19. As a South African in the UK, the moment you step across border control into the cavernous halls of Heathrow, you develop extra sensory perception. You suddenly become gifted with the most phenomenal ability to distinguish a particular sound. I’m not referring to the other special powers your homeland has blessed you with: the ability to decipher between a backfiring vehicle and a gunshot, or how to tell the difference between a police siren and the wail of an ambulance.
I speak here of your uncanny ability to sound out a South African accent virtually anywhere, from any distance. It’s an accent that you simply can’t get rid of, no matter how many years you’ve served on the Island or despite your best efforts to toff it up. If your mother tongue is South African, it will be as distinguishable to your fellow countrymen as the bottle green passport that you carry through customs, your shared bewilderment at health and safety and your polite indifference to the Royal Family.
The locals however don’t often share the same ability to recognise the unique intonations of our flat and let's be honest, slightly guttural accent. “Ah you’re Australian?” “No?” “Must be from New Zealand then.” “No?” “Can only be Argentinian” “Brazilian?” “Russian?” “Lebanese?” “C’mon luv where in da world are ya from?” “Sowff Africa! Cor. Yeah I fort so. I recognise dat accent. I know a lot of yous.” To the British not bothered to play You-Guess-my-Country-While-I-Feign-Amusement, we’re the ubiquitous Southern Hemisphere set. It’s us, the Aussies and the Kiwis. The Tri-Nations Trifecta. We’re all the same to them. To me, that Aussie twang is like nothing on earth. You can’t possibly confuse it with anything else. But that's just me. And about 50 million other South Africans I reckon.
I was recently at my local Tesco trying to extol to my son the benefit of a lovely red apple as a treat rather than what he calls “sprinkle biccies”. I warned him that too much sugar would rot his teeth and he’d end up looking like the man in the shop next to the garage. The poor man whose teeth you can count with your fingers. On one hand. I warned him he would get so fat he’d need a crane to carry him out of his house. I lost him at crane. To a 4 year old, instant gratification supersedes long-term cause and effect. So sprinkle biccies won. Part witness to this exchange was a lady who tapped me on the shoulder and asked: “Where in South Africa are you from?” I nearly fell over in shock. No one makes random conversation here. Even my best efforts at striking up a little chitchat with the checkout lady while I’m waiting those awkward few moments for my card to authorise payment have failed dismally. And I made an effort to talk about the weather. Their favourite subject. And I crashed and burned. Proper. No one touches here either. It’s just not done. Well except of course for the teenage chavs who go at it hammer and tongs against the dim exterior walls of the local pub. But that’s less touching and more…well, I’m not really sure what that is. I digress. So when this lady reached out, I couldn’t gush quickly enough… “KwaZulu Natal. I'm from KwaZulu Natal. Well Pietermaritzburg born and raised, but I lived in Durban.” I then asked her whether she was from Joburg as I recognised the Highveld accent. She said she was born in Joburg but moved to the Western Cape when she got married. She, her husband and their three girls have lived in Windsor for 12 years and she sounds as South African as a Skype call home to my sister. And so geography established, we did what two South African women do in the cultural melting pot that is the local Tesco, we had a dik chat.
Amidst the rush of harassed shoppers weighing up their dinner options, alongside a promotion for robot peppers, I told a perfect stranger my condensed life story. She did the same. And that was that. After we said goodbye, we both smiled as we lumbered our spazzo trolleys in different directions. There’s a comfort in hearing the South African accent in an alien place. My husband jokes about the unmistakable and familiar kiss of Hansa Pilsener after he’s been kissed by his twelfth dumpie. There’s little familiarity there to me except the inevitable couch pose he resumes the day after. In my instance, what’s unmistakable here is a connection with a stranger in a land that’s so foreign in so many ways. A connection of birth, a place of shared history. We cling to the nostalgia of hearing words like “yah”, “geez” and “hey". It’s the lekker sound of home and it will never lose its magically ability to unite. Not after 12 years in her case or three months in mine.
It took me nearly six weeks of doing the school run (roughly 60 separate trips if you’re a detail orientated Virgo freak like me) standing outside the classroom with the same mums every day, twice a day, before my weather small talk efforts finally broke through. I’m happy to be moving slowly into the circle of trust with the local school mums – our shared connection obviously our children. But I can’t help but remember with pride the five minutes it took to forge a bond with a Saffa in a random supermarket where the subject of the weather never came up once.
