"I've Never Met a Nice South African" is a satirical song originating in a sketch on the British television series Spitting Image (series 2, episode 5). It was written by John Lloyd and Peter Brewis and was sung by Andy Roberts. In 1986 it was commercially released as the B-side of the chart-topping "The Chicken Song". When the song was recorded, South Africa was considered a pariah state because of the apartheid regime that was in power.
The song is narrated in the music video by a seasoned expat traveller who describes his unlikely experiences to a bored bartender (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Lord Lucan). He has met the Loch Ness Monster, had a close encounter ('of the 22nd kind, That's when an alien spaceship, Disappears up your behind!'), seen unicorns in Burma, met a working Yorkshire miner and had sunstroke in the Arctic, but despite all these exotic experiences, he has never met a nice South African. The lyrics bluntly describe white South Africans in a variety of insulting ways, such as 'arrogant bastards who hate black people', 'ignorant loud-mouths with no sense of humour' and 'talentless murderers who smell like baboons'. The chorus is sung by a number of gun-toting white South Africans, out on safari wearing Springbok jerseys. As the song progresses, dead animals are piled up on their jeep and the barman becomes ever sleepier before collapsing on the floor.
In the closing verse, the South African chorus names writer and anti-apartheid activist Breyten Breytenbach, exceptionally, as "quite a nice South African" and say "that's why we put him in prison". At the time Breytenbach had, as the song points out, been living in exile in Paris and had been previously imprisoned by the South African regime due to his mixed marriage.
Famous quotes containing the words met, nice, south and/or african:
“A successful woman preacher was once asked “what special obstacles have you met as a woman in the ministry?” “Not one,” she answered, “except the lack of a minister’s wife.””
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“Were it good
To set the exact wealth of all our states
All at one cast? to set so rich a main
On the nice hazard of one doubtful hour?
It were not good.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“The writer in me can look as far as an African-American woman and stop. Often that writer looks through the African-American woman. Race is a layer of being, but not a culmination.”
—Thylias Moss, African American poet. As quoted in the Wall Street Journal (May 12, 1994)