Becoming African

It was 1995 when I first saw the Transkei. I say saw, because all I did was spy it through a car window. At speed. Doors locked. Windows wound. Don’t stop until you get to Umtata Shell Ultra City. It was the year after South Africa’s first democratic elections. Before then most Rhodes University students who lived in Durban used to make the long journey home via Bloemfontein, adding another 500km to their journey. Now our country was united, the border posts that separated the Republic of South Africa from the homeland of the Transkei were unmanned, and the unrest and bloodshed that had rocked the Transkei – of which I understood nothing – was over. We were free to travel through this unknown land. As long as we didn’t get out of the car.

As I drove with my then boyfriend back to his parent's Natal home, I felt like a child in an old-fashioned sweet shop, where the tasty treasures and pretty colours are stacked on top of each other, behind glass, way out of reach. The Transkei is not a flat land. Hills grow out of more hills. Smartie coloured thatched huts speckle downy green slopes. The road winds and curves and then when it forgets to bend, chances are you’re on a mountain plateau and any moment the world either side will drop away to reveal a deep valley. It was a world away from the brown brick block-like architecture favoured by the apartheid government, and to my 19-year-old eyes, it was as if someone had stolen my blindfold.

I’d love to tell you that this was when I was inspired to discover the heartlands of the country that raised me, but that would be a lie. Rather, my naïve, anxious 19-year-old self was relieved when we were spat out the other side, back to the safety of straight roads and neat rows of Natal. It took another 15 years and 40 countries before I got that itch.

It happened one wet evening in Glasgow. It was raining. Again. A grumbling, misery-packed cloud had blacked out the sun and we’d lit a fire in a rusty oil drum to keep warm. It wouldn’t have be so bad, but it was mid-summer’s eve and we’d invited everyone we knew over for a braai. Fortunately the Scots are never ones to let a downpour dampen their spirits, but for me it was the beginning of the end.

For ten years, like so many other restless souls, I’d been using the Queen’s sodden island and its Great British Pounds as a springboard from which to gorge myself on the world. I’d notched up adventures that one day might impress my grandchildren, but as the rain made a mockery of our summer party, I became restless in another way. Restless for roots. Warm roots. There was just one problem: the country that raised me wasn’t there any more.

It’s neat, dull, whites-only streets had been replaced with vibrant, colourful potholed roads and going back would mean facing up to a horrible truth: that as much as I like to believe I am the captain of my soul, I’m actually damaged goods. Like the rest of my generation, I was a child of a racist political system that raised me to have no knowledge or understanding of how the majority of my fellow South Africans lived, thought, felt, were. Racial segregation didn’t just mean black people couldn’t participate in white society. It meant white people couldn’t participate in black culture. It meant we were ignorant of the place we called home.

How could I crave to put down roots in South Africa, if I didn’t even know it? At best, that craving would be disingenuous. At worst, it would be a craving for the past. And so, with the help of a journalism fellowship from the Open Society Foundation, I set out to go back to the old Transkei, the land that raised Mandela and Sisulu and Tambo, and this time, get out of the car. Some might think I’d be better off going to the urban townships of Soweto or Khayelitsha, to find the pulse of modern South Africa. But I know enough to know that every black South African keeps one foot in the village, one foot in their heartland, and if you truly want to understand something, you need to go to the source.