A Return (A Guest Story by Alison Majuqwana)

A seasoned traveller may well consider returning to places visited. Travelling can present many experiences that feel magical even as they are happening and linger in the mind’s eye for many years afterwards. A traveller may decide to revisit, or not as the memories of the first visit may be sullied. One place that I have never revisited in the forty years since is India. I had some truly magical moments there as well as some trauma at the level of poverty I had never imagined.

Gqberha for me holds many memories. My children were largely raised here and their identities as dual heritage South African children born on the cusp of liberation were both painfully understood, and then vindicated as they met other children born of mixed marriages. As a white woman married to a black South African I was exposed to racism in a way that most white people are not, in all its forms, subtle and less so. At the time that humiliated me, angered me and saddened me. Now I am grateful for the lessons, as my children went through their teens in the UK I saw things that we rarely spoke about then, but now we do often through a political lens that I wouldn’t have the experience to understand fully.

But Gqberha is more than that for me. Close adult friendships were forged in a number of settings with people I regard as quiet heroes for their actions opposing the regime and with others who opened their homes to us as equals, who may not have had the context to do that before. Those friendships have been maintained over 23 years of my absence punctuated by a few visits over the past ten years. We have suffered loss and separation, shared experience and feeling over food and wine and shared intimate details of our lives. These friendships have always been treasured but as we grow older the recognition of the value of them, if anything, increases particularly as we enter the autumn of our lives.

There is an old saying that once Africa enters the soul it never leaves. I feel this. I have always loved the sea. I grew up near where the Thames reaches the sea and the even that muddy estuary held its charm for me as I grew up. I have been fortunate to gaze upon the Atlantic, the Pacific and Indian oceans and some of their smaller subsidiaries, but the Indian Ocean holds a particular place in my heart. At the opposite end of the geographical spectrum, the Karoo has always fascinated me. Some find it bleak, I find it old, with a resonance of the past, as a steady thrum of previous forms and existence. The long stretches of what some would call emptiness so vast that it is possible to see the curvature of the earth is rare in this world. Punctuated by mountains and hills that hold evidence of its creation. I know that battles have been fought in it, dorps founded as colonists won land or missionaries demanded that relationships be cemented in marriage.

I feel a contradiction in my sense of belonging in this land. I wasn’t born here. I have eight years of married life here, which fell apart here. I have the formative years of my children here and these belong to them rather than me. My citizenship by birth is British, and I know very well the harm the land of my birth inflicted on people here. The Khoi, the San, the trek Boers all suffered at the hands of the British. But this is the place to which I have returned in the autumn of my life. I know I will stay here and my bones will become the earth here. I am home.