Arriving the first day in Pretoria, after an exhaustive overnight flight and having flown back from Bosnia less than a day earlier, my first trip to SA definitely started off on the wrong foot.
Driving in to Pretoria didn’t make it much better. It was August and technically South African winter, although I had come with this preconceived idea that it was always hot in Africa, so with my little summer style office dresses, and skirts and shorts for the evenings, I found myself unexpectedly cold.
Luckily we didn’t spend much time outside because my second discovery was that no one walks anywhere in Pretoria. Wide streets and motorways lead you where you want to go (in most cases a mall or a random place in the middle of nowhere). And even when you want to walk, unless it’s daylight and you’re being chaperoned by some muscly/armed male (hey I’m not complaining) its not advisable. This is probably the thing we struggled with the most as compared to the UK;
1. Everything is really far apart and traffic is awful
2. Because everyone drives, many places are in really random locations that only locals know about you. This means you have to carefully plan where you’re going before you set off, so finding a place to have dinner every night was a massive pain in the ass, because unless we had dinner in the mall, we would spend half an hour googling restaurants in Pretoria. Our favourite restaurant Caraffa was recommended by a friend and was amazing but was literally located in a shady looking parking lot in the middle of nowhere.
But the most interesting part of trip 1 was the introduction to the different ethnicities of the office (and the country). While we all know there are white South Africans and black South Africans, the mix is much more complicated than you think.
Afrikaners are the prominent group in Pretoria – descendants of the Dutch settlers. They tend to be very fair and they speak Afrikaans – a mixture of Dutch and words picked up from the slaves they bought over from the Dutch East Indies and Madagascar. While they speak English as well- most of them have Afrikaans as their first language and some (especially older generations) will only learn English once they start school/work even. A lot of them are religious and quite conservative and unfortunately their history during the apartheid era and the Afrikaner nationalism has meant that many people still harbour animosity towards that group. Let’s say generally they tend to stick together and in the office I found that in many cases to be true. At times I even found myself in meetings where they would talk amongst themselves in Afrikaans until the meeting officially kicked off.
The other main white group is the anglophones which are predominantly the British. Historically the enemies of the Afrikaners due to the multiple invasions where the Brits decided they wanted a piece of that (and got it), there is continued animosity at times between the two groups (or at least the biggest patriots out of them). When we first arrived someone told us Pretoria is very Afrikaans and Joberg is more English and whilst at the time we had no idea what that meant it all makes so much sense now. Pretoria is definitely the calmer, more conservative, more religious and more boring place- picture Desperate Housewives but with high concrete walls, barbed wire and gated communities everywhere. And if I tell you that 6 months later we still haven’t found a decent bar in this city (and after many late nights in the office – trust me, it’s not for lack of trying) you get the message that I’m not Pretoria’s biggest fan. I’ll stick to British thank you very much
The biggest group (although you have to get out of Pretoria to believe it) is the Black Africans. These guys make up over 80% of the South African population but as you can imagine in the bank we worked in sadly this ratio is far from reflected. But the incredible thing about South Africa is the large number of ethnicities and languages you find in the country. The constitution recognised 11 languages- English and Afrikaans are two of them and the rest are spoken by the different black African ethnicities – Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu. This makes South Africa the third in number of official languages – behind only Bolivia and India. And no one speaks only one- in fact most speak multiple at the same time making communication smooth wherever you go and whoever you meet. My USP of speaking all the ex Yugoslav languages was not impressing anyone. Needless to say everyone speaks English and some of the older generations speak Afrikaans (although I fear for all the wrong reasons).
My favourite language of the lot is Xhosa (insert click where the X is). This language inherited the clicking sounds of the Khoisan languages and trust me if you haven’t heard it- YouTube that shit straight away. I first heard the click in one of our first meetings when I was being told to speak to “[Click]-aba” (this lady’s name had a click in it). I was vigorously taking notes but had to look up and couldn’t hide my shocked face of “what the hell just happened there” before I collected myself and politely asked how you spell that.
But now comes the weird part which I still can’t get my head around. There is another ethnic group which is the second largest ethnic group after black Africans. It exists predominantly in South Africa but also has small numbers in neighbouring countries. This multi racial ethnic group is called the coloureds. Yes you read that right. And as far as I can tell it basically consists of everyone else. Anyone of mixed race; whether it is a mix of African, European, Asian, etc. seems to fall into this category. Which is really weird because firstly to the European ear the choice of name is slightly awkward, and secondly but more confusingly for me is that how can a mix of a multitude of different ethnicities be an ethnicity? So for example, we got told by the client they would order some coloured food, but you don’t know whether it’s African, Asian, Afrikaans or none of the above. Weird, but apparently genetic studies suggest the group has the highest levels of mixed ancestry in the world so there’s another claim to multicultural fame. And judging by the ones I’ve met so far they are the coolest group here 🙂
Now as I write 6 months later I know so much more about South African culture, demographics and history but on my first trip here it was all a big learning curve and honestly a little difficult to get your head around. There are so many versions of history and faces to this country, depending on who you speak to or what you’re reading. I’m lucky enough to have met a mix of people and feel I have a fairly good grasp but even I’ve just scratched the surface.
Needless to say my first trip was getting to know everyone and everything but apart from the above the only other thing I remember is getting sick and having to watch Richard and Alex moan over their delicious springbok carpaccio and ostrich steak (washed down with some fine local Pinotage) while I sadly drooled over their dinners and nibbled at my piece of dry bread.
After this first trip, sick, exhausted and desperate to get home, I was eager to get to the airport, however the building blocks had been put into place and the following few months would see me slowly fall in love with this unique place.
