The Hypothetical Confessions of a Border-Jumper IV

Heat. That’s all I think of when I look back to that 2015 Christmas Day. The heavy weight of it that just wouldn’t lift as I walked out of O.R. Tambo airport. Heat around me. Heat all over me. Heat inside of me. Heat engulfing me. The hottest December of my life, when all my ploys and hopes burned up into ash.

As is typical, the charlatans who promised much had ultimately under delivered.

He was supposed to be on hand with critical information, one of my contacts in Ireland. The basis of my entire trip depended on his delivery of this information at the precise time. The skeptical immigration officers rifled through my papers unconvinced. One phone call would have given credence to my story. A phone call that never came.

And in that moment I was a young girl again; 6-years-old, kneeling at my mother’s deathbed; her smiling at me—the serene smile of death being embraced, being welcomed.

In that same moment, I wasn’t at an airport staring up at immigration officers, I was in a church, part of a weeping congregation, a coffin before us, bouncing on the knee of a tearful uncle as the Reverend, my grandfather, intoned: "It is written, Weep not for me, weep for yourselves."

I was moving from relative to relative 'til finally settling at my grandparents’ home. I was loving and loved by my departed mother’s sister, a single mother living with her sons at the same house.

I was about to start high school and had to make a trip to the hospital to watch that woman who’d became another mother to me fight for her life, gripped by sorrow and fear that a heart-loss would touch me again.

I was a teenage girl who took over that woman’s room when she went abroad for her own survival; with half a wall covered with pictures of England’s most dashing young Prince at the time, who she would stare at mornings, afternoons and evenings on end marvelling at his perfection, marvelling at such a charmed life, clinging to him, to his elevation and nobility… clinging for dear life.

He just seemed to soar so far above third world life, so far above the poverty and the blight. So far above mortality.

I was that girl who cleaved to literature as though it fed her breath. Shakespeare was worshipped; the Jane Austens, the Keates, the Doyles, the Brontes idolised to magnitudinous proportions—whole passages of works committed to memory and heart. Passion for language and England inevitably merging into an ideal that was like an oasis in a desert.

The entire mirage of it surrounded me as I stood there to the side of that immigration queue willing the phone in my hand to ring with the information that would get me on the plane.

But the phone never rang and the mirage dispersed quickly.

***

There is an identity crisis that exists where I’m from. An identity crisis stemming mainly from that awkward paradoxical relationship between a former colony and its former colonial master.

We have been so Anglicised;

You’re near the tip of Africa but your entire education has a British foundation. From a child you are taught to speak, read, and write their language better than your own. You are taught all their customs and habits—even their religion becomes dear to you.

So much, from their popular sports (as steeped in devotion the English Premier League is across many’s households) right up to their very thought processes, as their literature is piled on you to closely study, to memorise and dissect in analysis until it’s coming out of the pores of you—you even sit for their final exams, Cambridge GCSE/A’Levels.

You find yourself having more Anglo customs than those of your own ancestors. You grow and reach adulthood under the governance of that culture.

And sometimes, just sometimes you ask yourself; with my love for the English language and my dedication to all forms of English literature, with my being better read and spoken in English than in my own mother tongue, plus my affixation with the British royals – does that betray my authentic African?

Does such a thing as an “authentic African” even exist?

And that’s when, again, I turn to the pages of one of my favourite autobiographies. A man steeped in the west but with a heritage coursing through his veins he cannot deny. And he writes; “In the end, I am less interested in a daughter who is authentically African than one who is authentically herself”—a concept to hold onto.

***

There can be a number of layers as to why I did all that I did. But one thing I can say that’s the simple plain of it is that it was too hot, always—same as when I stood outside the airport on that cloying December day. I got tired of getting burned. I was parched for a little coolness.

It felt an actual physical weight in my chest, having to stand there outside O.R. Tambo with every fake document I could afford in my hands and with no place to go.

The question resounded in my head: What on earth do I do now?