Fear will keep you safe.
If you are a South African raised during the last 50 years or so, you know this for a fact: fear will keep you safe. Fear will keep you alive.

My parents taught me.
SABC 1 taught me.
Huis-Genoot taught me.
School taught me.
Experience taught me:

Be suspicious. Don’t trust anyone. Don’t talk to the ousie on the corner. Don’t touch unattended parcels. Go to the big field if the siren blares twice. They hate you because you’re black. They hate you because you’re white.

I am an excellent student. I learned well.
So I sit in my kitchen, 15,811 long, long kilometres from my homeland and I shake. It is barely perceptible, but the ripples reach far, far, daar doer aan die anderkant…**

My fear is a soldier home from the war; a war I went into too young to understand and finished too old to forget. It used to have a purpose, but now… now the war is over – suddenly, unexpectedly – and after a brief period of indulgence for the telling of stories and ooh-ing and aah-ing over scar tissue, it is expected to reintegrate seamlessly into polite society.
But the soldier wakes, screaming in the night. It has brought the enemy home, safe inside my skull, where I can never escape.

Fuck you, South Africa! How much farther do I have to go before I can outrun the acrid stench of fear that envelops me so completely? The Gift of Fear – ha! Some gift. You keep your fear in the box it came in, the packaging still pristine; a collector’s item. Talk talk talk about the gift of fear and you’ve never had to wrestle the shrink wrap off while a woman howls and bleeds in a public bathroom.

Lies.
This is the legacy of apartheid.
Fear.
This is what we were trained to do.
We.
Every colour in our new rainbow nation.
Fear your neighbour (but fear his garden boy more).
Fear the culture that is not yours. Fear the skin not like mine.
Fear the dark, fear the day. Fear the crowds and fear the quiet places too.
Fear the man with no teeth and holes in his clothes; the woman screaming for help down the road.
Keep apart.
Fear will keep you safe. Fear will keep you alive.
Fear will keep you apart.

Lies. Isolation.
Fear will eat you alive.

I was born into fear.
Into a country gripped by fear, torn apart by fear, a few short weeks before the Soweto Riots. It is my inheritance. It is my legacy.
And now I sit in a kitchen 15,811 long, long kilometres from my parents’ house. It is my kitchen. It is my house. And I shake.
But I am safe and the shaking will soon stop.

* I shamelessly stole this phrase from the book of the same title – Country of My Skull – by Antjie Krog. It is magnificent and heart-wrenching and the movie adaptation doesn’t completely reek.

** “Waaaaay over there on the other side…”