Driver's Ed 101: Xenoracism

I recently got my driver's license.  This is a Big Deal, dear reader.  It has been 7 years, litres of rescue remedy and thousands of rands in the making, this particular milestone.  I started giving it a shot (as you do) when I was 18, and legally allowed behind the wheel.  It went...well, not fantastic.  I failed the first test I ever took within the first five minutes (not exaggerating at all).  Up until that point, I had lived a basically failure-free life.  I was an academic achiever, used to excelling at every test I'd ever taken, and to fail this life-changing one (that most of my peers were passing) was a bitter pill to swallow.  I remember a conversation I had with my little brother (who got his license before me, by the way - huge confidence boost for big sister) in which he asked me how the test went.  I paused before answering carefully, "It didn't go well".  To which my brother earnestly replied, "Don't you either fail or pass?  How can it not 'go well'?" 

I can laugh about this now, but driving has always felt like this elite club that I needed to get into (I have been told many a time, by many a lift-giver that it will change my life) but that was closed to me.  First it was because my paralysing fear of failure.  I didn't attempt to get behind the wheel again for another six years.  And when I finally did, I was out of my parent's house, and the expensive lessons and test booking processes were no longer their bill to foot.  So the second barrier was money.  This year, after a failed first attempt, I got a good job, that pays enough to give me access to the instructor I needed to get over my fears, and learn how to drive.  And so it was that I came to be standing in the office of a traffic department employee, bawling my eyes out in disbelief at my good fortune.  I passed.  I could join the life-changing club!

Well, sort of.  I forgot one minor detail.  You can take the license-ness out of the girl, but good luck with the carless-ness.  Still, not as huge a problem as the damn driver's test, I thought.  So, armed with enthusiasm and my giant (in comparison to everyone else's snazzy, credit-card format) piece of paper that proclaims me legal on the roads, I set out to hunt down a car.  And I found one too.  Reader, I have never understood 'car people': I don't understand how you can enthuse about a mere metal machine and its various parts as much as they do.  I'm not a believer.  But I believe in this car.  I drove her around for a bit, got to know the different parts, got a feel for how I could negotiate my test-fresh skills into something more solid and concrete.  I love this car.  I want this car.  (Don't need it, though.  I need a car, not this one.)  I was smitten.  Filled out the paperwork, attached all supporting documents, dotted I's, crossed T's and fingers. 

I had been told and knew that my lack of a credit rating would maybe count against me; I was prepared for this.  What I was not prepared for was for the banks (including my own, who I have been with for 11 years) to tell me that I was considered a 'high risk' client, because I am not a citizen of this country and do not own property.  So, let me get this straight: I have lived here for collectively 15 years, I've had a bank account for 11 of those, I have been a permanent resident for 7 years, I have paid rent in this country (in one city) for 5 years, I have worked and paid taxes for 3 years, I have a South African identity document, and I am a 'high risk' client.  Not only that, but three of the other banks wouldn't touch me.  Really? 

I swung from extreme frustration and helplessness to deep sadness.  Aside from all of those feelings, I once again reflected on all of the relative privileges I enjoy as a non-South African permanent resident of this country, and what my obvious privilege says about the sytematic barriers those who don't enjoy the privilege I do must face.  I have an ID document, which (although it clearly, categorically states where I was born, and that I am not a citizen of this country) which opens doors that are resolutely closed to many immigrants (to say nothing of the many South Africans who don't have IDs).  This is arguably the first instance, since I obtained my ID at age 18, that I have ever encountered a closed door.  I cannot imagine what it must be like to encounter this kind of frustration, as a matter of course.  I can't imagine what it must be like to be an African immigrant trying to create a life away from your life, and face this institutionalised, systemic xenoracism (in addition to the constant threat of blatant, often violent xenoracism). 

I am incredibly privileged: I will probably be able to write off this and future encounters with institutionalised xenoracism as administrative nuisances.  I'll escape unscathed, and will probably gain entry into the elite club I so long for.  It will feel like a hollow (albeit life-changing etc.) victory.  I can't unknow the taste of what it must be like to try to make a life in a place that officially considers you a non-person, unworthy of the life you're fighting to build.  It seems useless and futile to, when faced with brutal, violent xenoracism, appeal to people's human decency in a society where xenoracism runs like a poison through the structural and institutional lifeblood.

Single Black Foreigner

Two things happened to me recently.  A little over a week ago, I started a new job (thankfully, it is going well, there is nothing blogworthy to report - I go to work, I do worky stuff, I come home and do not sob/talk about work constantly - it's the dream).  You'll know that as part of the new job routine, you have to get set up with an e-mail account, and have your name put on the company website.  The woman who does all this at this new place is from the country of my birth, she speaks my first language, and she knows what the full version of my name is.  This might not seem too significant, but it is: I have been living in South Africa for about 18 years altogether (give or take a 4 year return to the birth country).  As a South African resident, I use the shortened version of my first name.  It's punchy (2 syllables down from 4), and pronounceable (as I said, 2 syllables down from 4), and I use it because it helps to avoid the racial-xenophobic-etc awkward conversation the full version elicits.  Anyhow, this woman knows my full name, as people from my country do.  So when it came time to set up my e-mail address, she naturally assumed that I would be using this full name.  I didn't correct her, probably because I was in awe at the fact that for the first time in I-don't-even-know-how-long, I didn't have to carefully and awkwardly spell my name ("D - for dog, M - for mother...").  So for the first time in I-don't-even-know-how-long, I am using my full name on an e-mail account.

The second thing that happened was that I read The New York Times's magazine this morning.  I do so love the Times, and I especially enjoy the essays that I find in the Sunday magazine.  They are invariably thoughtful, intelligent pieces that make me want to be a better writer (one day, New York Times, one day...) so I can be a better person.  Their cover story this week is about mob violence in South Africa.  Before you go to that link, I have to warn you: it is not an easy read.  It tells in excruciating detail (I believe there is also accompanying video footage - I'm not willing to go there, frankly) the story of a Zimbabwean man brutally beaten to death by a mob that was out to catch criminals who had done something (stolen? killed? raped? what is the scale used to determine which transgression deserves what punishment?!).  He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, on his cell phone, probably speaking the wrong African language.  The story goes that the mob assumed he was a thief because that's one of the discourses out there about foreign black Africans in South Africa (we steal - jobs, women, cell phones, whatever you got, we want it!).  I think it could just as easily have been about him being a black foreigner.  You don't need to have actually physically taken anything, the fact that you're here makes you a thief.  Anyway, they meted out the punishment they had decided on, and he is dead.

These two things seem worlds apart.  I have recently started a job that affords me financial security, and an e-mail account.  I'm on the company website.  This man was working as a painter for a (by the Times piece's account) racist man, and was living far away from his home and from his wife and child, in a South African township.  I am alive, he is dead. And although I am a black foreigner, like he is, I have never considered myself as that.  Because I moved here when I was so young, much of my life, and my story is tied up with this country.  I often refer to myself as a South African, not because I am posturing but because I feel South African, often.  I grew up here, I studied here, I work here, I love here and I live here.  Nothing about my relationship with this country and its people feels temporary.  But as I say, I often feel South African; I don't always feel South African.  There will always be a part of me that will never belong here.  There are many reasons for this, one of them being that, well - I'm not from here.  My birth country (which the observant reader will note I do not call my home country) is my birth country, and as complicated as my relationship with it is, there is still a relationship I cannot easily disavow (or make sense of).  It's pretty visceral and unexplainable, and I can't put it cleverly except to say that I will probably never say that I am from Cape Town when I am asked.  I am just not from here.  When I read a story like the one I read this morning, what will jump out at me and bring me to frustrated tears is not the appalling levels of crime and poverty that are robbing people of their humanity (though there is that), but the xenophobia that can push human beings to kill another human being with their bare hands.  When I meet someone who can pronounce and spell my name without skipping a beat, I will always feel a tiny frisson of...I'm not sure - excitement? recognition? comfort?

I read that story this morning and I cried.  Because it is just so godawfully beyond-words terrible.  But also because it brought up the fear that comes from living in a place where you don't belong (not fully, anyway).  It's a fear that I meticulously bury and deny because I am kind-of South African, and because I live far away from the 'danger zones' where xenophobic attacks are rampant.  But when my new co-worker instantly recognised my name, and I felt that rush of inexplicable emotion, I realised in that moment, as I did this morning that The Fear is never far from the surface.  It sits in all of us, whether we are here because we need to keep the people we left behind in our home fed and clothed, or because we consider South Africa our home.