I am driving to stillwaters, to Stilbaai. Driving a narrow dirt road along wide empty land that bears sign of scars. White wash farm homes stare blank at open veld. Shutter-style windows and empty doorways gape like jackal jaws locked in rigor mortis — the life inside long gutted out. Mounds of stone that once guarded thick wall is rubble in many places. It is a beautiful stone. A soft roan-rinse the same colour as warm pus.

What am I doing driving to Stilbaai? The sleepy coastal village is not my home. It is barely on the Garden Route — South Africa’s famed 190-mile stretch of conservative fill-up and go dorpies. I am following a path. I steer the jeep deep into old wounds. Into the heart of South African slave society. The Western Cape. Here, you can still taste the rich tannins and long citrus finish that enslaved Khoi, Malaysian, Indonesian, Mozambican, Angolan, Filipino, Malagasay, and other stolen people first planted on old estates. Here, their descendants still till the earth. And until as recently as 2013, hired hands could still earn partial wages on the dop system — an exchange of bottom barrel wine dregs for hard labour.

In a meandering conversation along the Garden Route, a lovely Christian woman asked me rhetorically, Why are my fieldhands so partial to alcohol? I said nothing about dop. I said nothing about men like her father’s father. How could they pay pregnant women cheap wine over wages? I did not ask her, How did your farmer father and all your forebears sleep at night watching foetal alcohol syndrome spread throughout this outrageously beautiful coastline like a virus on the vines?

The road to Stilbaai is long. The land buckles where the murram has softened, where tight-packed earth has risen like dough. The car takes these dips and craters on the chin; she pushes on. Into the static rot that masks vanquished country.

I am here to reclaim our land. To ride her ridges and hug her coastline, which is bare naked sand and wild wind on waves that rush with fever to meet her many mountain folds of risen skin. I am here on holiday. I am here to know this vast open country. Not as a fieldhand or a housemaid or a hitchhiking day laborer — but as our ancestors roamed this place. Freeborn.

We arrive by way of a river. Meander along its bend. Drive shouldering rivermouth that splays wide open to sea and sand. I smell the heat of salt and sweat. Of summer holidays. It is December. Or could it be January? The whole country is out of office. Gone fishing. Stilbaai is an obvious place for people to flock. It has the snail pace of Faulkner country. If Yoknapatawpha was a seaside escape. If Yoknapatawpha had a river running through it. If the river was so lustfully lush with verdant life, the farmers called it Kaffirkuils. And if — only if — the black Southerners of Yakapataphanaw had something in common with the enslaved Africans of Stilbaai. If the word kaffirkuils rolled off a Southern tongue and onto the lap of a small child who knows to call a river Kaffir-cock. Locals here cleaved to that name — niggerdick — as late as 1998. Mandela was in power. Apartheid’s raw hide as high and fresh as bare baboon flesh flashing red at the arse.

At the ocean, Stilbaai’s stillwaters are anything but still. Germanic looking matrons unpack a year’s supply of food from coolers and big canvas bags. The full chicken with tender thighs and plenty sides come out. Potato chips of every kind and wine and wors and beer cans now sweating, now sunbaking, now dribbling down a red face that gulps the warm froth down. Dogs of every breed play between sandwiched people. They catch kelp, fetching tennis balls bobbing in seafoam. Blonde children chase each other through the mayhem. They are darts of golden curls farting through the crowd. Old couples collect skin in pools around their knees; they lie on recline, on sun-bleached towels and easy chairs. The beach is packed.

Apart from me, there is a young man, really a child — no more than seventeen. Me and him are the only two on this sardine chock a-blocked beach who look anything like the many millions who first made Stilbaai home. The Khoikhoi — men of men. People call them that, although the term belies Khoisan diversity. All along this coast lived Khoikhoi, Chainoqua, Hessequa, Gouiqua, Gamtoos, Damaqua, and many more national distinctions invisible to Europeans — colonizing serfs and sailors — who only saw “Bushmen.”

The kid is a lifeguard. He is dark and he is beautiful. Dreaded. Looks Zulu to me. He waves. I force my muscles into a smile. Does he feel the ocean vomiting? Does he also feel, standing here, like something fetid is still brewing, something nobody wants to clean up? Is he struggling also, to breathe? Do his lungs feel strangled by a hot and humid air carrying too much stale wind?

I cannot know. But dear Living Gods — mothers of my mothers — why must I know the tight fist clenching in my chest so intimately?

There are about six of us. No more than ten. A fat and mean bully who has fantasies of winning Miss South Africa. She and her little sister live in my Soweto neighborhood, Pimville. We carpool sometimes. There’s another girl who is slight. Shy. Small. She has two fathers competing for her love. My father was my god, but oh, how I envied this girl! The double sets of birthday showers. The weekends that ended in new takkies from her stepdad, or was he merely her mother’s lover? And the unbothered satisfaction that was her mother. Her mother: a beautifully unremarkable woman who kept her nails perfectly manicured, a hot and shouting red. How she managed this in the late 80s — before the miracle of gel — even now, I wish so desperately to understand.

And then there was A. She was the child of a nurse. I think her mother was a nurse. Child of divorce. A different kind of divorce, the kind that strips you, entirely, of fathers. Her hair was short, coiled and dusty. Like there were no combs in her house. Her uniform usually had something missing or soiled — the white hat on but the blue, black, and gold ribbon missing; her baby blue dress clean but white lace socks yellowed. I remember how she sometimes smelled. Rancid. Fusty. I don’t remember knowing her beyond these things, but she was one of us.

My best friend was Motshabi. Beautiful girl. A bounty of joy beaming from her nightshade face and big rabbit teeth. She had hair like a lion. Forestfulls of thick black strands fanning out from every pore. The fuzzy soft fir on her face might’ve reminded me of Mugabe. But there was no Mugabe for us back then. Not in any literature sanctioned by the state. And Mandela remained banned. Behind bars. I knew these men only as stolen words. Only behind closed doors, curtains drawn. My uncle sent us magazine cut-outs of Oliver Tambo and Mugabe from exile, their importance neatly folded and pressed with care between the breathlessness of his letters. How did we get those letters? Who was smuggling contraband over German-sheperded borders?

I never mentioned my uncle to Motshabi. Never asked if she knew Mugabe, or Mandela. Or why she figured us half a dozen and change were sent to this posh school with a swimming pool in the back and tennis courts we hardly used. Why it smelled like fresh rain here, even on dry days? Howcome the plush bougenvilla draped over the walls lazily, in foreign colors that seemed electric and shocking.

Me and Motshabi, Miss South Africa-wannabe, and even smelly A. — we were different. Everyone knew it. The world we left behind at that school looked nothing like home. Home that was Soweto. Home that was bulldozers with young, still-teething soldiers hugging machine guns in the crook of an elbow, in the place where bone tends flesh. A place where only three summers ago, a teddy bear might’ve slept snug, tucked in for the night. Home was a state of emergency — tear gas and disappearances. Molotov cocktails chasing down curfews, necklace-armed comrades, and empty cupboards that laughed out loud at our viral poverty.

What I remember of that Soweto, I catch now in bright fragments. I loved cruising around in my Daddy’s car. He had a red car. Volkswagen Golf, GTI. Sixteen valves. That car was always polished. It gleamed. Was alive. At dusk, I’d look out the window and see kids who looked just like me, gathered in empty fields. They’d be playing at the edge of a neighborhood, where stray dogs wandered through rubble and people burned their rubbish. There’d be a trampoline somewhere in that clearing. And kids would be leaping up. I’d see them from the car — a foot somersaulting past its owner’s waist and the head suddenly crowning like a star. Rising over the rubbish in the lot and the many black bodies gathered at the bottom.

I’d feel something tug at me watching those kids, the sun setting behind us. I wouldn’t have known the thing’s name. But it was the same displaced feeling I got jumping on trampolines at my classmates’ birthday parties. Those trampolines were called castles.

Unlike township trampolines with no safety guards, castles were blown up on manicured lawns, in tea-cake gardens with Persian roses lining palatial grounds. Jumping castles only came to neighborhoods where Soweto-stationed soldiers might’ve been raised, where they might’ve cuddled with their teddies only a few summers ago. What was I doing here?

I’d look around and the only other person who looked like me, who could say something soothing in my mother tongue, would be the woman wearing the universal servant’s uniform. She was an unacknowledged and ubiquitous presence. Her hands would be full, pleasing the birthday princess; her body covered in cake. She’d be carrying carefully cut sandwiches and flame-clapping candles, all smiles, all the while magically invisible, she’d be singing happy birthday in the loudest voice that nobody heard. Her own child uninvited here, most likely tussling on a safety-free trampoline. Her own child, most likely schooled in an overcrowded classroom, fighting three or five other little bodies to squeeze into a double-person desk. What did such a woman think, looking at me? Did she feel expanded and hopeful that things could be different? Or did she resent my reminder of her abandoned child?

At school, there were rules. We were not allowed to speak our mother tongue. That was a rule. We were not allowed to learn our history. That was an unspoken rule. Me, Motshabi, Miss Fake-South-Africa, smelly A. and the rest of us had to sit like dumb horses through tribal parades of the Anglo-Boer Wars. “Fine, the Boers won,” our Anglo-Saxon teachers conceded, but: “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire.” Through World War II never-agains and declarations that “The British Empire definitely won!” Oh, it did? I’d now like to ask my teacher. And what about the Native Military Corps? Or the African Rifles who helped defeat Mossolini’s Italians? Did they win, also? And of course, year after year, we were forced to sit through fresh renditions of the Voortrekkers’ “victory” over our land.

None of us complained. Not in class. Not to our teachers. Not even to each other. None of us asked, “Why, on our soil, can we not speak our tongue? And why, if South Africa is also yours, if being here a long time gives you rightful claim to our land, why are you not bothered to learn a simple thing like ‘sawubona’—I see you?”

We were babies. I shake with rage now when I see six or seven year olds and consider how tender we were, living in the lion’s den. Me, Motshabi, smelly A., and even the Miss South Africa bully, we were little black babies tossed into a treacherous sea of blinding whiteness.

But we were lucky; weren’t we lucky? We went to the very best school by any measure, toe to toe with the finest in the world. Because our parents could pay. Because our mothers borrowed from the Chinaman, because our fathers pawned the family cows — everything they owned, down to their last sock or wedding ring or favorite underwear. Our parents sacrificed everything.

What was they preparing us for?

In a moving track shadowing his father’s faults, describing how he tried to escape his father, admitting that he is after all, his father’s son and then observing how that son has become the father, Jay-Z asks his dad, What was you preparing us for? I’d like to ask my parents the same. I’d like to raise my father up from his grave, shake away the molesting dust and ask him, What the fuck was you thinking? Private school in apartheid South Africa was his idea. Feeding young hungry minds to an even hungrier and conniving crocodile was the only inheritance he left us. A miseducation.

And yet. Suppose my father wasn’t thinking. Suppose he was all too-knowing. After all, he married a crocodile. Slept with her every night. Seeded me and my two sisters in her crocodile belly. My mother’s people are crocodiles. Babina kwena. My mother’s mother, Johanna Mahlako Nkadimeng Mphela, is both crocodile and tiger. Long before I ever journeyed to Stilbaai, she’d already swam in through the Kafferkuils Rivier.

Back then, my grandmother was a hand-me-down hawker. A vintage queen. A mother of nine, she’d pack into a mini-bus with other neighborhood women from Diepkloof, Soweto. Away they’d drive. To the Garden Route. To fill-up and go little dorpies between majestic mountains that might’ve reminded her of Sekhukhuneland. To occupied towns like Stilbaai.

All along the coast, they’d knock on back doors in pristine whites-only neighborhoods and ask the Missus if she had old clothes she wanted to swap for cheap pottery. The Missus would bring out old pajamas and children’s uniforms that no longer fit. She’d fish for knicked school shoes under the bed and tut her tongue, These you can take for free. In better suburbs, the Missus might offer up a sundress the perfect shade of yellow and only a hair away from last year’s fashion. My grandmother would bundle all this up and move onto the next town.

Back home, in Soweto, she’d let my mother pick out the sundress and throw away the broken school shoes that insulted her royal pride. She’d haul the rest onto a busy road. Lay everything flat like a beach spread of tender thighed chicken next to wors and too much wine. What didn’t sell dressed her nine children.

She told me a story once, about a place that could’ve been Stilbaai. She was with her friend, Koko Maletsetse. A maid greeted them at the back door. They explained their business. The Missus traded what she had and picked the best pottery among the coy kittens and camel white vases. It was hot, my grandmother said. Maybe December, before the holidays. Or was it January, before school term? In any case, the sun was greedy for anything moist. She felt no saliva in her throat. Nothing but dry heat coated her tongue. Re kgopela metsi, my grandmother asked. She spoke no English. No Afrikaans. Not much really, except her vast and astoundingly poetic sePedi. I’ve always wondered how she got by. Especially knowing Koko Maletsetse and some of the other grannies. All of them in the same boat.

The water came in tall frosty tumblers. Again, the maid. Again, the backyard. I doubt they ever saw the insides of any home along that Garden Route. The uniformed woman handed each visitor a glass of water filled to the brim, while telling them with her eyes and with her hushed tongue, Throw this water out! She’d done what the Missus made her. Of course, the Missus instructed to give them water. But in the dog’s little pan outside. Or in the tumblers for rinsing out toothpaste. Go quick, she’d said. Fetch. Upstairs in the bathroom.

I never had to ask Koko, what did it feel like? Being treated like that? She was out on those breathtaking Garden Route roads less than fifty years ago—the space of a cheap third world life. Treated worse than their dogs. She was still at it when I started school—late 80s—when I was deliberately being scrubbed of her language, of our people’s ways.

Today, my grandmother is gone. Father gone. And I am a woman on a beach. Alone. Standing in a sea of blinding whiteness. Left wondering, how is it we are made to feel outside, looking in? How is it that we are forever the foreigners on our stolen land?

A few months after driving to Stilbaai, I am settling into Cape Town, where I spend half the year. De Klerk, apartheid’s final torchbearer and its last head of state, is sitting in parliament during President Cyril Ramaphosa’s 2020 State of the Union address. He makes a motion. And maybe De Klerk is still drunk on the Nobel Prize he bizarrely shared with Mandela. Maybe he’s foaming at the brain with an undetected dementia that still refuses to believe Africans anything but servile and docile. Or maybe, the man De Klerk is just speaking his truth when he stands to face an all-black parliament and proudly asserts, “Apartheid was not a crime against humanity.”

Justifying the banality of De Klerk’s declaration would be as deplorable as an earnest response to the unhuman, unthinking question, Why did Hitler kill the Jews?

What am I left with — living in a city that refuses to cure itself of a toxic and long-surviving cancer? What am I left with — entering restaurants and neighborhoods and shopping malls where I am more often than not the only black person present as a patron, the only black body not bent over a broom or serving white supremacy for peanuts? What am I left with — listening to countless well-read, well-traveled, well-liberalized white South Africans tell me with all sincerity that “there were no Africans living in the Cape when Europeans arrived.” Minus the 77,000-year-old sophisticated tools and farming techniques our ancestors left behind in and around Stilbaai; minus “the few” who traded cattle with Europeans as early as 1503; minus the other handful who helped Jan van Riebeck and his Dutch East India Company envoy survive their first 1652 season on our land, minus-minus lot who Francisco de Almeida the Portuguese described as able to “fly over the sand so lightly that they seemed birds,” after the Men of Men wholloped de Almeida and his band of attackers in 1510. And of course, forget that this violent erasure neatly parallels apartheid’s failed attempt at squirrelling 75 percent of South Africa’s black population onto 13 percent of our nation’s land mass, into “tribal homelands”, another “final solution.”

What am I left with — entering hostile territory where my presence is unwanted, where the fact of my regal breath remains a threat?

What I am left with is our mettle. We did not integrate Johannesburg because nice suburban white folk on occupied territory asked us to move in next door. Instead, they moved away–to Cape Town and Salt Lake City and Wellington. And of course, back to London. We did not attend better schools because white parents prayed for our acceptance to their foreign god. Instead, they taught their children hate. A four-year-old stopped other kids in kindergarten from playing with my sister because “she’ll turn you black.” We did not even turn the tide of white supremacy against this ongoing crime against humanity because we suddenly seemed more human.

No. We vanquished apartheid by reclaiming what has always been ours, what can never be stolen. Because everywhere we go, we belong. “Your crown has already been bought and paid for,” James Baldwin reminded us.

A crocodile woman raised me. A forward-seeing man sired me. My mother and her mother gave me all the tools I’ll ever need to walk tall on uncertain ground. My mother’s mother, Koko MaMphela, had a favourite saying to muster our courage. O robala ko maotong a hae na? Do you sleep at their feet? No. I do not.

The feeling on that beach. It was too much. I was six years old again. I was lost and maybe drowning. Unmoored. A pregnant restlessness loomed over the bay’s stillwaters.

I felt
Alone. But I am not alone.
I felt
Unwelcome. But I cannot be made unwelcome.

Because I Am

Here. Reclaiming our land. Breathing in what can never be stolen.