About one million white South Africans have emigrated since the end of racial segregation in 1993/94. A former Georgian government under President Saakashvili specifically invited South African farmers to work the fallow fields of a dilapidated Georgian farm. Some of these South African Boers actually stayed. Their Afrikaans is an extension of Dutch, which I speak a little, and so for years I have dreamed of chatting with South African Boers on a South Caucasian farm.
Now it is time. Another 14 kilometers on bumpy clay slopes, past an abandoned Soviet base, earth-brown enclosures with dry cows, parched dogs and an old Azeri farmer on horseback who seems to have sprung from an oriental painting. I probably imagined colonial glory, some South Africans have also built successful farms in Georgia, but now I find a one-family slum in a treeless wasteland with a view of a steel combine, and seven dogs are yapping at me.
4.80 euros per almond bush
The family has just had a visit from a recently immigrated pastor who manages the small farm of a Georgian and now wants to become a farmer. The “farm”, which they simply call “plaats” in Afrikaans, are two living containers that connect a primitive barrack, which in turn is divided into two rooms by second-hand cupboards. We are sitting in the fully cleared living room, they offer me almonds. They started here with a little lavender, but because of the lack of Georgian lavender oil boom, they are now trying almonds. Something whistles, either the steppe wind or the fan.
I have to leave out the names of the “extremely conservative” Protestants. Since a Georgian TV report in which they felt they were instrumentalized against the far more numerous farmers who immigrated from India, they have been “media shy”. Even if nobody says it, they are poor. Their farm in South Africa was only rented, they put this house down for a total of 7,000 euros, and “4.80 euros for an almond bush!” Groans my host. In order to find a livelihood at some point and to be able to build a real house, they calculate with a requirement of 13,000 almond bushes. To do this, they have to go into debt.
Since Boers usually speak English very well, they are usually drawn to the Anglo-Saxon world, America or Canada, although these countries only allow rich people in, “Australia wants about five million dollars”. The poor Boers therefore go to African countries, to Zambia, Malawi or Tanzania. Or even to Cambodia, Portugal, Macedonia. Or Georgia. After six years, they still speak poor Georgian, so they cannot get a Georgian passport and they would fail the language test. As descendants of the Boers, who once retreated inland from the English on the “Great Trek”, they lived near the border with Mozambique. In her village the nearest neighbor was three to four kilometers away, here it’s one or two. You are really a hermit. The closest neighboring farms belong to Azerbaijanis and Georgians, there is little contact. The children, both of working age and both housed in the right living container together with the kitchen, have been sitting at home for years. The daughter wanted to learn Georgian, Dutch, Turkish and Russian and to open a bakery in the city, these are still plans.
My question as to why the Boers do not go back to the original home of their language and denomination has already been answered. The Netherlands, says the Bure, is “too small, too narrow and too expensive”. Neither of them has ever been there; their strongest connection to Dutch is obviously me. When asked, they admit that the alienation was heightened by the rejection of apartheid from the Netherlands and Belgium. For these Boers, however, racial segregation was a good thing: “South Africa was still the best country in the world in the 1970s and 1980s, we didn’t know anything like fences.” Unlike today, says the pastor, “the hospitals were there for everyone and free ”.
The pastor’s wife reads a well-worn novel during the conversation. When the discussion turns to the undoubtedly very high murder rate in South Africa, the women in particular begin to talk. These are horror stories with white victims and black perpetrators: child in a shop drugged with chloroform and kidnapped for slavery or organ harvesting, boy dissolved in a boiling bathtub until his skin fell off. “South Africa is the only country in the world,” exclaims the Boer, “in which a 20-year-old raped a woman, burned her with an iron, killed her with a brick – and it was hungry!” When a murder happened in Georgia , they say, “then it’s on all the news, someone happens to us every five minutes and nobody cares.” My hosts, mourning apartheid, explain the current excesses of violence in South Africa with a “black mentality”. They claim that the robber gangs are not primarily concerned with robbery, “because otherwise they would not wait for you to come home”. Amazed, I ask: “Wait a minute, are you talking about black racism?” You say yes. You only flew back to South Africa once, “that was very negative”.
These South Caucasian Boers do not know who rules their commune and do not want to know either. Their closest Georgian reference person is the accountant imposed on them every month by the financial legislation. On Sundays they watch the online service broadcast from Pretoria by the Afrikaanse Protestantse Kerk, a traditionalist denomination with only 35,000 souls. The religious legacy of the Boers is Calvinist, but the South African pastor has lost his belief in Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, which was once so inspiring for capitalism, and is now sticking with Luther. Orthodox Georgian Christianity – “very strict in tradition, but not in morality” – is alien to him.
At the end of the seemingly unreal encounter, the Boer drives me back to the small town. Steering his jeep with a sure hand over the dirt road, he claims: “Georgians have more from Asia than from Europe.” That may be true. I, on the other hand, claim that these Boers have more from Africa than from Europe. None of them have ever been to Europe.
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