The Big Read: No country for young men

12 April 2017 - 08:41 By Andile Ndlovu
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WEIGHT HERE: More and more young people are struggling to cope with South Africa's unfolding political reality.
WEIGHT HERE: More and more young people are struggling to cope with South Africa's unfolding political reality.
Image: ISTOCK/GETTY

For many years I loathed South Africans who held dual citizenship. I saw it as a cop out. An easy way to escape the country once things got tough.

Mostly, I saw it as a privilege enjoyed by white people who had relatives living in New Zealand, where South Africans make up the fifth-largest source of immigrants behind the UK, China, India and Australia - or in Perth, or somewhere in Britain, where it is estimated that well over 500000 Saffers live.

I was convinced that if you were a natural-born South African you ought to have the stomach for the ugliness which is part and parcel of a fledgling democracy like ours. Just like a romance, I thought that it couldn't be that people threatened to leave at every sign of turmoil.

But about a year ago for the first time in my life I contemplated life away from South Africa. I looked at academic courses I could never afford. I perused scholarships I had no business even looking at because of their tough criteria, and I looked into the prospect of teaching English in Asia for a couple of years - any reason to get out of South Africa for a while.

That feeling has since only intensified. It feels as if my body is under deep waters and my heart is beating rapidly, because I am worried about how long it will be before I finally run out of breath, instead of how I can swim back up.

The scariest part of it all is that my country tells me that I have it good - things could be worse.

Of course, they could be. I could be the woman sitting with two infants at the corner of Corlett Drive and Oxford Road, in Illovo, devoid of any rands or energy to speak because she's hungry and because she's asked and been thwarted too many times already.

I could be any of the women being raped by taxi drivers - the men they trust to ferry them to and from their jobs.

I could have been the woman who was threatened by a marauding giant of a man while she was trying to enjoy a meal at Spur with her children. She didn't have a man to defend her because, well, who knows where he was? Many of us have grown up without our fathers and our mothers without their husbands.

I could have been one of the more than 100 mentally ill patients who perished after their lives were toyed with after being moved from Life Healthcare Esidimeni.

Being South African has never been more dispiriting than it is now. It is so distressing that we should all be worried about the environment this country's youth is growing up in.

One school of thought is that, because of South Africa's robust political landscape, we're building a more resilient people - a people who are adept at overcoming soul- crushing struggles. After all, it is in the DNA of most of our people.

By the same token, we are being inundated with news of - or experiencing - corruption and crime and unemployment as we watch our savings dwindle worryingly.

We are living in times of peak angst and apprehension.

On Monday night, I watched a documentary presented by the brilliant Laura Mvula called Generation Anxiety. She sought to find answers to why anxiety appears to be sweeping through "Generation Y" (people born during the 1980s and early 1990s) - people including herself, me and the majority of my friends.

British journalist Marjorie Wallace, who founded a body called Sane, which seeks to provide emotional support to those affected by mental illness, said that the bulk of her visitors "feel there's somehow no world that they belong to at the moment".

It is not foolhardy to suggest that that speaks to many in our country, too.

While I have never been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder (perhaps from fear of being told what I don't want confirmed), I have recently experienced several overwhelming episodes of panic and have friends who endure panic attacks - friends who are lucky enough to fall outside of the 26.5% unemployment statistic (singled out as the reason for South Africa's inclusion in the top 10 list of the most miserable countries in the world by the Cato Institute), and can call on family for support.

But we are a generation that is met with myriad expectations and scant attention. We're expected to take the endless knocks on the chin and press on. Zombies.

Most of all we're expected to remain loyal to a government and governing party speaking over us and speaking mockingly of us and rarely to us. Yet, we're expected to be patriots - a break from South Africa is not an option. We're a generation submerged under deep waters and I am worried the surface is too far off.

Some days I envy those who can take a break from South Africa and its slew of triggers.

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