Emigration consultancies seem to be booming. Jeremy Gordin attended one of their seminars — and decided it was enough to make him stay
WHAT was making our feet itchy, my wife and I agreed, wasn’t the tax rate. Nor the bond rate. Nor even the unavoidable realisation that our (remaining) deputy president looks and (much worse) sounds more like Nigel Bruce every day, while our minister of housing is clearly incapable of organising a temporary shack in a lumber yard.
It was more a simple yearning for the days when one could play fearlessly in the streets of the local neighbourhood till nightfall, and even beyond. Because, frankly, we couldn’t see that being an option for our son. And we had heard that New Zealand is in many ways not unlike (white) South Africa was 30 years ago: backwaterish, crime-free, excited only by rugby.
So when we saw the tiny ad in the Business Times, offering a “free seminar on immigration and job search” in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, we thought: “So we won’t see Jane Hicks tonight. Let’s go and find out what it’s all about.”
We drifted through the doors of the Sandton Public Library about five minutes before scheduled commencement time. Clearly, while we (or, rather, I) had been busy keeping my eyes on Jane Hicks, we had been missing a seriously major resurgence in one of white South Africa’s pastimes: finding a way to get the hell out of this country.
We had expected maybe 30 people, seated demurely around a long table. When we arrived, the library’s auditorium was already packed to capacity, and the line of irritated people trying to prise their way in reached back to the main doors.
This was the first rude awakening. Luckily, however, my wife is thin and I trained during the 1970s in Israeli bus queues, so we managed to find a place inside, squatting in an aisle.
There was then a brief hiatus while the man apparently in charge bellowed at those congregated at the door that they would have to return another day. One had the feeling that, had it not been Sandton, those words might have sparked a small riot. Still, it gave me a chance to cast my eyes around at those who had made it and who numbered, I would guess, about 400.
This was the second small shock: there were not many smiles about; this was a serious audience, at least a fifth of which was clutching pads for taking down pearls of wisdom about the points required by such- and-such a country for entry, and so forth. Nor were they young adventurers whiling away an evening; I would hazard that the average age was over 28, couples who had recently begun, or were just about to begin, a family.
The bellower introduced himself as James Cagney, a representative of the International Immigration Alliance. He then did an odd thing — odd, because if ever anyone had found himself in the position of preaching to the converted, it was Cagney. Everyone present clearly knew exactly why he or she was there.
And yet Cagney launched into a bone-achingly long diatribe about why one ought to want to emigrate: the old song and dance about how bad crime, education and unemployment are in this country.
But the evening’s third shock was, to judge by some of the shouted replies Cagney elicited, the racism simmering in certain (but, let’s be fair, not all) members of the audience. And these were not Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging acolytes; far from it.
Of course, I may simply be naive. Quite early in the proceedings, Cagney touted a booklet (going for R50, folks), containing all the necessary immigration information anyone could ever want. And perhaps, to ensure its sales, he was consciously avoiding the communication of any real information.
He did, however, tell us that the police are processing 3 000 emigration clearance certificates a month and that it’s impossible to get into the British Consulate these days because there are so many people lined up outside.
I can’t comment on the veracity of either claim, except to say that experience leads me to believe that National Police Commissioner George Fivaz’s boys and girls in blue couldn’t manage to process 150 certificates a month, let alone 3 000.
And perhaps Cagney did eventually cut, as the Americans say, to the chase. I don’t know. From my wife’s expression, I could see that, like me, she had had a bellyful of both his attempt at a verbal right-wing editorial and some of the audience’s reaction. So we left.
What I do know, though, is that the fall of the rand, the scuttling of the government of national unity, the crime rate and, yes, all the rest, have returned some South Africans to the state of mind that pertained before the election.
One swallow doesn’t make a summer and 400 nervous whites doesn’t make a tidal wave of emigration.
But if, by any chance, Madiba, Thabo et al do believe they need to win the hearts and minds of this country’s honkies, other than Carl Niehaus and Gill Marcus, I suspect they need to work much harder.
Jeremy Gordin is presently assisting Bob Aldworth with his memoirs, and is former managing editor of Business Report