(written on holiday)
It is March 28th. In exactly three months time I will once again touch down on African soil. I will be in my Africa, the place my friends believe to be my home, despite my white skin, British parents and Leicester up-bringing. I have been talking the talk for months now: ‘In April I finish University, and in June I move to South Africa’. ‘Where in South Africa?’, ‘Cape Town, the best bit’. ‘What are you going to do there?’, ‘I’m working with the Anglican Church, with HIV+ refugees’. ‘When are you coming back?’, ‘I don’t know, maybe never’. ‘But aren’t you scared?’, ‘Nope, not at all, I just can’t wait to be in my Cape Town again’.
Isn’t it fascinating how vehemently we are able to lie? The truth is that I’m terrified; I have never been more scared of anything. I’ve left home, lived in Cape Town for a year, gone to university, in Glasgow and in Canada. I know where I’m going this time, I know exactly where I’m going, exactly what to do, it is a dream; I couldn’t have imagined a better start to graduate life. So why am I so scared? Here is why.
When I was 13 a fellow pupil put a gun to my head in my classroom. I can still remember the fear, the feel of adrenaline coursing through my body. I wrote an article about the event a year ago, and sat weeping on my bed at 3am, physically shaking as I recalled the helplessness and disbelief. Such an event is relatively unusual in British schools, in Britain generally, and I can be assured that I will probably never experience such a thing again in the UK. In South Africa I cannot be given such an assurance. Lying behind my arguments that I am streetwise and poor; an unlikely target for crime, is the knowledge that one day I may be raped, mutilated and murdered, left in a ditch, and that this event is unlikely to even make the local news. How on earth can I cope with this reality?
I am scared that I will stop writing. My friend Sinethemba from the States, when he lived in South Africa, wrote fortnightly bulletins home, writing about devastating encounters he had with AIDS, with this pernicious virus which had invaded his life and rendered his thoughts chaotic, confused and hopeless. When I have felt similarly full of chaos in the past, my hand has frozen; I am unable to write of such things. I simply go from day to day at these times, staring aimlessly out of bus windows, eating, sleeping, but never thinking, speaking or crying, until I see an advert for a funeral savings scheme on daytime television and weep uncontrollably. Yet there is no point in my being in Cape Town unless I can write, unless I can push past the hopelessness and wax lyrical about my beloved country.
I am scared I will let down a very sad, very vulnerable, very disabled little girl. I have known Bianca for four and a half years now, ever since I met her at the school I worked at. We became close, I visited her at her children’s home, taking her ‘chips and cool drink’, or took her out to concerts and restaurants, and became ever more astounded at the tenacity of this ferocious little girl who refused to conform and refused to give up. Like me, she has become bitter as she has grown older, angered by the world’s betrayal of her. What she needs is a mother. At her own insistence I cannot be this to her; I am not her mama, I am her big sisi, nothing more. Can I even be that? Or are my sceptical friends right; am I ‘too young to take on a responsibility like that’?
I am scared that I will not cope without my own mother. She visits South Africa with me every year. Everywhere I look in Cape Town I have memories of her. Friends ask ‘where is your lovely mama? Isn’t she here?’ How can I leave her behind in Leicester?
Amongst all of these overwhelming fears, there isn’t even mention of my work. How on earth can I, a little middle class, white, British girl, gain the trust of a vulnerable, stigmatised group of people from all over the African continent? How do I avoid representing the oppressive, colonial force that my people have always been in that place? And how will I cope when attending the funerals of children and young adults becomes a part of my daily work, becomes normal and mundane?
The practicalities are a further stress. Three months to go and I still haven’t fundraised. We need to find a house. I need to learn to drive. My French is appalling, as is my Xhosa and Afrikaans. I have to deal with immigration, get a VISA. Will my passport expire while I’m there? What if I run out of money?
I can’t wait though, truthfully. I am terrified that I will be a dreadful failure, that I will let others down, let myself down, get mugged, rapped, hijacked. I am terrified that I will yet again experience the utter horror that I experienced all that time ago in a Leicester classroom. Yet every day I yearn for my beloved country. Every day I read the British newspapers and say ‘I am so glad that I am leaving this ruin of a place’. Ever since working with asylum seekers here and seeing the dreadful way they are treated and used, I have felt that this is no longer my country. It does not represent me, I am not this hypocrisy. This place feels dead. I long for a place where there is life, where the houses are painted in vibrant colours, where people cry with joy, where they dance and sing the whole night through, where the tension and pain seems simultaneously insurmountable and easily overcome. I will keep writing, I will keep singing, I will write to my mother every day, I will treat my security as a second, not first thought, just as I always have. Because, living in such a wonderful country, what else can I do?
