DaveO wrote:
... How people don't go even slightly mad given the caged existence they live in that part of the country is beyond me...
Only been in Jo'burg long enough to walk between airport terminals and get a connecting flight, but Pietermaritzburg is bonkers. Tom Sharpe's first two books,
Riotous Assembly and
Indecent Exposure were set there – it's absolutely recognisable and I swear I met at least one of the characters on one visit.
I've also been carted to every bloody shopping mall in that town – all of them bland and utterly boring.
TB's mother used to get very funny comments from other white people because she was perfectly happy to get one of the combis into town to go shopping and they had a mindset that assumed she'd get raped or butchered when alone with all those black people.
The British ex-pats can be mad, but Afrikaaners are in another class.
Some of TB's old schoolmates held a braai to which we were invited as guests of honour.
All the blokes stood around the fire with cans of beer. I was expected to sit with the women in a corner: none of them were drinking and they weren't even talking to each other, let alone me, the 'guest'.
We also visited the mother in law's bowling club – like stepping back in time to the beginning of WWII: I felt as though I was sitting on the set of
Tenko before they're all carted off to prison camp. Flowery dresses and lipstick that should have been in a museum; not being allowed in the main bar and having to listen to this complete fruitbat explain how she carried a picture of her dead son in his coffin with her at all times after he'd been killed in a car crash.
And when we stayed at a resort in the mountains, the Afrikanner guests never talked to any of the non-Afrikanner visitors, at all. The cocktail lounge would be quiet as a mouse in the evening – fortunately, we discovered the sports bar by the second night, which was where some of the staff and all the European guests socialised.
Lessons I learned while there on how to shock/horrify Afrikaaners:
1) be female and wear football shirts;
2) be female and drink beer;
3) be female and insist on getting a round in when it's your turn, and then actually going to the bar.
