“They don’t know what we know.”
And yes, it does sound better in Afrikaans. "Hulle weet nie wat ons weet nie". But alas!
In recent news, sana, we’ve been dealing with issues we never thought were issues. In case you have been living under a rock and frankly, with the cost of living, I understand why you might want to, South Africa has been the talk of the town.
Apart from the Springboks beating the All Blacks 33-26 at DHL Stadium on Saturday, August 29, should have been more than enough excitement for one weekend, we somehow found ourselves at the centre of an international aviation debate.
The tea, shall we say, is the Airlink flypast.
While aviation experts were asking whether the aircraft had flown too close to the stadium, the comment section was busy asking whether they could have gone lower.
One person suggested that if you thought these pilots were good, you should wait until you see our taxi drivers.
Another simply declared that “South Africa is not for beginners”, while someone from the Cape Flats pointed out that people there would tell you the pilots could have gone lower.
Then came the inevitable: “If we die, we die” - a South African proverb, according to the internet.
You have to admire the confidence. One TikTok user even admitted they had not slept while defending Airlink “as if I was in that stadium”, which is perhaps the most South African sentence ever written about an aviation incident.
At some point, we had all become aviation experts, with opinions on flight paths, altitude, safety margins and pilot skill, despite most of us having no qualifications beyond successfully getting through an airport security line without leaving a bottle of water in our bag.
Watching something once and arguing about it online was clearly not enough. Someone turned the whole thing into a game.
Created in Cape Town by developer Nico du Plessis, "Flappy Link" puts players in control of an Airlink plane and challenges them to see just how low they can fly over the stadium without crashing into it or, as if the pilots didn't have enough to worry about, a hadeda.
If there is one thing South Africans understand, it is that no flight through Cape Town is complete without the possibility of being taken out by a bird that sounds like it has a personal grudge against you.
At this juncture, the flypast had gone from a few seconds of aviation footage to a full-blown cultural moment.
It was being dissected on social media, turned into memes and converted into a game, while the actual rugby match, you know, the one where the Springboks beat the All Blacks seemed to be fighting for attention.
Yet underneath all the jokes is something I find far more interesting: why are we so comfortable laughing at things that make people elsewhere genuinely nervous?
South Africans have developed a rather unusual relationship with risk. We live with uncertainty as part of ordinary life, whether that means charging every electronic device before load shedding, swerving around potholes that could swallow a small hatchback, keeping buckets ready because the water might decide to take the afternoon off or watching your belongings when crime is part of the everyday calculation.
When a traffic light stops working, we don't necessarily wait for somebody to come and restore order. We look around, assess the situation and start negotiating our way through it.
It is not that we don't understand danger. It is that many of us have spent years learning how to function when things don't go according to plan.
Independent registered counsellor, Vanishaa Gordhan-Narotam says repeated exposure to crime, frightening news and uncertainty can make South Africans more conscious of their surroundings.
“It’s a combination of threat awareness, so being aware of a threat beforehand, and then adapting,” she says, pointing to behaviours such as keeping a safe distance from other cars at known smash-and-grab hotspots.
That constant awareness can also be emotionally exhausting, while humour can become a way of regulating those feelings. “A lot of people can actually use humour, jokes, sarcasm and, as you say, bravado as almost like a psychological coping mechanism,” Gordhan-Narotam says.
“Even though that situation is potentially dangerous, we have found a way to deal with it that allows us to feel safe in the moment.”
That may go some way towards explaining the “they don't know what we know” attitude. There is an almost instinctive feeling that outsiders are seeing the situation through a different lens. They see two aircraft flying incredibly close to a stadium and think danger.
We see pilots performing a manoeuvre that was planned and approved, and some of us immediately think: “Look at that skill.”
Of course, that doesn't mean every concern should be dismissed with a laughing emoji. The South African Civil Aviation Authority is investigating the flypast and the safety questions surrounding it are legitimate.
Airlink has maintained that the operation was carefully planned, while its planned flypast over FNB Stadium this weekend has since been withdrawn because of unfavourable weather conditions.
There is a serious conversation to be had about aviation safety, but that is not quite the conversation South Africans have been having online.
Our conversation has been closer to: imagine if those pilots were taxi drivers. And that is where our sense of humour becomes part of the story.
We use it when things are uncomfortable, uncertain and sometimes downright frightening. We joke about the pothole, the broken traffic light, the power going off halfway through dinner.
We send the meme, make the TikTok and carry on. It is a coping mechanism, certainly, but it is also part of how we recognise one another. There is a shared understanding that comes with having lived here long enough.
You look at something and think, "You think this is bad? Yoh, you should see the rest of it".
That is what makes “they don't know what we know” such a perfect South African response. It is funny, slightly arrogant, probably a little reckless and, somewhere underneath all of that, rooted in experience.
The problem is knowing when experience has made you resilient and when it has simply made you too comfortable with risk.
South Africa is not for beginners. We know this. The people on TikTok know this. The world knows this. The taxi drivers certainly know this.
And if you don't?
Well, then maybe you don't know what we know.