Hi - I’m back in a city I used to call home. I have come home. Or have I?
What does that word mean to you?
Where do you call home?
Is it a place? Or more than that?
I get to thinking about this H word a lot when I travel back to South Africa. I am frequently asked if I am going home. I have no idea how to answer. It bothers me that I don’t feel that I am going home.
Birds and animals home to their own territories. Missiles home in on targets with great accuracy! How does that fit in with what home means to me?
I was born in a once country called Rhodesia just north of South Africa. I had a strong patriotic spirit growing up in a relatively newly pioneered land. As a young child in school, we sang of our forefathers marching to this place. I stood for all it stood for and was ready to sacrifice anything for her. Was I brainwashed? By songs.
From the age of four the world shunned the land of my birth. A war started to simmer and brew then.
The “bush war” intensified throughout my teenage years and we adjusted to all the male school leavers going off to do military service at the start of each new year. During their brief periods of R&R they would regale us with horror stories of the conditions they endured out in the bush protecting our culture and country.
We then adjusted to our male teachers being called up to do service for our country every few weeks. It then progressed to our fathers being called up for Police Reserve duty every few months.
While my father was out in the “bush” on police reserve duty I was the designated driver of the household at the age of sixteen. My older brother was away doing his compulsory national service.
My family left Rhodesia with thousands of others in miles long convoys protected by military patrols in the late ‘70s - the year I finished school.
I returned 2 years later for a visit. The smiling border controller stamped my Rhodesian passport and welcomed me home. Familiar roads, familiar shops, familiar buildings and countryside. Yet most of my family and friends had scattered to far corners of the earth. Rhodesia - now called Zimbabwe- no longer felt like home.
Last year (decades later) I made a second visit back, to see Victoria Falls with a friend. I expected to want to kiss the ground as I stepped off the small aircraft that landed me at Victoria Falls International Airport. Instead, I gazed around at the dense growth of pink-flowered Zambesi Teak trees (once known to me as Rhodesian Teak) and my mind’s eye replayed scenes of camouflage clad lads armed with FN rifles chasing even younger lads armed with AK47 rifles. I felt dismayed at the senseless bloodshed of those bush war years. I felt sadder still at the chaos and corruption that has reduced a once thriving fertile country - the “breadbasket” of Africa - to a land of starvation and abject poverty.
I fell in love, married and had babies in my new country yet never fully felt that patriotic feeling. The Boer war seemed to still linger almost a century later, between English and Afrikaans. Black and white were separated by law, location and culture. The ruling political party of the time had policies I could not support and once democracy was established late last century, the new ruling party created policies that made me feel unwanted.
I feel an annual need to return to this home I created on the south eastern coast of Africa. The house that still contains my comfy leather sofa and the antique oak desk. Both my daughters’ artworks adorn the walls. Every plant in that garden was planted by my design (and some by God’s design). I hug my trees and greet the flowers. But it is the grandchildren living in that house now who are my real home. Their arms around me loving me regardless.
It is the grandchildren in Wales who make me feel that I have a home there, too.
Born African yet forever wandering, I am blessed to have a couple of homes on this blue marble.
The question is not “where is your home?” The real question is “who is your home?” And I am able to answer “Yes I am going home" no matter if I am going to South Africa or to Wales.
Live well and find the happy,
Merryl @ GreenSmoothie.com
P.S. During this stay in South Africa I am living in a house not my own. It feels like home, though, because the people I’m with are comfortable friends. And who wouldn’t love that view?
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