Sith Efrika

Our daughter Helen is nearing the end of the first week of the school year teaching Kindy kids. She rang today and gave us a word picture of her charges. They are mostly lovely kids with the exception of a couple of difficult ones. One young fellow is a new arrival from South Africa. Helen has had a couple of years with bad mannered South African children. This particular 4 year old yelled at her telling her to shut up...in that awful Sith Efrikan accent.

The attitude of the children can, I believe, be attributed to having African servants who look after their every need but are not able to discipline the child. I observed some of this in Papua New Guinea when we lived there.

In the late 1950s there was a wave of Rhodesian immigration into Western Australia through Fremantle Harbour and I remember reports of the immigrants ordering the wharfies to carry their baggage. That went over like a lead balloon.

There are quite a few real African migrants here now. I doubt they are living in the same suburbs as the white South Africans. The ones from Somalia are the most mentioned in the newspapers.