Letters from little Jo’burg

There are about 150 000 South Africans living in London. Jeremy Kuper goes in search of the new expat community.

My mother, who was raised in Johannesburg but spent all of her adult life outside South Africa, used to joke ‘when a girl has seen Paris she doesn’t want to go back to Parys”. I have lived in north London since the 1980s and many other exiled South Africans lived locally. Oliver Tambo lived around the corner and his wife once made my family a big stew. Now, 20 years later, I am on a mission to find out how the South African community in London has changed.

By the time of the elections in 1994 there were tens of thousands of South African voters living in Britain. Nobody knows exactly how many there are now; The South African High Commission in London estimates that the number could be anything from 500 000 to 1,5-million. Most of the early arrivals lived in north London. Now there is a huge and growing South African community predominantly based south of the river. The biltong shop in Wimbledon train station tells you that you have arrived in ‘little Johannesburg”, as the area in and around Wimbledon has become known.

An English friend who is a teacher in Wimbledon is amazed by the numbers of South Africans moving into the area. He tells me he is impressed by them: ‘Great teachers, hard working.” When I mentioned the young couple who told me to go away when I asked for an interview, he admitted ‘they can be a little blunt”.

Melani Kruger from Tzaneen and Willie de Kock from Potchefstroom were less reluctant to speak to me. I spotted Melani as she was coming out of the Savanna deli in Southfields, a stone’s throw from the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Club. The Savanna is one of a number of delis that have sprung up in London in the past decade, catering to expat South Africans, specialising in delicacies from home, from boerewors to Black Cat bars.

Melani is a nanny even though she has a degree in fashion design. Typical of twentysomething South Africans in London, not sure if she wants to go home after her two-year working visa, she already knows after four months in London that she doesn’t want to stay here forever. ‘Kids are different here,” she says when I ask about her job. She also worries about spending time outside in the coming winter. It is only November, still autumn, and freezing in the morning and when it gets dark at about four in the afternoon.

Melani chose to live in a shared house in little Johannesburg because her friends stay there. ‘I’m not really here to save, I’m here to travel,” she says, ‘as long as I’ve got money to go where I want to go then I’m okay.”

Willie’s Afrikaans accent marked him out from his crowd of Polish drinking buddies in the Old Garage pub around the corner. Willie works on building loft extensions with a group of Polish builders. He first worked as a teacher. ‘It was the first time I taught,” he tells me. But, while the pay was better, he prefers to work as a carpenter, because he wants to learn how to build so that he knows the trade when he returns to work on his father’s farm in Potchefstroom.

Willie also found the lack of discipline in London’s state schools difficult to deal with. He is lucky to have his girlfriend here with him, because many relationships are long distance and he still misses friends, family and the weather.

Converting everything into rands makes things expensive for new arrivals in London, especially if they haven’t got a job yet.

‘There are more opportunities here,” says Shane du Rand from Benoni. He moonlights at Zulus bar, housed in a large, Gothic Victorian building near Putney Bridge. ‘It’s not easy when you first get here; I struggled. The first year is the hardest. For the first two months I was unemployed.” Luckily he had enough rands saved and set up his own construction business. ‘Now I’m living the dream,” he says.

Shane’s mate, Mitchell, also comes from Benoni and is now doing too well to consider returning, having traded one city of gold for another. Mitchell said crime was a major factor behind his decision to leave.

‘Better opportunities” was the reason Kim Kubheka gave for coming to London. Kim, a graphic designer from Meadowlands, has lived here since 1999. He came to further his education and to learn more about the media industry in the United Kingdom. Kim wants to work in the visual media business when he returns.

He misses the sun and open spaces of home. Married to a Polish woman, he has friends from all over, including many Southern Africans. He is optimistic about the future of South Africa and likes to attend some of the regular cultural events held at South Africa House in Trafalgar Square. Once besieged by anti-apartheid demonstrators, enraged mobs tried to burn it down during the poll tax riots in 1990.
Many former Southern Africans would agree with Nobel laureate Doris Lessing, who moved to London almost 60 years ago, and told the BBC: ‘I miss the landscape” of Africa.