What I Learned In Rome, pt 2: Excellence
The next thing I learned while in Rome, on my first visit outside of South Africa, is that we can afford to do things with the same amount of care and pride that Europeans do things. By comparison we South Africans are quite sloppy in our work. What I observed in Rome is that the Italians do everything with a level of pride and a certain aspiration towards excellence. Everything - from the way they put up neat, clean, barriers when they are renovating something (pictured below), to the way that the shop assistants in the stores handle the transactions with such care.
A good example of this - my wife Auds went to a makeup shop that would be similar to the Body Shop here - and the experience here at the Body Shop is quite good anyway, but the way the transaction was carried out really made me notice - the girl at the counter took great care in choosing the right size packet for the amount of shopping Auds had - rang it all up, was really friendly despite the awkwardness of a language barrier, when the card machine spat out the slip, she took the slip out, produced a pair of scissors, and neatly cut the slip into two - one for the merchant, and one for us. Ours was given back to us, and a small gift was popped into the bag with our shopping.
I realize this is really a small thing - using scissors instead of just kinda using the side of the table to tear the slip in two - ensuring to tear through perhaps the date or the total, making it tricky when you need to return the goods if needs be. It is small - and that’s my point. It’s a level of pride that was foreign to me. This is a level of pride that sweeps from making sure the Vatican Museums are neat and tidy in spite of constant renovation - right down to making sure the receipt in your wallet is cut nice and straight.
This level of excellence gave me a startling realisation about Africa and South Africa. We spend a lot of time telling ourselves that we are “A World Class African City”, that we are the “New York” of Africa - that South Africa is the shining example to the rest of Africa, and that we are creative, unique, and innovative, and that we are poised to - any day now, (any day now!!), hit the world stage by storm - that we will rise up and compete globally in various markets and industries.
This is comforting to hear, isn’t it? We’re living in the best country - heck, probably the best city - on our continent. We are the miracle baby of democracy. We are a shining light to the world! It’s comforting, but sadly, I don’t believe it’s true.
China knows it’s strengths - mass production and cheap labour to name but two - and they are harnessing that to allow them to compete on a global scale. They do not attempt to have the American “Go Get Em, Tiger” attitude that has inspired so much innovation and wealth generation - and they don’t have the spirit of excellence I witnessed in Europe. They really don’t - and they are OK with that - they have identified the way they can compete, and their place in the world stage. If they tried to create a luxury brand to compete with Louis Vitton or someone like that - they would fail. But they don’t do that, do they?
They are not self deluded.
We, as South Africans, I’m afraid - are. We do feel that because we are this miracle story (Madiba! Madiba!), we will get special rules applied to us. We will be treated differently, and we won’t have to be as excellent as the Europeans.
But the world’s standards won’t change to suit us. We will either need to up our game - to their level, or find out place in their world. We need to find our place in our world!
For the most part, people struggled to even know what South Africa was. I got some vague “Ah, lions!” and one “Ah, the World Cup 2010 was bad for us!”, but for the most part, we are from Nowhere.
I don’t have answers - i’m not sure what our place is. I’m not sure where we fit into this “Global Village” puzzle. I do know we have potential, but I now know that it isn’t unlimited potential, and it’s not even as large as I thought it was.
That may sound negative - it may sound like the words of one of our many fleeing soon-to-be expats. But I’m not - i love it here, and I love living here. But if we ignore our weaknesses, or delude ourselves by saying we have strengths we actually don’t have - we will never find our niche. We will always be one of those nameless faceless countries. You know the ones I mean - it’s the longer list of the 193 countries which you can’t think of right now.
So i guess what I learned is that we are a tiny place far from everywhere, and we need to learn what we can bring to the big people’s table if we plan to sit with them.
What do you think we can bring?
