July and August are for swimsuits and sunbathing. It’s for taking some time off and enjoying the warmth of the sun. For many people reading this, the current time of year may be inextricably linked to summer. I don’t want to spoil your enjoyment of the barbecue weather, but you have to remember that enjoying the sunshine in August is a distinctly northern hemisphere thing. For those of us who live far south of the equator, things are a little different.
As I write this, it is a quintessential South African winter’s day. I’m sipping tea, wearing multiple sweaters and I’ve got the heater on. It’s a time for Glühwein by the fire and movie marathons under the blankets. This is when you play rock-paper-scissors with your partner to decide who has to go outside to get a delivery or do the laundry. I watch the weather report closely and wonder whether we may miraculously get snow. Remember winter? It’s going on right now.
Here we have “Christmas in July” parties, which are an excuse to break out your finest winter apparel, but it’s not the same as the picture-perfect scenes you get in all those American Christmas movies. In fact, I still tend to watch films like that in December, in my shorts with the fan on during a heat wave, feeling like something just doesn’t match. I still get recommendations on my social media for perfect autumn soup recipes when it’s clearly spring in my world, and vice versa.
There’s something deeper and more unsettling about this time of year. Winter in South Africa is when we worry. I worry about the many homeless people in my city who have no shelter, let alone the insulated houses that are the norm elsewhere. I worry about veld fires ripping through dry fields and livelihoods. The smoke in the distance is as typical of my childhood winters as hot chocolate. I worry about the unsafe heating and cooking practices many people resort to and the casualties they lead to every year. This time comes with unique reminders of the inequality and suffering that is the core experience of South Africans. For me, that’s winter.
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And here we are at the core of why June, July, and August here will never quite be as jolly to me as wintertime elsewhere. It’s not just that the snowy winters I’ve experienced in Germany or the US were seen from the viewpoint of a sparkly-eyed tourist, amazed at the beauty and the traditions.
It’s that somehow, winter never quite seemed to belong here. Yes, we are “sunny Africa” and the blue sky tends to greet us even on the coldest of days. But, after a lifetime of consuming media – from summer vacation-themed novels to festive-season movies – the seasons have become coded in my mind to be what they are shown to be elsewhere, not what they are here.
Has cultural colonialism stretched this far? Or is the snowless view outside my window just getting to this writer’s head? Perhaps it would do me good to donate more blankets, and perhaps in future to pay less attention to how other cultures negotiate the winter time and a little more time to my own.
Elna Schütz is a Johannesburg-based freelance journalist
