Opinion article by Prof Joy Owen, Head of the Department of Anthropology, University of the Free State

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 the US. Their departure 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 country is the wealthiest African country, or vituperatively disowning Elon Musk, South Africans have a unique, enmeshed and complex affinity and loyalty to each other.  

Double-edged nature of ‘the 49ers’ departure

Amorphous and responsive, this loyalty is an organic response to a perceived threat, or a show of appreciation or forgiveness – recall our troetelnaam for our President – cupcake! South African humour and loyalty are revealed on TikTok, Instagram, and X (former 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 socio-cultural 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 OR Tambo International airport. The phrase, Great Tsek, thus points to a rejection that is mirrored by those who stay (are left behind) and those who leave.

Amidst the laughter M, a young black woman, who has experienced the harrowing loss of dispossession of family-owned land in the Free State through apartheid’s legalised appropriation of land comments: “I’m laughing, but they’re still South African, man! What are they going to experience there? It doesn’t matter that they are white. I worry about them. They are us.” 

They are South Africans

Of course, as a national human collective – South Africans – we don’t want to be rejected, or ‘left behind’. It is a typical human response to excise the offending parties from our collective. But still there are those among us, like my friend, who compassionately tries to understand the reasons for ‘the 49ers’ departure, and hopes that they haven’t made a mistake that will have enduring negative repercussions. The reasons for emigration are multiple, but this particular departure underscores a severance of ties with the land of their birth, our South African 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 that is being lived in the trenches and robustly debated on the streets of social media. Those who speak, who stay, who worstel 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 kaal voete 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. 

South Africans are complex and incomplete without each other