Gary Younge talks to South Africans who are thinking of moving to greener pastures
At the entrance to the Sandton library, John Gambarana is doing a roaring trade in fear.
With the help of an overhead projector and a few corny jokes the emigration consultant has taken just one hour to craft a psychological narrative that starts with resentment and ends with his 100-strong, mostly white audience dreaming of a better life somewhere else.
They came thinking they wanted to leave the country; now they are queuing up to put a down payment on a consultation so they can find out how.
“I just want to know what my options are,” said one middle-aged man who refused to give his name. “It’s not just about getting a better job. I’ve got two small kids and there’s no saying what kind of future they are going to have in this country, and I want to live to see them grow up. The way violence and crime are going here you never know.”
With the country’s second democratic election less than a week away, talk, principally among the white community, has returned to the subject of emigration. But while newspaper headlines threaten an imminent exodus, official figures show a 7% drop in the numbers leaving the country in 1998 compared with 1997.
“There is no consistent trend of people leaving the country,” says Vincent Williams, the project manager of the Southern African Migratory Project. “Some years more people leave than others, but there has been no significant increase overall.”
But the number of those who responded to a newspaper advert for the International Migration Alliance lecture suggests that the prospect of starting a more stable and prosperous life in another country remains popular.
Gambarana has worked them in gently. Surrounded by flags of the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, he talks about the weather.
Vancouver and Perth have climates that are not dissimilar to Cape Town. True, Montreal is cold and London is dreary, but people get used to it.
And those who stay soon sniff out their compatriots. The South African community in Auckland has a newsletter called Afrikaanz; Vancouver has one hour of public television in Afrikaans a week.
But peppered in between the picture- postcard slides and weather charts comes the gradual confirmation of the disgruntlement many feel at the changes that have taken place over the past decade.
Holding up a book called When Mandela Goes Gambarana implores them to get a copy. “People, this book is a wake-up call,” he says. “The bad news is the pawpaw’s really going to hit the fan. The good news is the fan probably won’t be working.”
Five years after South Africa emerged from its pariah status and established a democracy, the number of those eager to leave is still climbing.
Like the audience in Sandton, most, but by no means all, are white. A considerable number of Indians and coloureds from the Cape are also looking to move abroad.
“Our research showed that the number of people who would leave the country if they had the opportunity was evenly spread across the races,” says Williams. “It’s just that more whites have the opportunity.”
But as policies of black empowerment help create a small black professional class, they too are contemplating leaving. “I don’t want to leave but I think there are more chances for me in America or Canada,” said Sipho Mandlene, a black computer programmer. “I don’t want to go for ever but just to see if I could make it over there and then come back with better experience.”
A growing number are also Afrikaners – who once prided themselves on their determination to stay in a country which they insisted belongs to them as much as it does to the black population.
“Sixty-eight per cent of my client base is Afrikaans-speaking,” boasts Gambarana.
The main reasons given are the high crime rate and escalating violence, according to one recent report. Others include falling living standards, health and education, affirmative action policies and better employment opportunities abroad.
The vast majority heads for Europe, followed by Australia, North America and New Zealand. The precise scale of the emigration is unclear since 20% of white South Africans travel on British passports, roughly 10% have other foreign passports and many simply slip out of the country without officially declaring that they are leaving it.
It is not the numbers but the calibre of those who are leaving that is worrying the government, which is trying to rebuild the economy. More than half of those leaving are economically active and more than half of those are professional, semi-professional or managerial. Their departure not only depletes the pool of skilled labour but forces up the wages of those who stay, thus adding to already existing inequalities.
Last year President Nelson Mandela delivered a blistering attack on those abandoning the country rather than staying to help build the nation.
But while many have left, the threat of a mass exodus which hovered over the 1994 election has failed to materialise, suggesting that talk of “white flight” is more of a pre-election moral panic than a long-term threat to the nation’s economy.