Dear people of SA. I am writing to you to thank you for loving me when I lived in your country for 10 years. Illegally.
In
January 1991, I travelled to SA with my sister from Nairobi to study at
Unitra. I convinced myself that, rather than study arts, I would
register for a B.Comm because I was told that there were only five black
chartered accountants in SA.
I lived in Mthatha for over five years. I lived in Cape Town for about four years.
When
I registered, I had no idea I was supposed to apply for a student visa
too. A year passed before somebody mentioned this to me. I was too
scared to do anything about it, so I ignored it, fearing that if I
presented myself I would be arrested.
For
the 10 years I spent in SA, I never had a proper visa, only three
tourist visas. My parents paid my fees in full, as well as my food and
residence.
To be honest, SA was a
shock to my system. In Kenya then, it was impossible to imagine
thousands of students, workers and university lecturers taking over a
country, singing and dancing.
Dear
God! I thought. The world will break apart if we express our political
dreams. Break! I used to be scared. Every day it felt as if SA would
break.
Every few weeks in the 1990s,
students would gather and march and it was the most beautiful and
terrifying thing I had ever encountered.
From
my fourth-floor room in Iphulo residence, I would stand, scared, at the
window and struggle songs would climb walls, burst out of rooms, stream
into corridors, pool on stairs, and a million feet would thud in the
sky, in my head and heart.
The day I
put on my tiny, black and white television and saw Noxolo Grootboom
crying and saw Chris Hani dead, I walked out dizzy, half asleep, to look
for people and there were hurricanes of rage and rivers of tears
everywhere in Mthatha. Everywhere in SA.
That
night we went drinking at a wholesale liquor store/club called Miles
and the night was full of anger and tension and dance, and I fought that
day for the first time in my life with a Unitra student from Joburg — a
guy who liked talking about the fact that he was a gangster and was
trying to bully a terrified young woman. I wanted to kill him. He broke a
bottle over my head.
Trust Mdia of
Diepkloof pulled me into a car before more damage was done. Trust was
there for me, a brother for years. He took me to his home, showed me
Joburg and Pimville and his friends Percy and more, and his mum who took
me in like a son.
It was everywhere, this rage, these songs, these armies of young people. On television, on radio, on the streets.
Meanwhile,
me. I wanted to be a hard-working, middle-class boy from “Africa” and
earn R16,000 a month as a chartered accountant, buy a 16-valve car,
pretend to fall in love with a yellow-skinned girl who looked like she
lived in an R&B video and pose cool. I had an S-curl, and Xhosa
girls told me I looked like Luther Vandross.
That made me very happy. I was too scared to look for sex.
I
failed exams. Every year, I failed more, slept more, fell more, until I
would lock myself in my room in Iphulo residence, hiding from my
uncles, my parents, class, exams. Ashamed, guilty, confused. Away from
home.
People of SA, let me name
names. The people who watched over me. Champion Ngcobo of Butterworth,
who had a shebeen in his room on the fourth floor of Iphulo residence,
who never charged me for beer and Courtleigh cigarettes “because you are
my brother far from home”.
Champion
came from a poor family and I did not. He supported his family. During
weekends he was a taxi driver, Butterworth-Umtata.
SLEPT AND SLEPT
I
slept and slept through weeks and weeks. Sometimes I would come out on a
weekend and drink and dance and get wild. I was very depressed,
confused. Broke. Gay. Unsure. Scared. Conservative. Kenyan.
I
read every novel in the Mthatha public library. I read, borrowed and
stolen novels. I hid throughout my twenties from myself and from the
world living in books, scared to act, to make choices.
Today,
let me thank the nameless soldier. He stopped me in the corridor and
spoke to me in Kiswahili and told me he lived for 10 years in Tanzania.
He told me he was Apla.
Sometimes,
lonely and broke, I would go to his room and we would eat supper, and he
would order beers and we would talk in Kiswahili for hours and the
heartsickness would go away.
The
nameless soldier once asked me to come to him if anybody threatened me
because I am a foreigner. One time, we were drunk and he showed me an
AK-47 under his bed. “We are ready,” he said.
I remember the blood flowing from Chris Hani’s head.
One
time, we travelled to Mangosuthu Technikon in Umlazi to play sports. I
was in the basketball team. I was very fat and we got beaten badly, and
that night we stood, tired, holding beers.
I
was so homesick that night because those hills looked like Gikuyuland.
My father’s home: rich, green rolling small farms. Zulu sounds so much
like Kiswahili. The same lilt.
Zululand
looked like my mother’s home too. From my grandfather’s hill in Kisoro,
Uganda, you can see Rwanda and the Congo. And it is just a few miles
from there that rivers of blood flowed in 1994.
And
then, from those hills around us I saw flashes of light and sounds I
had never heard before near me. Guns shooting as neighbour fought
neighbour and Inkatha hill fought ANC hill, and the sky was black, and
the air was ripe and green and a billion stars above us screamed like
bullets.
Let me name names. The late
Zanele Xaba, a genius. The late, and fearless, Dadawele Koyana, so much
younger than me, and so much braver. I would never have become myself if
I had not met Dadawele.
All those
who have died in violence in SA because of a system that was evil. Those
Africans who live in SA and have been injured. Those who have been
killed.
Those who live in hiding, in camps, in terror as gangs of Afrophobes hunt them.
I wish to celebrate the dreams of Africans. The adventurous spirit to look for livelihood wherever it finds possibilities.
I
wish to celebrate Africans who are let down by our governments who put
walls between our hopes and dreams, and who do nothing when our brothers
and sisters drown in the seas of the north.
I send my love to all. To the family of the late Emmanuel Sithole.
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