By Kabelo Mokoena

A friend invited me to the Unscripted conversation on xenophobia, and I was heated.
I think we need open spaces to share our experiences as South African youth. I am
a student at UJ from Limpopo, and I wanted to share my experiences of living in
Johannesburg with foreign nationals, not as someone speaking about the issue
without real experience of what it means to be in the present Johannesburg, where
foreigners and locals collide daily. I had opinions about migration, and I felt quite
strongly about them.

I am a young South African trying to imagine a future in a country where jobs are
scarce, crime is a daily concern and many communities already feel like they are
fighting over too little. So when people talk about undocumented migrants taking
jobs, placing pressure on communities or making certain areas feel unsafe, I
understand that frustration; I have felt it myself.

I expected the conversation to be a debate. I thought people would present their
positions, we would disagree, maybe argue a little, and I was prepared to stand my
ground. We started by going around the room, everyone saying who they were and
how they had come to be in South Africa. There were South Africans and migrants
in the room, and suddenly the word “migrant” stopped being an idea. A lady from
Rwanda broke me; she started to cry when she described her experience in South
Africa since the xenophobia marches began. I felt guilty; was she crying because of
me and people who think like me? What she was saying was sad, but it also made it
hard for us to have an open conversation.

An older man spoke about missing home; he said he had walked to South Africa with
his wife and babies when the genocide happened in his country. He described his
longing for home and said the politics there prevent him from going back, leaving him
stuck in South Africa. He did not speak about South Africa as some wonderful place
he had chosen over his own country. He wanted to go home. But because of the
political situation there, going back was not really possible for him.

I always assumed migration was mainly about opportunity. Someone decides life will
be better in South Africa, comes here, and then South Africans have to deal with the
consequences. But what do you do with somebody who tells you that they do not
actually want to be here, someone who longs for home? What do you do when
somebody says, “I miss home, but I cannot go back”? The truth is, their stories did

not completely change my mind. I still think South Africa has serious problems
around immigration. I still think citizens have a right to ask difficult questions about
jobs, crime, documentation and access to limited public resources. But after
listening to those stories, I can no longer hold those questions in exactly the same
way or with no guilt.

I understood these unscripted conversations to be a space for everyone to have a
say, to disagree and challenge each other. I found it difficult to speak my mind to
someone’s tears. This did not change my mind; it did make it harder to speak my
mind without being judged for wanting foreigners to go. They may not be able to go
home, but surely they all do not have to be here. It is to make strong statements
about people when they are not in the room. I had planned to speak that day, but I
did not, and I regret that I did not make them see how we feel about them too. The
harder truth is that I still had questions, but I no longer knew how to ask them. How
do you tell a woman who has just cried while speaking about what she survived that
you think migration is creating problems in your country? How do you tell a man who
cannot safely return home that South Africans are tired of foreigners being here?
Maybe those things can be said, maybe they even need to be said, but in that
moment, they felt cruel, so I stayed quiet; maybe I regret this.

What I have been thinking about since then is whether staying quiet was respectful
or another way of avoiding the real conversation. Both things can be true. The
migrants in the room needed to hear the frustration that some South Africans carry,
just as much as I needed to hear what displacement and uncertainty actually look
like from the other side. The conversation also made me think differently about the
word “illegal”. I had always understood it quite simply. You either have legal
documents, or you do not. What happens when the system itself prevents you from
becoming legal? What happens when a permit expires while an application is sitting
somewhere in Home Affairs? What happens when a person keeps trying to
regularise their status, but the state does not respond? At what point is a person
illegal, and at what point has the system made them illegal?

South Africans are right to be angry about unemployment. We are right to be angry
about crime. We are right to be angry about broken public services and a
government that often seems unable to manage immigration properly. But the
woman from Rwanda did not create our unemployment crisis. The man who misses
home did not create the housing shortage. The undocumented person standing in a
Home Affairs queue did not design the system that has failed. It is easier to be
angry at the person standing next to you than at the institution you cannot reach.

I did not leave believing that all my concerns about migration were wrong. I left less
certain about the way I had been expressing them. There is a difference. Listening
did not give me an answer; it complicated the answer I thought I already had. I still
wish I had spoken that day. But I suspect that, if I had the conversation again, I
would speak differently; I think I already do.