Homeland

Prologue

“All is ephemeral, both that which remembers, and that which is remembered”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts and that is where all our battles ought to be fought”

Mahatma Gandhi 

“I'm searching for the spirit of the Great Heart, To hold and stand me by,

I'm searching for the spirit of the Great Heart, Under African sky”

Johnny Clegg, lyrics

There is a wormhole across the Mtamvuna River. It is disguised as a steel suspension bridge, but everyone that crosses it knows they have been catapulted back in time. To the north, the road is smoothly tarred and speeds on to the shiny shopping malls and beach resorts of South Africa’s Kwazulu Natal province. To the south it narrows to a patchwork of potholes, delivering weary travellers to the lallies (villages) of the old Transkei, the former apartheid-engineered homeland of the Xhosa-speaking people. It is here that the country’s legendary anti-apartheid leaders including Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Govan Mbeki and Walter Sisulu grew up. And it is here that many South Africans still live in the old way: in rainbow-coloured clay-brick huts, close to the graves of their ancestors, under the rule of tribal chiefs, often without access to running water and electricity.

I travelled south through the wormhole for the first time in January 2010, while the country busied itself with preparations for the FIFA World Cup, a lone white South African woman at the wheel of a bakkie (pick-up truck). I was heading to the coastal town of Port St Johns to stay with the first woman I had ever met in the Transkei, who was the last person I had expected to find there. Thea Lombard is a single, blonde Afrikaans woman of a certain age who, with the help of waifs and strays has turned a derelict old farm into a traveller’s hideaway. The first time I stayed with her she carted me off down “the worst road in the Transkei” to Umgazana, a coastal village where she has a holiday home. The idea that a white Afrikaans woman took her holidays in the middle of the lallies blew my mind. Most South African white folk build electric fences around their homes to insulate themselves from their fears. And there was Thea, declaring to me that there was nowhere on earth she felt more relaxed and at peace. She was the opposite of everything I knew and believed about South Africa, which made her the perfect starting point for what I was about to do. 

But first, let me take you back. To 1995. The year 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 up. Do not stop until you get to the other side. It was the year after South Africa’s first democratic elections. I was a journalism student at Rhodes University, travelling with my boyfriend back to his parents’ Kwazulu Natal home. Before 1994, most white students who lived in Kwazulu Natal made the long journey home via Bloemfontein, adding five hundred kilometres to their journey. Now the border posts that separated the Republic of South Africa from the Ciskei and the Transkei, the two so-called independent Homelands of the Xhosa people, were unmanned, and the unrest and bloodshed that had rocked both these in the latter days of apartheid – internal coup d’etats of which I understood nothing – was over. We were free to travel through this unknown land. As long as, on strict parental instructions, we did not get out of the car.

As we drove I felt like a child who had broken into an old-fashioned sweet shop, where all the 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 scatter across brilliant green hillsides. The road winds and curves, and chances are when it forgets to bend, you are 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. But I would be lying if I said I wanted to get out and explore. If anything, I was relieved when we were spat out the other side on to the straight, smooth roads of Kwazulu Natal. It took another 15 years and 40 countries before I felt the need to return to the land of Mandela’s youth. 

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

Like so many other young, restless souls, I had been using the Queen’s sodden island and its Great British Pounds as a springboard from which to discover the world. I had notched up adventures that one day might impress my grandchildren, but as the rain made a mockery of my summer party, I became restless in another way. Restless for roots. Warm roots. There was just one problem: the country that raised me was not there any more. Its neat, dull, whites-only streets had been replaced with vibrant, colourful potholed roads and going home for longer than a holiday would mean facing up to an uncomfortable truth: that as much as I like to believe myself the master of my fate, the captain of my soul, I am 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 did not just mean black people could not participate in white society. It meant white people were not permitted to join in black culture. And it meant I was ignorant of a large swathe of the land that I like to call home.  How could I crave for roots in South Africa, if I did not even know the country? At best, it would be nostalgia. At worst, it would be a craving for a racist past.

During the decade that I had been abroad, South African newspapers stories had been dominated by sensational stories leaked from the country’s security intelligence services. These stories were eventually revealed to be the result of internal power wranglings between the incumbent president Thabo Mbeki and the man-in-waiting, Jacob Zuma, but like most South Africans, as I waded through finger-pointing headlines about arms deals, AIDS denials and conspiracies, rape allegations and corrupt police chiefs, I was left confused and bewildered, wondering who had done what to whom, and in what order and why. The truth about South Africa had been purposefully censored throughout my 1980s childhood, and despite the fact that we now had an vibrant, free press, it felt as if I was never any closer to understanding what made this country tick, who we were, who we wanted to be. I felt defined and defiled by my inability to make sense of this complex, conflicted land.

Fortunately providence intervened. One rainy afternoon, while half-heartedly reading the liberal South African Mail & Guardian newspaper online I spotted an Open Society Foundation advert inviting applications for a 3-month journalism fellowship to investigate democracy in the new South Africa. During my years living in the UK I had worked as a freelance journalist for national newspapers and magazines, including The Independent, The Scotsman and the US news magazine Time. With the backing of an editor at Time, I pitched the idea of investigating how democracy had changed the lives of those who live in the remote, rural villages of the old Transkei. Written like that, it might sounds like the seed of an unreadable, high-brow academic study, but my intentions were more humble: I wanted to get out of the car in a place which had previously been off-limits. I wanted to take my ignorance and fears for a ride.

Some will argue that if I really wanted to get close to the Africa in South Africa, I should have immersed myself in the urban townships of Johannesburg’s Soweto or Cape Town’s Khayelitsha that are still, almost 20 years after apartheid, unchartered territory for most white South Africans. Perhaps. But it was not the urban pulse that intrigued me, but the unheard voices of the people whose colourful, rural homes I had once spied through a car window. I wanted to get as close as I could to those from whom history had separated me.