Joy Owen
It is Tuesday evening. I am seated with a friend and my son in our favourite restaurant in Bloemfontein. My son listens to our conversation as I note that “the 49” (or 59 as some reports suggest) Afrikaner migrants, incorrectly and problematically afforded refugee status through executive order by the Trump administration, have landed in America. Their departure from South Africa is called the “Great Tsek” on social media. We laugh conspiratorially.
South Africans respond to most situations with a trademark humour that inspires much hilarity. We repeat the in-joke, or reference, in multi-cultural and multi-classed spaces: taxis, buses, lecture halls, around a Sunday braai, in a coffee shop, between co-workers, etc. We evoke the reality of co-created belonging through shared humour. Our humour, a shared South African-ness irrespective of historicised divisions of race, class, creed or gender, masks our discomfort, or psychological and emotional pain.
Whether we are fighting for Tyla’s “right” to self-define as coloured – whilst ridiculing and stereotyping colouredness – and interrogating black Americans’ failure to interrogate the context of coloured in South Africa; or “beefing” with Nigerians through e-hailing apps about which is the wealthiest African country; or disowning Elon Musk in a vituperative fashion; South Africans have a unique, enmeshed and complex affinity and loyalty to each other.
This loyalty is an organic response to a perceived threat, or a show of appreciation or forgiveness. South African humour and loyalty are revealed on TikTok, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). On these platforms we deconstruct the perceptions and slights of “ordinary” South Africans as we digest and metabolise the news together, as South Africans, and as global citizens in conversation with other global citizens. We find solace in our derision, and the truth etched onto the edges of that laughter.
The phrase Great Tsek is an incisive commentary on the double-edged nature of the 49ers’ departure. As South African stayers imagine saying that to the 49ers, they remind us of a sociocultural memory in which white Afrikaners would chase black people from their farms with the word “voertsek”. And in return, based on commentary from a few of the emigrants, we can duly imagine the 49ers exclaiming “voertsek” as they took off from the OR Tambo International airport. http://Prof. Joy Owen Thus, the phrase points to a rejection that is mirrored by those who stay and those who leave.
The reasons for emigration are multiple, but this particular departure underscores a severance of ties with the land of their birth, our humour, and much more that embodies a particular national expression of humanity.
The 49ers are not Europeans; much less American. They are South Africans, and we are a complicated mengelmoes of peoples who embody various amalgamated traditions, languages, orientations, humour, oppressions and battle scars.
Violence, risk and resilience are endemic to the South African narrative, no matter which ethnic tributary you lay claim to as you arrive here on the shores of a contemporary South Africa. Those who speak, who stay, who wrestle with the inadequacies of the state, birth South Africa’s next chapter in which every lineage and narrative has value.
We navigate turbulent racialised, ethnicised and citizenship currents, potholed roads and jagged promises of well-being for all in rickety boats, maladapted vehicles and kaalvoet, together. Our sailors, wayfarers and leaders – the ordinary South Africans – are not necessarily seasoned or adequately equipped; and the shoreline of our dreams is unfamiliar, with the horizon blurred and distant. But for those who stay, the vision of a South Africa that supports the well-being of all her citizens inspires us to put our shoulders to the wheel, and to live not only for ourselves but for others.
■ Prof. Joy Owen is the head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of the Free State (UFS).
