Dear God, my 10 years studying illegally in violent South Africa

Dear people of SA. I am writing to you to thank you for loving me when I lived in your country for 10 years. Illegally.

In January 1991, I travelled to SA with my sister from Nairobi to study at Unitra. I convinced myself that, rather than study arts, I would register for a B.Comm because I was told that there were only five black chartered accountants in SA.

I lived in Mthatha for over five years. I lived in Cape Town for about four years.

When I registered, I had no idea I was supposed to apply for a student visa too. A year passed before somebody mentioned this to me. I was too scared to do anything about it, so I ignored it, fearing that if I presented myself I would be arrested.

For the 10 years I spent in SA, I never had a proper visa, only three tourist visas. My parents paid my fees in full, as well as my food and residence.

To be honest, SA was a shock to my system. In Kenya then, it was impossible to imagine thousands of students, workers and university lecturers taking over a country, singing and dancing.

Dear God! I thought. The world will break apart if we express our political dreams. Break! I used to be scared. Every day it felt as if SA would break.

Every few weeks in the 1990s, students would gather and march and it was the most beautiful and terrifying thing I had ever encountered.

From my fourth-floor room in Iphulo residence, I would stand, scared, at the window and struggle songs would climb walls, burst out of rooms, stream into corridors, pool on stairs, and a million feet would thud in the sky, in my head and heart.

The day I put on my tiny, black and white television and saw Noxolo Grootboom crying and saw Chris Hani dead, I walked out dizzy, half asleep, to look for people and there were hurricanes of rage and rivers of tears everywhere in Mthatha. Everywhere in SA.

That night we went drinking at a wholesale liquor store/club called Miles and the night was full of anger and tension and dance, and I fought that day for the first time in my life with a Unitra student from Joburg — a guy who liked talking about the fact that he was a gangster and was trying to bully a terrified young woman. I wanted to kill him. He broke a bottle over my head.

Trust Mdia of Diepkloof pulled me into a car before more damage was done. Trust was there for me, a brother for years. He took me to his home, showed me Joburg and Pimville and his friends Percy and more, and his mum who took me in like a son.

It was everywhere, this rage, these songs, these armies of young people. On television, on radio, on the streets.

Meanwhile, me. I wanted to be a hard-working, middle-class boy from “Africa” and earn R16,000 a month as a chartered accountant, buy a 16-valve car, pretend to fall in love with a yellow-skinned girl who looked like she lived in an R&B video and pose cool. I had an S-curl, and Xhosa girls told me I looked like Luther Vandross.

That made me very happy. I was too scared to look for sex.

I failed exams. Every year, I failed more, slept more, fell more, until I would lock myself in my room in Iphulo residence, hiding from my uncles, my parents, class, exams. Ashamed, guilty, confused. Away from home.

People of SA, let me name names. The people who watched over me. Champion Ngcobo of Butterworth, who had a shebeen in his room on the fourth floor of Iphulo residence, who never charged me for beer and Courtleigh cigarettes “because you are my brother far from home”.

Champion came from a poor family and I did not. He supported his family. During weekends he was a taxi driver, Butterworth-Umtata.

SLEPT AND SLEPT

I slept and slept through weeks and weeks. Sometimes I would come out on a weekend and drink and dance and get wild. I was very depressed, confused. Broke. Gay. Unsure. Scared. Conservative. Kenyan.

I read every novel in the Mthatha public library. I read, borrowed and stolen novels. I hid throughout my twenties from myself and from the world living in books, scared to act, to make choices.

Today, let me thank the nameless soldier. He stopped me in the corridor and spoke to me in Kiswahili and told me he lived for 10 years in Tanzania. He told me he was Apla.

Sometimes, lonely and broke, I would go to his room and we would eat supper, and he would order beers and we would talk in Kiswahili for hours and the heartsickness would go away.

The nameless soldier once asked me to come to him if anybody threatened me because I am a foreigner. One time, we were drunk and he showed me an AK-47 under his bed. “We are ready,” he said.

I remember the blood flowing from Chris Hani’s head.

One time, we travelled to Mangosuthu Technikon in Umlazi to play sports. I was in the basketball team. I was very fat and we got beaten badly, and that night we stood, tired, holding beers.

I was so homesick that night because those hills looked like Gikuyuland. My father’s home: rich, green rolling small farms. Zulu sounds so much like Kiswahili. The same lilt.

Zululand looked like my mother’s home too. From my grandfather’s hill in Kisoro, Uganda, you can see Rwanda and the Congo. And it is just a few miles from there that rivers of blood flowed in 1994.

And then, from those hills around us I saw flashes of light and sounds I had never heard before near me. Guns shooting as neighbour fought neighbour and Inkatha hill fought ANC hill, and the sky was black, and the air was ripe and green and a billion stars above us screamed like bullets.

Let me name names. The late Zanele Xaba, a genius. The late, and fearless, Dadawele Koyana, so much younger than me, and so much braver. I would never have become myself if I had not met Dadawele.

All those who have died in violence in SA because of a system that was evil. Those Africans who live in SA and have been injured. Those who have been killed.

Those who live in hiding, in camps, in terror as gangs of Afrophobes hunt them.

I wish to celebrate the dreams of Africans. The adventurous spirit to look for livelihood wherever it finds possibilities.

I wish to celebrate Africans who are let down by our governments who put walls between our hopes and dreams, and who do nothing when our brothers and sisters drown in the seas of the north.

I send my love to all. To the family of the late Emmanuel Sithole.

Mr Wainaina’s memoirs, One Day I will Write About This Place, details how he grew as a person in South Africa.