I am revisiting my chosen home. The visit conicides with the exact date of my departure 15 years ago. It has been a long journey spanning three continents with half a dozen of moves and relocations. As I try to pick up the pieces in my apartment, and get up to date with my admin at the notorious Department of Home Affairs (DHA), I am trying to figure out what my final relationship with this place will be.
I have wandered down here in the waning years of the last century. I lived with a husband in Johannesburg, East London, and Cape Town. I birthed my son here and bought my first property. I made friends with whom I still maintain contact. I come here on Home Leave every other year. But it is painfully obvious to me that I lack the familial ties, and I feel that my emotional attachment to this place is weakening.
My son had a traumatic experience at the DHA last year, and he feels that he does not want to come here EVER again. I know, he is a teenager and at his age we also misused the word EVER and its adjacents like never and forever, but given the efficiency of this government bureaucracy, it is possible that he won’t be able to come here. His passport application was complicated by the fact that he needed an old green ID, and an ID is a prerequisite for a passport, so he might get stuck in a closed loop that only providence is capable of breaking. So now my ties with my chosen country are simply one close friend, one old friend, and an apartment that needs lots of maintenance after long years of absence and short-term rental abuse.
The place is a money pit. My close friend is doing okay, but my other friend is in dire financial straits. The apartment needs a fortune to be brought back into shape, and even though I try to upgrade and fix it every time I come here, things take very long, with African workmanship and African delivery timelines. The worst, however, is that the quality of things has visibly deteriorated, or perhaps I have gotten used to Western quality standards; I now see the flaws of what is on offer here.
Another disturbing thing is the city poverty I witness regularly in Cape Town. I remember when I first came here; I worked in town, and I sometimes walked the streets in the city and spent time in the Company Gardens. Now the place is depressing and threatening. A few hundred meters away from museums and the national gallery, vagrants take the sunny grass as bedding. I saw at least a dozen of them still dozing in the middle of the morning when I walked back from one of my admin errands in town. Now I understand my son’s sentiment of not feeling safe while walking in Cape Town. I had an unpleasant experience in the CBD a few hundred meters away from Lower Plein Street, where a security guard warned me it was not safe where I was heading. I waved him away, thinking that I knew the dangers having lived in this city for over six years. I am glad that it was just a short harassment without loss or damage to self or property, but I am sure I will never walk in the CBD again. The city I left 15 years ago no longer exists.
I still think SA is incredibly beautiful. Last week I took a road trip with my close friend and her son. We went to Addo Elephant Park, then drove all the way from the Eastern Cape through the Garden Route with stops along the way in Knysna and Mossel Bay. The scenery is incredible, and the difference between the country lifestyle and Cape Town is obvious. Even my close friend is rethinking her stay here after over 20 years in the country. Looking at her, I wondered whether we both suffer different stages of an attachment to a sunk cost.
We were travelers on the same journey at different times. She observed my struggle as a single mom and the amount of blood, sweat, and tears I expended on this journey. South Africa to me is synonymous with all this. I worked hard to gain access to it, to become a citizen, and to survive as a single mom. I still return here even after my ex-husband has long left. I found out that his 3rd ex-wife, my successor in the victimhood of narcissistic abuse, has also left SA. The only people who are left are my close friend and my first housemate in Cape Town when I moved here in 2005. And I think that they are both questioning their reasons for staying. And if they leave, then I have no more reason to maintain this place, so distant from everything I now have.
It is perhaps too early to make a decision yet, but it is time to start thinking about it.
The Loskop Diaries 