, and much more that embodies a particular national expression of humanity. The 59ers are not Europeans; much less American. They are South Africans; and we are a complicated mengelmoes (mixture) of peoples who embody various amalgamated traditions, languages, orientations, humour, oppressions and battle scars.
Violence, risk and resilience are endemic to the South African narrative, no matter which ethnic tributary you lay claim to as you arrive here on the shores of a contemporary South Africa that is being lived in the trenches and robustly debated on the streets of social media. Those who speak, who stay, who worstel (struggle) with the inadequacies of the state, birth South Africa’s next chapter in which every lineage and narrative have value.
We navigate turbulent racialised, ethnicised and citizenship currents, potholed roads and jagged promises of well-being for all in rickety boats, maladapted vehicles and kaal voete (bare feet) together. We are not necessarily seasoned or adequately equipped; and the shoreline of our dreams is unfamiliar, with the horizon blurred and distant. But for those who stay, the vision of a South Africa that supports the well-being of all her citizens inspires us to put our shoulders to the wheel, and to live not only for ourselves but for others.
Each one who voluntarily remains behind assumes an active role in envisioning, dreaming, crafting, moulding and building South Africa’s next chapter. Each one.
And so, during supper when my son asks what the word “colonisation†means I try simply to chart South Africa’s convoluted history. His response — “not all white people are like that†— is not a negation of our past. Rather his words confirm, as a seven-year-old, that his immediate and direct experience does not align with our “black and white†histories.
They offer a moment of pause, as I come to terms with what my lineage has experienced pre-apartheid, what I have experienced during and post-apartheid and the future my son is living into existence.
He demands from me, and you, a conscious recognition of how far we have travelled as South Africans to be here — constructing our futures with clear sight of our histories. His words defy an easy, glib and uncontextualised narrative of what makes us South African.
And, like M, he inspires us to accept that we are complex and incomplete as South Africans, whether at home, or in the US, without each other.
Professor Joy Owen is the head of the department of anthropology at the University of the Free State.