There’s been a lot of talk about whether South African expats should be able be able to vote in the upcoming elections. This begs a broader question about whether expats should able to make any sort of judgements at all about a country they’re no longer in.

It might be worthwhile, at this juncture, to point out that I’m a South African who lives outside South Africa for half the year. But I want to talk about why I seriously, if briefly, considered voting for the PAC of Azania in the April election.

Verwoerd's ideological offspring

I met a man who claimed to be related to Verwoerd around a fire in Mozambique. It is completely unnecessary to mention that he was fat. This man began his monologue by telling me that he intended to fly the two hours from Pemba to Maputo and back to mark his cross beside the leathery face of Freedom Front’s Pieter Mulder. I have nothing against Pieter Mulder, nor do I have anything against his amazingly leathery face.

The party stands to fight for the rights of a minority in our democracy. It follows that I have nothing against supporters of the Freedom Front. That is unless, like the inconsequentially fat man, they follow the statement “I’m voting for the Freedom Front” with the words “because the blacks are ruining the country and we should be grateful for apartheid”.

I asked him in my best calm voice to clarify exactly what he meant. He meant to say that South Africa’s infrastructural and economic superiority over the rest of the continent was down to the work of the apartheid government, which should be congratulated for adopting the right policy at the right time for the good of all.

There were too many ways to disagree with this, but I settled on the most undisputed negation; that South Africa also has the highest rate of violent crime, which is largely due to the rift between rich and poor, a rift that was exacerbated by the apartheid system. “No” he said. This remained, until the end of our discussion, his weapon; his one word army.

I ignored him for some time but couldn’t forever. We argued until we arrived at a point of no return, the point at which he decided that because I had not “been around the block”, I had no right to an opinion about South Africa. I was, in his words, “just another fucking liberal who reads books written by Jews” (but my God, I was reading a novel by a Jewish writer at the time! How did he know? He was like that mind reader off the TV, the one who wears the polo necks!) Come to think of it, most of his rebuttals had to do with my not having been around the block. I asked him where the block was and what going around it entailed.

“Military service,” he said, “And because you haven’t got any you haven’t been…”
“Around the block?” I volunteered.
“Exactly”.

I appealed to Wessel, who was sitting on the just-so-happened-to-be-fat man’s left. Wessel was disappointing. He told me he used to be like me but having worked in Mozambique for five years he’s come to realise that black people are useless. “You haven’t worked with them, Matthew…it’s Matthew, right?” The only thing that calmed me down after that was imagining Wessel turning slowly on a spit.

Giving a racist the silent treatment

If you are wondering why, at this point, I didn’t go to my room, close the door and read my book — the one written by a Jewish author — you are absolutely right to, but I felt that all I could do was at least make him feel uncomfortable for a while by sitting next to him and not saying a word. It felt futile still — giving a racist the silent treatment is like telling a murderer to go to his room without supper and come back when he’s learnt his lesson.

It doesn’t change anything. What it gave me was the desire to vote for whatever party directly opposed the Freedom Front in order to cancel out his vote. That is my one desire in the upcoming elections — to render his vote useless. I asked an informed friend what was considered the political antithesis of the FF. He told me it was the PAC of Azania, which sounded fine. At that point I would have voted for the Black Panthers.

A day or two later I realised I’d be voting for possibly worse reasons than even Chubby Verwoerd and returned to my previous position of not having the faintest clue what to do. I’ve since perused the PAC of Azania’s manifesto and found it extremely persuasive, which may have made things easier, but in fact has just served to deepen my confusion.

So who to vote for? It feels a bit like choosing between means of execution at the moment: either one goes for the quick and painless guillotine; or the more drawn-out pillow-over-the-face method complete with fleeting moments when you think you might escape. I don’t know enough about each party and its policies to really make an informed choice, but then neither do nine out of every ten voters, and even then, that one informed voter is informed mainly by the party he is voting for, which is like choosing Omo over Surf because you’re attracted to the mom in the advert.

'I know who I’ll be voting against'

But if a democracy is a country whose future is decided upon by the people, then it matters less whether we know exactly why we are voting than that we cast a vote. You — the guy who “thinks De Lille has some pretty good things to say” — do you really understand what she is saying? Does she?

Perhaps. For my part, I don’t know who I’ll vote for, but I know who I’ll be voting against — all South Africans who live outside of the country and badmouth it routinely, clear as it may be that they do so to numb their feelings of homesickness.

I know with a bitter resignation that my vote is pitted against countless other expats who share the views of the fat man at the fire. There are South Africans standing around fires in Putney and Perth all shaking their heads and talking about how the country has gone to the dogs, like annoying neighbours peering over the fence and telling you that you that the lawn could do with a once over.

I hear it all the time — the friend of a friend who finishes a day of work in London and says she “smells like a coon”, then apologises to all foreigners present by saying “Oh, you’re not from SA, you wouldn’t understand”; the cricketer who arrives with a bagful of complaints about the quota system and sport “going to the dark side”; the countless expats who complain about “the idiot Zuma” or the “moron Malema” without knowing the first thing about either politician or his motives. They may very well be idiots, but it is far more idiotic to base an opinion on Zapiro’s cartoons.

You know who you are. It seems each week I hear of racist slur that goes unpunished in these circles. To everyone who has made a comment like this: may you join Wessel on the spit and burn. You are giving South Africans a bad name.

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