Yummy Wakame Weblog

When people ask where I come, a few will say, “I really wish I knew more about South Africa. I feel silly that Nelson Mandela is one of the greatest men of our time but I dont know much else about the place, exept that there was once a thing thing called apartheid. Did I pronounce that right?” Which is cool. At least they’re interested.

Inevitably I watch people pull the standard ‘oh, how unfortunate for you’ face while they ask, “Is the crime really as bad as people say it is? I don’t think I’d want to go there”.
The other day I got asked, “I should probably know this but… is South Africa still segregated?” also, “Aah South Africa! So can you speak Afri-cans? That’s like the language the africans there speak?” and “Do some schools there have electricity?” Oh and my favourite, “Mandela? Hmm no… never heard of it.”
No wait, I take that back. I once met someone in a chatroom who took a look at my profile pic and declared, “Why do you pretend you’re white in your profile when you actually come from South Africa?” Another person told me he’d never heard of South Africa and then asked me where it was.

Now I realise that I’m not from not the World’s Greatest Country and Im not at all surprised that people know so little about it when they’ve never been there and probably only seen one documentary about it on TV… but with sooo many South Africans all over the world (we’re a plague of curious world travellers descending on every country), it won’t be long before you’re being served at the bar by one of us or work across a desk from one… and if she’s cute you’ll want to impress her with your vast knowledge about her silly little country…

So with just a tiny further ado, here are some cool new emeging facts coming from the New South Africa – FYI: the current president who took over from Mandela after he retired is Thabo Mbeki, and the ruling party is the ANC. Also Afrikaans is one of the 11 many official languages of South Africa. Afrikaans is spoken by all races and ethnic groups in South Africa and much has been done in recent years to promote varieties of this language that were suppressed during the years of Apartheid. Close to 6 million speak Afrikaans as their home language out of 40.6 million South Africans. (more…)

Wish I could be there… :@)