Capetonian’s Message from the Heart to South Africans: LIFE IS GOOD!

Forgive the political tone – I am trying to keep it in check, but I fail… writes South African musician Albert Combrink.

Dear Friends, I love you dearly. But I just CAN’T with all this negativity about South Africa all the time. When I look at the quality of your lives, and the quality of my life, I just can not square it with all the bleating about how you are all hard done by, by a racist and incompetent government.

Yes there are MASSIVE issues. You can do two things: stand for office yourself, or try voting for the opposition.

But sharing alarmist post after Afro-pessimist alarmist rant, while planning your next bottle of wine with your restaurant meal, I just find it hard to square the dialogue. Plus you are sharing it on TOP OF THE RANGE smart-phones on pretty fancy contracts.

Land-ownership is a bullet we have been dodging since the Apartheid era and the chickens have come home to roost, and we simply have to come to a workable solution.

Sharing alarmist posts will solve little. Corruption is no worse than in the old South Africa – they stole an entire country and disenfranchised 95% of the population on an arbitrary selection-criterion of the colour of your skin.

People of colour WERE NOT ALLOWED TO OWN LAND, GO TO SCHOOL, PERFORM ON STAGE, apply for CREDIT, even take out a BOND. They were not even allowed to apply for certain jobs, kept as those were for WHITES ONLY.

I can not believe so many people seem to have forgotten HOW APARTHEID ACTUALLY WORKED. I will NEVER say that was ok, I will NEVER wish for those days, I will NEVER vote for anyone who even smells of that rhetoric. Google ‘Forced Removals’, Google ‘Land Act’, Google ‘District 6’.

You can not keep an entire race of people OUT of the conversation and then, once they are part of the dialogue again – having avoided a bloodbath of a Civil War – think you are going to control WHAT they say and HOW they say it. That ship has sailed, and its sails were Oranje Blanje Blou and it is never coming back.

If you have money to emigrate, good for you, but I guarantee you will need a helluva lot more money to have this quality of life in New York, London, Berlin or Paris. And no, it is not Zuma’s fault or the ANC’s fault. Those cities are EXPENSIVE, regardless of your currency.

We see AWESOME concerts for R150 a ticket, everyone orders a bottle of wine with their restaurant meals. Cocktails are R80 each and we bleat, and yet, everytime we go out, you order one!

Restaurants and shopping centres are POPPING out their seams with people spending. We drive our own cars, our kids are in TOPNOTCH, very expensive schools where school kids are ordering UBER EATS for break-time lunches.

Our infrastructure is bloody good, I still shower as much as I always did and I do not mind dancing around the buckets – when I was 7 there was GROOT DROOGTE in Bloemfontein and we used the bathwater to water my mother’s roses. Nothing new, really.

The internet is working well. I can Google plane ticket prices to anywhere in the world and I could probably fit a trip to a tropical island on my available Credit.

I am a MUSICIAN and a TEACHER. I own a flat. I have a medical aid. I have a pension plan. I have performed at virtually every Arts Festival in the country, playing everything from Tango to Opera to Jazz. I perform regularly in MULTI-MILLION Rand concert halls on some of the best pianos in the world.

I have worked at the best Universities and schools in the country in a niche “Eurocentric” artform, and have made a success by hard work and determination. Could I have landed somewhere better? Of course that is possible. But even here, I have made a living, and have had a deep and meaningful musical life with incredible colleagues.

LIFE IS GOOD.

It is not perfect, not by a long shot. But just LOOK at the quality of your life, actually. If we were all honest, I’d say we don’t know how lucky we actually are.

End of rant.

BY ALBERT COMBRINK, published here with Albert’s kind permission.