Annie Q Syed

Ara iso ni
Tada hito-me mishi
Shiroki tori
Hatsu koi no kimi
Waga yume wa kore

Once, far over the waves,
I caught a glimpse
Of a white bird
And fell in love
With a dream
Which obsesses me.

~Yosano Akiko

I first visited South Africa in 2006 due to my assigned law internship in Durban for two months. I did not know much about the country other than the minimal textbook information. I was blessed enough to befriend the people whom I now call my ‘second family’! Since 2006 I have visited South Africa with a frequency beyond my budget and hence finally considered a semi-permanent relocation.

The piece that follows is not to say South Africa is free from the myriad of problems typical of any developing country. The reality of diseases, violence, and need for health and education reform stares back at you from every corner. The need for a critical discourse calling for self-examination amongst its youth and young professionals is much needed.  It is a country full of possibilities and the people full of heart. Yet most are caught up in complex web of the past and present that is well beyond a racial issue. (You can read that perspective here). However, a rare reverberation can be felt despite all of the above.

The excerpt below is from the end of a ten page, single-spaced, word document which was sent to family, friends, and interested individuals in the United States, prior to one week of my departure from South Africa in August of 2006:

I know I am coming back in 2010 for the World Cup even if I do not have tickets to attend! (I can’t believe the construction all over that is already going on!). That much I do know. But I know I am coming back before then—definitely to South Africa, but also to Kenya, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and the rest—there is just so much to explore.  If I was to describe this continent—I would say imagine that the Earth is like the human body (one country can be the head, the other eyes, and the rest all the other major and minor parts), if that were the case, then this continent—this Africa, is the heart. This part, this heart, is the part, just like in real life with our human bodies, we ignore, the part we hardly explore, the part life is all about, the only part—despite all our riches, intelligences, pragmatisms, that really matters in the end, because it is the only beginning.

There is a magnetic pull from the nucleus of this Earth which pulses throughout this continent, and if you are really blessed (regardless of your skin color), you can feel that pull as the universe pumps you with hope and life despite all the mistakes of the human race—and you want more of it, because it feels like you are home.  But the heart has vessels and nerves that reach the rest of the parts of the body—and hence if you are lucky you can hear the Earth’s vibrations (quite literally) in Wasco (California), Abbottabad and Lahore (Pakistan), Sullayal (Saudia Arabia) and even Marrakesh (the closer you get to the Saharan desert in Morocco)…but South Africa is part of the jugular. All parts of the heart are equally important I suppose…but is the heart anything without the jugular? I guess some of you are thinking of arguments in your head—that what about the brain? Well, of course if you have the heart and no brain—some would question if you really are even alive. But—without the heart there is no brain…so I mean my analogy quite literally—this continent is the heart.

It also has a way of healing, South Africa specially. A way of nurturing to matters you thought you had long forgotten, choices you have never considered, and decisions you feel too much.  It embraces you and strengthens you till you glow with the same concentration of affection that the Indian Ocean holds, and perhaps that is why this Indian Blue is the loveliest by far—it washes away so forgivingly. South Africans (99% of them) are all about forgiving…forgiving…forgiving…because there is nothing without forgiveness—including forgiveness for your self and for others.  This one South African attorney, my friend, (L. J. V. Rensburg ) said it best when she returned to South Africa after her visit abroad, “If you are lucky enough to feel it, there is a spiritual energy that you feel once you get here (if not throughout the time you are here) and definitely when you return back, having left.”  So, do those who have never left here—do they know all this? Strangely enough, yes. Just like the Blue Indian Ocean knows—although never as charming as the Caribbean—it is mesmerizing just because it is.

I am leaving soon. I am not sad because I am coming back.  This was just the beginning I had been waiting for my whole life.

If somehow the above description does not quite express enough, the following quote by Holly Payne, author of The Virgin’s Knot, relates well to my experiences in South Africa:

Sometimes there are places in the world we have never been but the minute we step into them we are forever changed.  We have native towns, houses where we grew up and return to now and then, but somehow, something overtakes us when we set foot in our homeland. Some call it the karmic debt land and we know it better than the places with which we are most familiar. A crooked tree, a bend in the road, the way a mountain whispers.  We need no road signs here because we already know the way, and everything at once becomes home. I have felt such things in Turkey.

~a.q.s.