AGATHI was born and brought up in South Africa, her parents having set sail from Cyprus 40 years ago to seek a new life in Zimbabwe.
The family returned to the island 15 years ago and immediately experienced a wide range of problems, ones that have since beset many other South African repatriates.
“Our relatives here in Cyprus were constantly telling us to return, as they were worried about the changing and dangerous political situation in our adopted country. This always came with promises to help get us set up in Cyprus and because they offered support we eventually decided to pack up and come back.
“Sadly the reality of the situation for us and many thousands of other repatriates was very different and we had a really difficult time finding our feet.
“It felt as if our Cypriot relatives thought we were ‘too big for our boots’, probably because we had seen a bit more of life, were also a bit more open-minded and less wedded to the old style of doing things.
“There was also the problem of trying to understand why so many young and old people had what we would describe as a sort of ‘tragedy blanket’ permanently draped over them. Every little thing seems to be a tragedy, with little or no joy being expressed in their lives, just a feeling that sorrow and problems are always be expected.
“What’s more, we had no personal experience of what horrors our relatives had gone through during the ’74 invasion, which somehow lost us a lot of credibility.
“We were (and for the most part still are) treated as foreigners, we had little or no status and it was all very confusing.
“We weren’t part of the all important clique that existed, one that would have cleared the way to obtain with ease everything that was needed to live here, from identity papers to driving licences, schools, jobs, duty free cars, in fact it turned out to be a nightmare of bureaucracy.
“We were given no preferential treatment, except the one thing that did work quickly and efficiently was the calling up of the repatriated men to serve their time in the military.
“Many of us felt as if we were almost being victimised for having left our homeland in the first place.
“Of course there were those who returned with lots of money and it was they who presented a rather negative image of the ‘South Africans’. They were children of parents who had arrived in South Africa decades before with only a blanket and some trachana, but they had worked hard to make money, and now the offspring are back, fingers loaded with diamonds, employing maids in their homes and a BMW parked in their big driveway. It’s this kind of display that set us apart and not in a good way.”
Agathi has found it hard to make friends in the Cypriot population: “Not many Cypriots are what we would call close friends, mainly because part of their social culture is wanting to know everything about you, right down to how much you have in your bank account; then, they go and share this information with the whole village. That’s really difficult to adapt to.
“We have some British people as neighbours, they are polite and friendly, but keep themselves very much to their own kind. Many of them experience some of the same problems when they first come to live here, especially with the bureaucracy as there seems to be no set rules or pattern to anything.
“I honestly love what has now come to be my permanent homeland, but I do so despair of my fellow Cypriots selling off their island to developers. I know of one young man in Paphos furiously buying huge amounts of land from Cypriots, then selling it on to the British at a huge profit.
“This seems so strange to me, after all we got full independence from the British, and now they go and sell it all off back to them. After 1974, it seems as if everything was just motivated by making lots of money, as if this act alone would save them from anything else bad happening to them.
“The simple life that was once enjoyed here has long gone; it’s now a case of how much money can be made with little or no thought to the future.”
“I have nothing against the influx of Europeans living here, the majority seem like decent people but, there is a minority who do give a bad feeling.
“My friend works for a satellite service and is regularly asked by English people why they have to suffer Greek subtitles on every English speaking programme. That’s just one example of how insular they can be. They don’t seem to want to learn about our culture or history, few venture beyond their complexes. I would like them to make more Cypriot friends and by that I mean real relationships, not talk patronisingly about ‘my friend Costas who runs the local taverna’ but, get to understand why there are some who are indeed prejudiced and seriously try to see their side of the story.
“If we are on the road to a multi-cultural society, I fear all this will do is create a fragmented society without any true national identity. All of us, no matter where we come from, can always learn from other people; that’s why it’s so important to embrace other cultures, but, to do this we need to integrate more, not retreat into more and more residential ghettos.
“Cypriots too will have to become more accepting, they have to learn to treat others who come here as equals in every respect, but I fear we will have to wait for the next generation before we see that happening here.”
