A Place to call Home: Adventures at Home Affairs, South Africa

Where a man feels at home, outside of where he's born, is where he's meant to go. 

~ Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

If the man at South African Home Affairs in Qwaqwa had not decided that he could not process my visa due to the fact that he was “in mourning” and if the South African Home Affairs officer in Paarl had not decided to deny my request (and threatened to put in me in jail) because he (falsely) believed I was border hopping, I would not have found myself on 56 Barrack Street at 5:30 am on a Monday morning.

I was the third person to arrive at Cape Town’s Home Affairs office that morning—a Somali and a Congolese refugee being my two companions. The security guard was intently speaking with the two men and I edged closer to listen.

“Zuma needs to step down,” the guard explains. “He is ruining Mandela’s legacy.”

The Somali and Congolese man are nodding in agreement.

“Did you see them booing him at the funeral?” the guard asks.

“I saw it in the paper,” says the Somali refugee.

“Mmm,” the Congolese man nods along.

“What did you think about Marikana last year?” I can’t resist jumping in.

“Ohhhh that was bad. That would have never happened under Mandela,” the guard says. “You know South African politics?”

“Just a little that I’ve read here and there,” I say. “But if you don’t like Zuma, what kind of leadership would you like to see in South Africa?” 

And before I know it all three men are avidly discussing what needs to be done for South Africa to truly be a rainbow nation and what changes in leadership must take place. I listen, intrigued by the fact that two of the three men are not South African.

“You know a lot about South African politics,” I say to the Somali refugee.

“Well I have to,” he says. “I don’t want to go back to Somalia. Cape Town is an amazing city and South Africa is my home now.”

Home is such a slippery concept, especially in a “globalizing” world. I have often struggled to define what home means and I am struck by his certainty that Cape Town is home, not a resting place until he can return to his motherland.

More people begin to arrive and two lines begin to form – one for those seeking refugee status, and one for the rest of us. I take my spot at the front of the “everything else” line and patiently wait for the doors to open at seven-thirty.

At seven-fifteen a lady yells at me, “Go, go, go!”

“Ma'am, the doors only open at seven-thirty,” I say.

“If you don’t go, I’m going in front of you,” she responds.

Soon there is a whole crowd of people pushing and shoving behind me until a guard stops the crowd and asks them to please wait patiently until seven-thirty.

Seven-thirty comes and it is a mad rush through the doors. Queues, apparently, do not matter. I find myself sprinting to the information desk to get my number, so that my five-thirty start to the day is not wasted in vain.

I sit down, waiting for my number to be called, and an engaged couple, Thembelihle and Anashe from Zimbabwe, sit next me. “Those were quite the lines this morning,” Thembelihle remarks.

“They were….different than how we queue in Canada.”

Thembelihle laughs, “It’s chaos here, but you get used it.”

“I take it you’ve done this before?” I say.

“Oh many times,” Thembelihle responds, “working visas, student vsias, visitor visas.” He proceeds to tell me their story:

Thembelihle and Anashe fell in love in Zimbabwe when they were just eighteen. However, there were few economic opportunities, and Thembelihle was too poor to pay for Anashe’s lobola. Looking for a better life, Thembelihle moved to Cape Town in search of work. He started out as a janitor working double shifts to make money, but he knew that to really secure a future for Anashe and himself he needed to go to school.

“I had never used a computer before, but I knew that technology was a growing sector,” Thembelihle explains. “I decided that I must go to school to learn about technology. I remember going to an Internet café for the first time to try and see how the Internet worked. It was a disaster,” he recalls. “But I continued to go and slowly but surely I began to figure it out.”

With the help of friends he had made in the city Thembelihle was able to gather funds to attend school. Every other spare rand went towards calling Anashe back in Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, Anashe patiently waited for her love, trusting that one day they would be together.

Fast-forward six years later and Thembelihle has permanent residence in Cape Town. Anashe was at Home Affairs to extend her visitor visa.

“This is the last time I’ll be getting a visitor visa,” she smiles.

Thembelihle has raised enough money for the lobola, which means that Thembelihle and Anashe will be getting married this spring and Anashe will finally be able to live in Cape Town permanently.

“You don’t want to live in Zimbabwe?” I ask.

“We will always go back to visit family in Zimbabwe,” Thembelihle says. “But Cape Town is where we can see ourselves building a life, raising kids, and growing old together. It’s a place we can make home.”

For the second time that morning, I am struck by the language of home.

My number is called, and after a good half hour of explaining my work in Lesotho, why I have come to South Africa, and assuring them that I am really and truly not border hopping, I am finally granted my visa.

As I leave, I find out that Anashe has also been awarded an extended visitor visa. “It’s always a nightmare coming down here, but it’s so worth it to be able to stay,” she beems.

“It really is, isn’t it,” I say. “This truly is an amazing place.”

This past fall I was reading Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa and there was a line that hit me:

Where a man feels at home, outside of where he's born, is where he's meant to go.

It is easy to see why Cape Town is a place so many want to call home. For the Congolese and Somali refugees, Cape Town offers a safe haven. For the Zimbabwean couple, Cape Town represents economic opportunity and a place where they can build a future for their family. For myself, it has been a much-needed resting place.

Of course, it is not with out its shortcomings: Mandela’s vision for a rainbow nation is still very much a work in progress. Even if you have enough wealth to buy security, crime is still a problem. More superficially, there are a few too many people who look like they stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch ad.

Yet, there is something magical about this place. Maybe it’s the way the fog rolls over the top of Table Mountain on misty mornings, or perhaps it’s the dramatic landscape of Cape Point, the waves at Muizenburg and quaint coffee shops in Kalk Bay. Maybe this city’s magic resides in the rich history of the land or in the sincere hospitality of South Africans. Whatever it is, there’s something here that makes people from around the world not only want to stay but to claim this place as home….even if it does mean dealing with the chaos of Home Affairs.