The South Africans

Within a matter of minutes the ship became the domain of another continent through simple majority. Once upon a time we had two Scotts, a South African and an Australian as the top four ranks working on the vessel. Then one fine day one Scott and the Australian departed on leave to be replaced by two South Africans leaving the lone Scott to battle accents with the three others!

Apart from coastal work it is these days quite hard to find a ship totally manned by say a whole crew of home-grown officers! Ships float around the oceans with Polish Electricians, Chinese Captains, Nigerian Chief Engineers, South African Mates and British Thirds. Anything goes these days with vessels being more global than the United Nations itself! This is not a bad thing, it makes for cultural crossings, a tolerance and understanding to be built between different people to the extent that racism and bad feelings are pushed aside in favor of "let's just get on and do the job" or "want a beer mate"! Sometimes though these barriers cannot be broken down, this often due to a deep-rooted cultural heritage that wants one to smash the other over the head before discussing matters in a calm and logical matter! Say for example the vessel that toddled off from port with a Serbian Chief Engineer and a Montenegrin Chief Mate; the mate had twanged the chief over the head with a large spanner before they had even left the harbor limits.

For the most part crews get on well with each other and just get on with the job that they were hired to do! As such and after the tools have been tidied away they can either eat dinner in resigned silence and hideaway in their cabins or socialize with those that are in the same boat, so to speak! A common language is always needed for communication and with the International Law of the sea being English disjointed and misplaced conversations can be found from Brazil to Iceland, Pitcairn to Russia. As long as liberal sign language is used to help construe a sentence and until the patience wears thin the vessels can have a 'happy' culture instilled into it through interest and acceptance of other people's heritage and background!

During South Africa's heyday there were three major shipping companies, SAF Marine, Unicorn and Pento! SAF Marine which did in fact own most of the other two companies sold all their container ships and goodwill to Maersk Line in Denmark and their interests in Pento to Smits of Holland! As a result of the demise of 90% of the Merchant Navy of South Africa a large pool of officers became available, not to domestic interests as there was none to speak of but to international shipping companies of any shape and size! Many of them ended up in the Offshore Business and being rather adept and knowledgeable (they had followed the British Educational System) they rapidly found themselves promoted to the higher ranks if not all the way to the tops!

South Africans are a funny bunch! Some love their country, some hate it! Most have enough locks on their doors to put the Bank of England to shame and enough bars on their windows to feed the army tanks should they ever go to war! This is the culture that they are faced with from Johannesburg to Cape Town, yet they carry it well, are proud of their country and still tell everybody that it is an excellent place to live!

The whole world has heard of Townships, something that the ANC (African National Congress) said would go, but that never happened! The townships feed a crime rate that is soaring, they make walking safely an impossibility - unless one really does want to get mugged, his shoes stolen and left as a talking piece on the curb! With forty percent unemployment, a mass of hungry, uneducated and desperate bodies' intent on survival at the expense of others it is surprising that anybody with money still wants to live there!

Strangely, and despite the fact that dogs are taught to bark at anything darker than the colour yellow, two of the supposed South Africans onboard this mighty vessel are immigrants, Englishmen who have left the safety and security of the hinterland and who have moved lock, stock and barrel into the wilds of the Dark Continent!

To understand this shift from supposed safety to a life of walking in the shadows, to alarm systems and newspapers filled with stories of rape and murder, it might be necessary to look deeper than simple colors and beyond Nelson Mandela's Heritage! Certainly the country has suffered massive upheaval, once upon a time the Whites ruled with an iron fist, the Blacks, Indians, Chinese and 'Coloureds' were kept on a short leash and yes, the country was safer than it is today! And then one fine day the Whites found themselves out of jobs, out of parliament and with less say in the running for the country than an elephant has to say to the ant that it is about to stand on. As the Whites now joke with dripping sarcasm; if you are an uneducated and disabled Black Jewish woman you are more likely to get a job than a white man with all the appropriate skills, enthusiasm and attitude. This is all slowly changing today as companies realize that disabled Black Jewish women (many of whom might be pregnant to boot) might not be able to keep the profits flowing in, and even the ANC have realized that they might need some of the wisdom of those they had once disposed. It is an uphill climb but one that is moving forward. The future is rosier than a few years ago and should one like to think of their glass as half full rather than half empty then life can only get better!

It goes without saying that South Africa has allot to offer. It is a large country with an enviable climate; it is large and as far away as one can possibly get from the UK and America! South Africa dishes up some wonderful foods at cheap prices, some of the best steaks in the world are found there along with some wines that should put the French into hiding! The standard of living is also excellent and where a seafarer's salary can actually stretch to a largish house with a swimming pool rather than the shoe box that one can hardly afford in Britain these days! The weather is beautiful, it is seasonal and fresh, and does not yet come with the standard acid rain and smog that Europe is now infamous for.

So bundling all the above together, the locks and the dogs against the large house and excellent food it is no wonder that the English accent is pushed aside for the South African one! There is no competition!

Ieuan Dolby
Author and Webmaster of SeaDolby.Com

Copyright © Ieuan Dolby, January 2007