I've Never Met A Nice South African
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I've Never Met A Nice South African is a satirical song originating in a sketch on the British television series Spitting Image. It was written by John Lloyd and sung by Chris Barrie and was commercially released in 1986 as the flip-side of the chart-topping The Chicken Song. When the song was recorded, South Africa was considered a pariah state because of apartheid. Spitting Image's take was characteristically savage.
The song is narrated by a seasoned traveller who describes his various outlandish experiences to a bored bartender, including: meeting the Loch Ness Monster, having a close encounter of the 22nd Kind, seeing unicorns in Burma, and suffering a sun stroke in Arctic — but in all this time, he has never met a nice South African. The lyrics bluntly describe white South Africans in a varietly of unflattering ways, such as "talentless murderers" "who hate black people."
Burma was but one of the less than democratic destinations visited. China, Mali and others are all mentioned, but only (white) South Africans bear its brunt.
In the music video for example, the chorus is "sung" by a number of gun-toting white South Africans, out on safari; as the song progresses, dead animals are piled up on their jeep.
The closing verse names Breyten Breytenbach as "a nice South African". As the song points out, Breytenbach did emigrate to Paris, but was later imprisoned when he secretly returned.
In 1982 he was released and returned to France where he later became a French citizen. In 1986 he visited South Africa for the first time since his release and in 2000 took a position at the University of Cape Town. He currently spends a lot of time in South Africa where he is ironically also an outspoken critic of the current post apartheid government's race bases policies.
