An Expat in South Africa

By: Sine Thieme - Also see author's expat blog listing & expat interview

I wake up with a start. My bedside alarm tells me it’s 4:30 in the morning and it takes me a moment to remember that I’m in a brand-new house, in a brand-new country, on a brand-new continent. What on Earth was that noise that just jolted me from sleep?

It sounded like a pig was being slaughtered right outside my window.

As I lie in bed, unable to go back to close an eye again, I reflect upon the rather startling fact that we – myself, my husband Noisette, and the four kids – now live in Africa, a continent we never thought we’d make our home one day. It’s a miracle we moved here at all, really. When the prospect of Johannesburg first came up I went online to Google South Africa, and I was shocked to find out that we probably wouldn’t survive the trip from the airport to our house. Every expat forum discussing South Africa tries to outdo the next one in terms of spreading crime horror stories, so that when you finally arrive here you are saddled with a huge amount of anxiety. Even though we made it to our new home from the airport in one piece, we were warned by our driver about a place called “Alexandra” which we could see from the highway, the most dangerous township in the area and one to never set foot in if we held our lives dear, or so we were told. Not an entirely comforting start.

Except now that we are here, I’m much less concerned with the prospect of murder, at least my own. What really frightens me is the murder of whatever it was that made this horrible noise just a minute ago, at such an ungodly hour in the morning. Because there is no way I’ll ever sleep in this country with that kind of a racket going on.

It is the middle of March; technically the onset of autumn, but the night is stifling hot. The Joburg winter is cold and short and still a few months away. Since I can’t sleep, I open the door to the balcony to let in the fresh night air and it feels wonderful. Getting used to living without air conditioning will not be a problem, I can already tell. I step outside, lower myself against a wall, and barely manage to avoid what I only now realize is a blanketing of bird shit. I make a mental note that something will have to be done about that. Item number sixty-three on my ever-growing expat moving-in list.

But soon all thoughts of to-do lists and crime rates are temporarily forgotten. Because I’m about to witness my first ever African sunrise, and it is simply glorious. Within minutes the sky transforms to a soft pink, outlines of trees appear on the distant ridge, and the sun creeps over the horizon, fiery and orange and full of warmth and promise not just for this day but for our new life.

With a sunrise like this to start things off, everything is bound to be just fine in South Africa.



It is now two years later and I often think back fondly to my first night here on that balcony. I was so full of wonder back then about this new country, and everything was so fresh and different. It is when I decided I would write down every experience along the way, and so my blog was born, enabling me to share all my baby steps (and, more often, missteps) with others and dish out advice to those following behind me.

If you are one of those (following behind me, that is) you’ll now want to hear some of that advice.

Where to start? Well, with the noise waking me up that morning, of course. It was a hadeda. A bird. But not just any old bird. The hadeda is the only bird in the Ibis family known to man that makes any sound at all. And it’s the ugliest, most piercing scream you can imagine, jolting you from sleep the first few weeks of your expat existence just as the sun comes up, which is early in a South African summer. The hadedas will descend on your lawn in groups, most likely searching for Parktown prawns (a large and disgusting member of the insect family you will learn to hate when you are faced with the prospect of fishing one out of your pool filter), and they will converse with each other loudly while landing, only to screech off again a while later, no doubt to the next newly-arrived expat house to scare the living daylights out of them.

But trust me, you’ll get used to the hadedas. As you will get used to the many other peculiarities of life in South Africa. Like the fact that South Africans employ three different expressions to convey they’ll do something eventually, all three of which misleadingly have the word “now” in them, even though it is very obvious, after having lived here just a short while, that “now” is most certainly not the intention of the speaker. You will get used to no one calling you back who promises to do so “just now.” You will get used to carrying your passport and lease agreement with you for the first six months, always aware that you might be asked to produce them whenever signing up for any kind of service. You will get used to being sent home again, without your new cell phone contract, because you are only the spouse and your husband will have to sign it instead. You will get used to turning on the faucet to find no water coming out of it, and you will eventually no longer have the urge to call a person of authority to alert them of this shortcoming. You will similarly learn not to flinch when the power is off for several days because of some mistake by the utility company, and you will not even find it particularly offensive when a reconnection fee appears on your bill later after the power is restored.

And you will quietly discard your to-do list one day, realizing that you no longer get the same satisfaction from crossing things off of it. Probably because you never get to cross anything off.

Africa, you will learn, is determined to teach you patience, however determined you might be on your part to bend it to your will. The thing is, eventually you’ll be grateful for it. You’ll become a more relaxed person, a person who knows that life goes on even if certain things simply do not get done, or at least take a lot longer than you expect. You might as well laugh and joke and say “Eish! There is nothing to be done” when things go wrong. Take a break, dunk a rusk in your Rooibos tea, have a Boerewors, and raise your glass of Chardonnay with a toast of “Welcome to Africa,” just like everyone else does.

Live in South Africa for a few months and you will get used to saying “tomahto sauce” for ketchup, you will find it normal to hear the word “shame” in every other sentence, you will no longer be afraid you might run over the hawkers at the intersection or the parking guards waving you into your spot. You will find it perfectly natural to call a traffic light robot, you will consider it no big deal that the robots often don’t work, and you are okay with the minibus taxi drivers ignoring them even when they do work. You will feel a stirring of interest in sports like cricket and netball and rugby, even though you will never publicly admit that rugby is in fact superior to American football, and you will not be surprised finding yourself submerged in a cage in freezing water staring at a Great White shark swimming at you, or perched atop the world’s highest bungy-jumping bridge staring down into the void, even though in your former life you swore you’d never do any of those things.

Because this is life in Africa. The adventurous (and the frankly weird) is always just around the corner, and my advice to you fellow expats is to seize it. Forget the messy house when your container first arrives and nothing is in its place, and book a safari instead. Go watch mating lions and hunting wild dogs and bathing elephants. And when you come back without ever seeing a leopard, go book your next bush trip, and take a photography class somewhere along the way. Go see the wonders of Victoria Falls, of Table Mountain, of penguins living in Africa, of the gigantic red sand dunes of Sossusvlei. Go swing from tree to tree like Tarzan on a canopy tour, and go climb Kilimanjaro, the continent’s highest peak. Do as much of this as you can, because there is so much to see both in South Africa and the surrounding countries, and you never know how long you’ll be here.

You might bankrupt your coffers, but you will make valuable investments in the memory bank. There is something special about living in Africa, and it gets into your blood. Some things might never move off of your to-do list, but your life will be moving along at an exhilarating pace.

Aside from the myriad travel opportunities, there are two things most expats immediately fall in love with in South Africa: The weather, and domestic help. Johannesburg in particular has what hast to be the most agreeable climate in the world, with ten months of warm weather that is almost never too hot but nice enough to spend at the side of your pool, and two months of freezing nights but dry, sunny days. Those freezing nights will make you curse the flimsy state of South African housing and the lack of proper central heating and force you to go to bed at 8:00 at night because that is the only warm place in your house, but they will be over before you know it and, like every other Joburger, you will spend the next ten months in a state of blissful amnesia, banning any thoughts of winter from your mind until you find yourself waking up again one cold June morning without a single gas bottle in the house.

If you’re coming from Europe, the idea of a live-in maid might strike you as alien, and if you’re coming from Asia, the idea will be a huge comfort. Either way, you’ll most likely end up with domestic help, either part or full-time, and come to love it. It’s a South African way of life. Domestic workers often become a part of the family they are working for, and by employing someone you are not only providing one job but often a livelihood for an entire extended family. It will take some getting used to and it is important to think about what kind of person you want to hire to be around you all day before you get started, but the benefits to everyone involved will be well worth it. Who knows, you might even start a blog in your newly-found free time.

This all sounds great, but what about that crime rate, you will ask?

As I said, moving to South Africa can be very scary. At least up to the point where you actually do the moving, if you listen to all the bad press about it. Yes, Johannesburg isn’t the safest city (and neither is Cape Town, which doesn’t get nearly so much bad press but in fact has a higher crime rate, based on the latest government statistics), but that is true for many other cities of the world. Most locals will tell you that you just have to be “sensible” and I find that to be very true. You’re careful where you go at night and you keep your eyes open, but you also realize that the possibility of crime and bad luck can’t rule your life. Remember that place called Alexandra we were warned about the very first day we set foot on South African soil? I have since driven into the heart of it dozens of times, and have lived to write this column. I stood out like a sore thumb, the only white person for miles around, in a nice big car to boot, and I admit it made me nervous the first few times. All these scary stories you hear about South Africa focus on township criminality and violence, and whether you want to or not, you’ll arrive in South Africa afraid of black people, made “worse” by the fact that there are so many of them. 80%, in fact, of South Africa’s population is black (and 9% is white with the rest made up of another 9% Coloured – yes that term is still used – and 2% Indian) and the vast majority of it still lives cramped together in the townships they were confined to under the apartheid system.

But the thing is, there are good people everywhere, and so it is in a township. All it takes is getting to know some of them, and you’ll no longer feel afraid. Some of my best memories of life in South Africa will always be those of cheering a bunch of township kids during their baseball games, seeing their faces light up when we were able to give them new shoes, or new t-shirts, or new hats, but mostly just to see us come and take part in their lives that are so different from ours. The income inequalities in South Africa are huge, even though it is much more developed and westernized than the rest of Africa, and many people still live in cobbled-together shacks without access to running water or electricity. Nevertheless, you will hardly find a place with more cheerful and friendly people than South Africa, and the energy and vibrancy all around you is infectious.

You might choose to stay holed up in your secure estate, worried about crime, but you’d be missing out on a truly educational, even life-transforming side of living in South Africa.

In the end, being happy as an expat in any new place comes down to one thing, and that’s the people around you, the friends you are able to make. One of our best decisions upon moving here, and something I can highly recommend to anyone else, was to send our four children to a local private school, not an international one. We were admittedly anxious how that would work out in terms of friends, but we needn’t have worried. Most of our friends are South Africans, with a sprinkling of expats, and we couldn’t be happier. Being on the same schedule as our local friends has given us plenty of opportunities to travel together and experience the country differently than if we were hopping on a plane for home leave every time the school goes on break.

It has also been a good experience for our children to be enrolled in a local school, even if they might have more of an adjustment to master upon returning or moving on. They have been sorted into houses. They have learned a new national anthem that is sung in five languages. They have learned to play netball and field hockey and cricket and rugby and the marimbas. They are “proudly South African” just like their peers when it comes to cheering for the national team, and they are just as proud to have competed in an Impala-poop-spitting contest. They have learned to speak Zulu and Afrikaans, entirely useless on the world stage, you might argue. But which other languages use a poetic “I see you” (sawubona) for a simple hello, and a more prosaic but oh-so descriptive “lekker” for something good as opposed to “kak” for when things go wrong?

Oh, and one last piece of advice: Pack some warm sweaters. Africa has a hot sun, but contrary to what you might think, it can be a cold land.



The key to a successful life as an expat is to adapt to the country you’re living in, wherever that might be. You can almost never replicate your old life in a new place, or if you try, you’ll probably be miserable. Yes, you can come to South Africa and bemoan the high crime rate, but on the flip side you can enjoy the fact that you can more or less just drive up to a wild lion or elephant without ever signing an indemnity form. You can be uptight about the lack of customer service at many government agencies, but you can also enjoy the fact that it forces you to stop sweating the small stuff in your life. You can miss the convenience of shopping online or in big supermarkets for your every need and whim, but you can enjoy buying the freshest mangoes you’ve ever had at the small grocery store around the corner. You can rail against the lack of public transportation, or you can buy yourself a four-wheel drive vehicle and become a true South African at heart, only happy when there is at least one dirt road between you and your destination, one that will teach you to change more than your fair share of tires.

If you keep an open mind, you’ll discover new joys around you every day.

If we had listened to all the naysayers condemning South Africa for its crime rate, or if we had been discouraged by the ridiculous amount of paperwork you’re required to submit to obtain your visa, we might never have moved here. We would have been the poorer for it, as this is an amazing place to live.