How To Never Go Home Again
20 January 2018 was a scary day for me. It was the eleventh anniversary of me leaving South Africa.
It wasn’t scary because I’d been out of the country for eleven years. It was scary because the ten year anniversary had come and gone without either me or my wife realising it.
That happened last year, obviously, and we marked the occasion by…I have no idea. There’s actually nothing on my calendar for that day. I could have been working, snowboarding, sleeping, hungover, putting the finishing touches on a book, swearing at a book, stomping around the neighbourhood trying to work out plot problems in a book. I just don’t know. What is certain is that the tenth anniversary of me leaving the country of my birth passed without any comment from me.
I find that vaguely horrifying. And not just because it indicates early signs of age-based memory loss. When my wife and I finished our university course in 2006 (side note: Jesus Christ in a hammock, I’m old), we decided to take a year out and go to the UK, with the goal of getting whatever jobs we could and travelling as much as time and our bank balance would allow. We had every intention of returning to South Africa, a country we both loved and still love, and where all our friends were. We knew we wanted to experience a bit of the world first, and we breezily thought that a year would be enough to get a sense of what lay north of our little country.
Yeah, Right.
What we hadn’t counted on was that it would take close to four months just to set ourselves up in London – flat, bank accounts, jobs etc – and that we wouldn’t take our first real European trip until April of 2007. I don’t actually know the point at which we both decided that we weren’t going to return to South Africa on a permanent basis, but at some point, we both just knew. We weren’t done yet. There was too much to do: too many festivals to go to, too many countries in close proximity, too many weird and wonderful restaurants to try out.
You in the back, sneering about first world problems: you can shove off. Right now. Go on. These weren’t problems. These were magnificent opportunities, and we discovered that we didn’t want to belay them by returning to a country that we loved, but that simply didn’t give us the chance to take them.
A year turned into two. Then four. Then six. A large group of us, all South Africans in London, solidified. We watched our country when the 2007 Rugby World Cup in Clapham. We had braais (barbecues) in the rain. We rocked Springbok jerseys and did everything we could to keep our accents and firmly maintained that we still had the strongest of strong connections to the country of our birth. We’d go back in two years time, we all told ourselves. Four at the outside. For now, there was Oktoberfest to go to and the snowboarding lessons to save for and that new spot that just opened up in Camden and maybe this tiny-ass apartment in Clapham Junction could be improved on and oh hey we just got new jobs and
And then eleven years passed, and we still hadn’t gone home. In my case, I’d gone even further, moving to the great white frozen North, the move to Canada spurred on by a love of snowboarding. And somewhere along the way, the South African part of me just…slowed down. It’s still there. Still very much alive. But it’s quieter now.
This is particularly galling, even a little embarrassing. I occasionally rap, and I once took it seriously enough to actually release a full album – a project which took up a good chunk of my time in 2011, and which is still available online – you can actually download it for free now, because we are way, way past the point of me earning money on it. The album is called African, and it represents an absolutely staggering amount of hubris.
At the time, I wanted to make an album that told African stories that hadn’t been told before, which is why so much of the album relies on storytelling about sci-fi and superheroes (spoiler: that shit hasn’t gone anywhere as I’ve gotten older). But it was also made by a white kid living outside of the continent, something which troubles me greatly now, mostly because it didn’t trouble me greatly then. What a naïve, stupid kid I was.
I’m still proud of the album, and had a tremendous amount of fun putting it together – go listen to a track like Flames, and tell me my shit isn’t dope – but I had to do it again, I would change that title. I still consider myself an African, having been born there, holding a passport for one of its countries, and still possessing a deep love for it, but I’m no longer just an African. It’s gone from being the primary way I identify myself to just one aspect of my personality.
And I find that…a little sad.
I realise this may be hard to believe. After all, what I’ve gotten in return is riches beyond belief, and I’m not talking about money. Living outside of my country of birth has been an unbelievable opportunity, one I never take for granted, which I gratefully seized and which has given me irreplaceable experiences. When you eat weird food, talk to people who have no idea what the Johannesburg skyline looks like, mangle a different language as you try to order a beer, develop an addiction to getting on planes, you can’t help but feel fulfilled. But all the same, I grieve for what I’ve lost: the ability to look back over my shoulder, eye a particular spot on the map, and say, “That’s my home. Those are my roots.”
Theresa May – the asinine, vomit-inducing pseudo-Prime Minister of the country I used to live in – once proclaimed, “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” She meant it as a rallying cry for British nationalism, a call to close the borders and hang the St George’s Cross in your window and turn the country into a tax haven for millionaires. She’s wrong, of course. Being a citizen of the world means being a citizen of everywhere. It means being able to cross borders without a second thought, knowing how to order a beer in a dozen languages, being able to walk down the street in Kathmandu or Kampala or Karachi and meet the gaze of anyone you pass.
It is something people like me can never, ever, ever take for granted, because it puts us in the 1% of the 1%, the lucky few who can travel the world unmolested, and you have the funds to do so. So yes: I know how lucky I am. But when May spouted her piece-of-shit proclamation, she hit upon a tiny nugget of truth. I am no longer a citizen of South Africa – not really. I have a passport there, friends, family. But I lost the right to hold an opinion on the affairs of the country long ago. Now, eleven years after I first got on a plane, it feels like losing a little part of myself.
Will I ever go back? I have no idea. Oh, I tell myself that there are many factors at play: Brexit, the instability in South Africa, the fact that so many of my friends are leaving, the fact that my family still lives there (my parents among them), whether or not my wife and I should try for Canadian citizenship. But really, it comes down to one thing: am I done?
Being in South Africa doesn’t preclude me from adventures, obviously, but it makes it a lot harder, a lot more expensive, and requires a lot more time. No more nipping off to the US for a weekend. No more trips to Europe – or at least, far fewer. It puts Asia further out of reach, and I haven’t even begun to really explore that part of the world yet, aside from a few scattered trips.
Going home would admit that the adventure is over, that I’m too old for this shit, that it’s finally time to settle down. No matter how positive the experience would be – and make no mistake, getting to hangout with my parents and my friends again, visit my favourite spots, would be fucking magic – there would always be that particular element. What did I leave on the table? What else is out there? What am I missing?
I don’t know. I don’t have a neat ending to this. I don’t have an answer. It’s just cold, and I didn’t sleep particularly well last night, and I want my mom and dad, and I’m missing home.
Or what used to be home.
OUTER EARTH: THE COMPLETE TRILOGY
Dropping 6 Feb 2018 – Orbit Books
This new edition of the OUTER EARTH series contains three adrenaline-fuelled novels: Tracer, Zero-G and Impact.
Outer Earth is a huge space station orbiting the ruins of our planet.
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