South Africans who call New Zealand home

By WARREN GAMBLE

The first thing you learn about South Africans in New Zealand is that there are a lot of them.

Immigration figures show South Africa was the single biggest source country for migrants in recent years (behind only the combined numbers from Great Britain).

Since the transition from apartheid to democracy in 1994, more than 26,000 South Africans have been approved for permanent residence in New Zealand, and that number is growing by around 3500 each year.

That explains why in Auckland, where many South Africans settle, particularly on the North Shore, most butchers now stock the coiled boerwors sausage.

Slapping one on the braai (barbecue) while gnawing on some biltong (dried meat) washed down with the odd beer, is now an established part of a North Shore summer.

In winter it would be hard to find a rugby or soccer field without the clipped South African accent in full voice. And in some workplaces, particularly in industries such as insurance, information technology, and publishing, there are whole clusters of new colleagues only too willing to wave a Sharks scarf or Springbok flag.

The second thing that you find about New Zealand's South Africans is that you cannot generalise about their reasons for coming or their experiences here.

While some are part of the "white flight" of people who did not want to live under a black Government, for most the reasons are many, varied and rarely simple.

And while some have struggled to adapt to what they see almost as a life in exile, others, particularly the children, talk about representing their new country on the sports field.

Some have joined support clubs to keep in touch with their past and adjust to the future. And many would rather not dwell on the apartheid regime and the huge problems left in its wake, preferring to look to their new lives here.

At a church hall in Glenfield on the North Shore this week, one of the newest South African clubs was welcoming its highest-profile ally, new Race Relations Conciliator Gregory Fortuin.

A fair share of the republic's 11 official languages filled the small room and a mix of food, from Indian curries to Afrikaans melktert - a milky pudding - lined a serving table.

Like the new conciliator, many of the members of the South African Supporters Club are so-called coloured - South Africans from mixed black and white heritage - but the club stresses that it welcomes everyone.

"We speak English, Afrikaans, Zulu," says one of its founders, Barbara Parker. "Irrespective of skin colour it's taught us that for all the years the white man tried to put us in little boxes according to skin colour, when we leave South Africa we speak to each other."

Parker says the transition to democracy has opened her family's eyes. Coming from a narrow, protected life in Durban, where they were told what they could and could not do, she and her husband wanted to give their children more opportunities, and that meant leaving home.

New Zealand has "lots of family life and vast open spaces, like South Africa used to be," she says.

After a rocky start three years ago - "the worst two months of my life" - she and her husband both have good jobs, their children are settled, and they are here to stay.

Starting with three founding families, the club now has about 300 members.

Another one of its founders, Kevin Stoltenkamp, says problems with jobs, immigration and day-to-day life can be overcome more easily through shared experiences.

Many South Africans are too proud to ask for help and will not accept any Government benefits, but the club's practical behind-the-scenes work has struck a chord. Now its members fill halls for social events and band together in sports teams.

Stoltenkamp played professional soccer in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, for six years before a chance job offer brought him first to Wellington and then Auckland.

He now plays in a Forrest Hill over-35 soccer squad made up of 13 coloured South Africans, two New Zealanders and a new recruit - a white South African from Cape Town.

He would rather concentrate on the more united present and future in New Zealand than look back to a divisive past.

It is hard to explain adequately what it is like to live under apartheid to anyone who has not done so, Stoltenkamp says. In New Zealand he has not been aware of tensions between South Africans "and to be honest, if there was it would not interest me."

Instead he and his wife Albra, who both now teach at West Harbour school, appreciate the qualities of a country which their two children now call home.

"My 14-year-old daughter can walk around at 8 pm in the evening with her friends, and while we don't encourage that, we know she's safe.

"My 10-year-old son tells me he is going to play basketball for the Tall Blacks one day ...

"I hear people complaining about this country, but I say to them you have to leave it before you realise what you have got."

Of course, there are downsides: hassles with immigration, heavy exchange rate losses ($NZ1 equals 3.5 rand), the struggle to have qualifications recognised, and the immigration baggage of isolation and loneliness magnified by New Zealand's geography.

For white South Africans, who comprise most of the new immigrants, there is another, often unspoken problem.

A number say they have not encountered it, and few will talk about it publicly, but one highly qualified professional sums it up: "I have felt that being a white South African - who is not a racist - that there was often the assumption that I'm a white racist South African."

He says he has once been attacked verbally based on that wrong assumption, and in other cases New Zealanders have assumed his agreement when they make racist comments about Asian immigrants.

Another mistaken assumption is that he is a sort of refugee from the republic's crime capital of Johannesburg.

He cannot say whether prospective employers have held those impressions against him or whether there is just a more general reluctance to hire people with outside, and relatively unknown, work experience.

For Judy Paterson, an Auckland University mathematics teacher who arrived in 1995, adjusting to life here has thrown up more subtle differences.

"It takes a long time to realise that perhaps you have been too up front for the New Zealand psyche, and maybe you have been a bit offensive but nobody tells you and it does not come in any manuals.

"In New Zealand things tend to be done by consensus, in general it does not all get put out on the table. In South Africa I think we are more forthright."

Other subtleties come through the language. It took her months, for example, to find out that "cheers" meant thank you and not goodbye.

South Africans also have to adjust to traffic lights, not robots, and roundabouts, not traffic circles.

Like many, Paterson says mounting anxieties - about crime, Aids, and the future of her three children, especially being a solo mother - led to her decision to leave. As a mathematics teacher the numbers did not add up: too many people and not enough jobs or resources, which in the end outweighed the natural energy and colour of the place.

In New Zealand she was initially amazed about things such as her children being able to catch a bus somewhere and the lack of window bars to keep burglars out: "It seemed to me so unfair that life was so easy here."

But then the reality of leaving friends, family and a whole lifetime of cultural references set in. "It's exhausting, it's like grieving because it's like an enormous loss."

Time, her work, and the help of family and new friends means she now considers herself "enormously fortunate" to be here.

Looking back to her years in South Africa, although she taught in a school for blacks and, coloureds she wonders whether she should have done more to oppose apartheid - taken more of a stand. It is almost with a sense of guilt that she says she never put herself in danger.

The Weekend Herald spoke to other South Africans who say they tolerated the racially divided regime because they did not know any different. "I did not know any better," says one woman. "I was from a privileged white background. I was horrified to go to London to find white people working on the roads."

She now realises that many of the apartheid practices were horrific, but believes the Rainbow nation is an illusion because "people are different and you should not try to make people the same."

As the new Race Relations conciliator, Gregory Fortuin is bemused that he has never met any South Africans here who supported apartheid.

But he says he doesn't want to reopen old wounds. "Ten or 15 years ago I would have openly challenged people about it, whereas now you know it doesn't serve the purpose of nation building ...

"It's important not to become too critical and have the spirit of condemnation about people who didn't do anything. Ultimately everybody's conscience will deal with them."

The North Shore-based Afrikaans Club caused a mini-uproar in 1999 with a suggestion that Afrikaans - the language associated with the white apartheid government - should be taught in New Zealand schools.

The club faxed polite replies to Weekend Herald questions, acknowledging that in hindsight the suggestion was a mistake. It now offers its own Afrikaans classes on Saturdays to children of members.

From 30 founder members in 1998, the club now has 450 members in Auckland, the Bay of Plenty and Waikato.

The biggest South African organisation in the country is the well-established South Africa New Zealand Charitable Trust, which has more than 2000 members.

Chairman George Deeb says the group wants to integrate into the New Zealand community, wants New Zealanders to take part in its functions, and does not want to be seen as exclusive "because that leads to problems."

One of the focal points for the North Shore's South African community is Janssen's Continental in Browns Bay. Wim Janssen gave up his successful butchery business in Pretoria, a big house with a pool and tennis court, and brought his wife and four children to New Zealand in 1997.

Crime and the fear of violence were the main reasons. "We just didn't see a future any more for our children. The kids just live with fear, they end up in your bed every day.

"Get me right: South Africa could not carry on the way it was going, it had to change, a minority could not rule a majority."

After an expensive two years of struggle, Janssen's business is now profitable and is looking to expand.

At the start South Africans were the main buyers of the freshly made boerwors and biltong; now New Zealanders are the biggest customers. "I'm quite content. I love New Zealand, really I do.

"My house may only be one quarter of the size it was in South Africa, but I can walk down the road, and I can go down to the beach, my kids walk to school and they play in the street. It's just using the whole country and not just the one house we're in."