The point is to claim your place in the world. If you’re living in the dregs of society, anywhere is shite (there’s more to life than working a job you hate or being a non-descript office automaton)…

one should rather focus on how good the “good” can be and really take advantage of things that you wouldn’t be afforded back home i.e. invaluable work experience, access to some of the worlds best/active/rigorous/competitive academic institutions, real integrated multicultural immersion & exchanges (not some half-assed political notion in the ether), the ability to travel to many culturally distinct countries affordably and within a close range, massive economies that can happily accomodate budding entrepreneurs.

Seriously- the fact that these countries are so candidly dismissed as “crappy” indicates one of two things:

1) Ignorance.. no knowledge of the contrary (a real shame in other words)
2) Ignorance.. even more of a shame.. actually offensive !

Remember; Losers whine… winners grab it by the nuts !
Let’s be real shall we !

I actually have an interest in SA because I have friends and relatives there, and I’m good friends with one of TL’s writers. I comment constructively most of the time, but there is a smug tone frequently taken against expats that makes us out to be a pack of cowardly traitors who left because of racism, all suffering dingy existences in mouldy little shoeboxes devoid of any “quality of life”, culture or nature.

It could not be further from the truth. Hell, last winter I was able to take a lovely, affordable weekend trip into the near-equatorial tropics (within the borders of the same country!), the kind of thing I could never afford in SA.

If Thought Leader is ostensibly a journalistic enterprise, I can’t let the kind of routine, cliché-ed besmirching of expats go uncommented upon. It’s lazy, smug and jingoistic in a way that does not reflect well on SA at all: “ha, your countries are boring dumps!”

Does it? It doesn’t seem like a good place for my friend who got a breadknife inserted into his neck.

Or my friend’s father who was shot in the street for his wallet.

Or my friend who got a knife through the heart making a call in a telephone booth.

Or my friend who got raped.

Or me when “Proudly South African” entepreneurs stiffed me on payments that were less than an installment on their new BMWs.

Or my cousin whose spine was destroyed by a drill sergeant and is permanently supine because the state cheaped out on surgery.

Or the millions of people in shacks surrounding barbed-wire suburbs financed by overdrafts.

Or the victims of xenophobic pogroms.

Or women.

I’m not saying that it’s only the avaricious, cutthroat, shallow or sociopathic that inhabit the place, I’m saying they seem to have a tremendous advantage in dealing with it.

I emigrated because I no longer felt welcome or safe and being an entirely cerebral (if not particularly bright) person, I was interested in nothing much in South Africa. It’s a good place for no-one but the most nakedly avaricious, cutthroat, shallow or out-and-out sociopathic people.

I’m a quite happy to be a nobody, and live a modest little life, as are most Australians. The South Africans who moan about the difficulties of achieving in first world countries are a pack of over-entitled, over-privileged, conceited swine with no desire to assimilate, and are often quite rightly disliked. Aasvoel hit the nail on the head.

You want it to be easier to get ahead? The bus I take in the morning is full of professional people who are still studying in their forties. University graduates are not special here.

My sunshine needs (not much, I prefer to remain my natural colour) are sorted, my healthcare is sorted, my security is sorted, my career is sorted and I’ll have citizenship in another two years. And if I feel like going to another country, it’ll be a lot cheaper and easier than from SA.