I'm South African

Today I am Zimbabwean, tomorrow Nigerian and every other day I am Congolese! Most confuse my Identity. This started when I moved to Cape Town for my postgraduate studies in the University of the Western Cape. In campus, most French-speaking students would speak to me and I would respond in English. I would see the sudden change in their faces showing a sense of disappointment. To them, I have everything about me confirms that I am their own. At this time, the only word I knew was ‘Je Tem’ (I love you) which was never useful in most basic contexts. Some Zimbabweans find it funny when I say “I am South African” while I can speak fluent Shona. They think I’m one of those ‘Harare wanabees’ who came to South Africa at a young age and claim they are citizens. To add to this misperception, most people cannot locate my English accent anywhere in South Africa. 

Woes befall me at a police station when I lost my ID in 2010. This was not plain sailing because police wanted to depot me as I was “claiming” that I have lost my ID when I never had one-assuming my foreign status. I was at this station with my Zimbabwean husband, to the police, this confirmed my conspiracy. Fortunately, my FIFA accreditation (was working for FIFA at the time) had my ID number on it. In this baffle state, I could not stop laughing at four policemen who were clueless about Venda people from the Limpopo Province. In my mind, I’m thinking ‘how did this people get into this uniform when they have limited knowledge of their country’. The truth is: my great grandfather belonged to one of the last groups to descend from Central Africa to Zimbabwe. He settled in there where he married a Zimbabwean woman who gave birth to my grandfather and his siblings. However, when the dark-cloud of border war began around the late 1920s, my grandfather and his siblings fled to South Africa and settled in the north-eastern part of the Limpopo. Here- in South Africa, the generation of my father came about. Therefore, I am South African!