South Africa has, rightly so, become a far less racially charged society. It feels as though all of us are Springbok supporters (though we're collectively still deciding whether we should take Siya or Rachel’s side when it comes to the Kolisi saga) and most of us have accepted that the genre of music known as Amapiano isn't going anywhere. But there are times when it's acceptable to acknowledge that the various races in South Africa inherently handle various aspects of life differently. Well, so we thought.
I read an article the other day titled “14 South African pet ownership statistics to know in 2025” and learnt that around 87% of reptiles kept as pets are not native species, with ball pythons and bearded dragons being the most common.
Let’s be honest, just like Trevor Noah joked when he said all of us imagined a black person when Oscar Pistorius claimed someone broke into his house, you also visualised a white person when I mentioned pet reptiles. This is a safe space.
I'm a 42-year-old black man who hails from a township and when I still had hair on my head not a single person in my hood had an exotic pet. Hugh Morgan, one of my many coloured friends from the predominantly coloured town of Geluksdal, didn't even know what an iguana was, and he was a top three in academics kind of chap. You can bet your last rand Aasim Ansari — my Indian friend from primary school who lived in the mostly Indian town of Bakerton — thought an axolotl was an artificial sweetener. Shame, he was a bottom three in academics kind of chap.
Fast forward a few decades and we see an exponential growth in the number of Louis Vuitton-wearing tenderpreneurs. These people of colour (as if white is not a colour) are now adding exotic pets to their repertoire.
Thanks to their amassed financial fortunes and being willingly influenced by people of no colour, the Bonganis, Hughs and Aasims of this world are now cruising around with chinchillas and geckos in their V-Classes.
Last year sometime I was on a flight to George and, after landing, lo and behold there was a sugar glider in a cage on the baggage carousel. I couldn't wait to strike up a conversation with the presumably white person who was travelling with what I thought was a squirrel.
It turned out that the only other black person at the airport — Lebogang — was the owner and he was on his way to a month-long holiday in Knysna and didn't want to leave his life companion behind.
It may sound like I'm making this up, but I kid you not when I tell you that the last time I was on the larney beach of Llandudno in Cape Town I bumped into a mixed-race lady who had a baby crocodile in her handbag. After correcting my township English using her St. Cyprian's Diocesan School for Girls accent to educate me that it was a “hatchling”, she proceeded to tell me her dad paid a lot of money for it. I could hardly pay attention as all I could think of was how the baby crocodile was kept inside a crocodile skin bag.
If one day I reincarnate as a Caucasian housewife from Bedfordview named Naomi, I will most certainly consider a blue-tongued skink named Lulubelle.
I can tell you for free that there's no way any of the aforementioned POCs would ever dream of having exotic pets if they still lived in historically non-white parts of SA. They would have been immediately labelled as witchdoctors, sangomas and these days, black magic practitioners.
Just an ordinary owl in rural areas is seen as weird and these birds don’t do their reputation any favours by freakishly being able to rotate their heads 270 degrees. Even black cats are considered to bring bad luck in townships, so owning one of these would be a risky move, as it would soon “disappear”.
And when my people in the hood do end up owning pets, even their pet names are not as cute as those given to their suburban counterparts. In tree-lined parts of Sandton, Lindsay named her hedgehog Sonic and Bruce affectionately refers to his tarantula as Kiki.
In previously and currently disadvantaged parts of the country, how much affection do you think Triangulate Magagula has for his dog Mavukuvuku (the scruffy and raggedy one) and what about Lirandzu and Corduroy, her brown cat sporting a velvety skin.
And by the way, when was the last time you heard of a non-white South African from a township saying that they worked through the trauma of growing up without a father with the help of pet therapy? How would that be the case when Hugh and Aasim and I were 100% convinced that a “police dog” was a type of breed?
Some of us are just never going to get to a point where we own a ferret or have a capuchin monkey perched on our shoulder. And that’s okay. However, if one day I reincarnate as a Caucasian housewife from Bedfordview named Naomi, I will most certainly consider a blue-tongued skink named Lulubelle.
