By Sizwe Dlamini

Listening to the story of a South African who found himself stuck in China during
Covid made me think about something I had not really considered before: how
unusual it still feels, for many of us, to imagine a Black South African building a life
somewhere else. The story itself is difficult. Being trapped in another country during
lockdown, separated from home and uncertain about when you will be able to leave,
is frightening. China during Covid was probably one of the worst places to discover
how far away from home you really were. But underneath that story I heard
something else. He had left.

That sounds obvious, but it stayed with me. He had looked at a map of his life and
South Africa was not the only place on it. I don’t think enough of us do that.
Growing up, the version of success I understood was quite local. You finish school.
Maybe you go to university. You move to Johannesburg, Pretoria or Cape Town. You
find work. If things go well, you move to a better suburb. Maybe, if you are very
successful, you travel overseas for a holiday. But the idea that I could simply decide
to live in Ghana for five years? Study in Kenya? Find work in Nigeria? Build a
business in Rwanda? Teach English in South Korea? Spend a few years in China?
Those possibilities did not really form part of how I imagined adulthood.

Europe or America sometimes appeared in that imagination, but even then, they
belonged to a certain kind of person. Somebody with money, connections or the kind
of degree that gets you onto an international graduate programme. For everybody
else, life happened here. I wonder how much of that is history. South Africa spent
decades isolated from much of the world, first through apartheid itself and later
through the sanctions and political isolation that apartheid produced. But there was
another kind of isolation too, especially for Black South Africans. Apartheid did not
simply tell Black people where they could not go. It told them where they belonged.
The Bantustan project was partly geographical, but its consequences were
psychological too. Your life was mapped for you. This is your homeland. This is
where you are legally recognised. These are the places you can enter for work.
These are the conditions under which you can stay. Movement was something
controlled.

Perhaps it should not surprise us that freedom of movement does not automatically
produce an imagination of movement. The borders opened, the laws changed,
passports became available, but maybe some of the old map remained in our heads.

I see traces of it in the way we talk about migration. South Africans often speak as
though migration is something other Africans do to us. Zimbabweans come here.
Nigerians come here. Congolese come here. Mozambicans come here.
South Africa is imagined as the destination. We rarely reverse the question. Why
aren’t more of us going there? Not as tourists. To live. Why do we find it normal that
somebody from Malawi might leave home to find work in Johannesburg, but strange
to imagine someone from Soweto moving to Lusaka because they found an
opportunity there? We live on a continent of more than fifty countries, but sometimes
our imagination of Africa ends at Beitbridge.

It is especially strange when you consider how angry young South Africans are
about unemployment and the feeling that there is no future here. We talk constantly
about being stuck. There are no jobs, no opportunities the economy does not work,
but I wonder whether one response to feeling trapped is to make the map bigger. I
don’t mean this in the irritating way people sometimes tell unemployed young people
to “just go overseas”, as though visas, plane tickets and money do not matter. Travel
is expensive. Migration is difficult. Other countries have their own unemployment and
immigration rules. Leaving home is not an easy solution to structural problems. But
there is a difference between saying something is difficult and never considering it
possible. How many South African students seriously look at university options in
Nairobi, Accra or Cairo? How many young professionals search for opportunities in
Lagos or Addis Ababa with the same curiosity they might search Cape Town? How
many of us know what it would actually take to live and work elsewhere on the
continent? I didn’t. Perhaps that is the part that bothers me.

There are young South Africans who have never been outside their township, who
never go beyond town or the province. Many have never seen the ocean. That is
partly about money and inequality, obviously. But it also shapes how you understand
the size of your world. If your whole life has happened within a few kilometres, the
person arriving from somewhere else can begin to look like somebody who has
invaded your space. They moved, crossed borders, took risks, found relatives,
made work, learnt a new language, learnt the way the taxis move, built networks,
and you did not and are not sure you would be able to. None of this makes
xenophobia acceptable. But perhaps it raises a more interesting question about
mobility.

Instead of only asking why other Africans keep coming to South Africa, maybe we
should also ask why so many South Africans struggle to imagine going anywhere
else. Sometimes our political conversations make the world smaller. Politicians will
keep you focused on the other, saying that there are too many people coming here,

that there isn’t enough to go around. What happens if we make the world bigger
instead? What if a young South African sees Nairobi not as somebody else’s city,
but as a possible place to study? What if Accra becomes somewhere to build a
business? What if Kinshasa is somewhere an artist might collaborate for a year?
What if Johannesburg is one stop in a life rather than the centre of every possibility?

The experience of being stuck in China was frightening. Being stuck far from home
during a global emergency is not something to romanticise. But before he got stuck,
he had gone. He had crossed the boundary of what his life could look like. Perhaps
that is worth holding onto. For a generation that often feels that South Africa has
become too small for its ambitions, the answer cannot only be to fight harder over
the opportunities inside our borders. Maybe some of us also need to look outward,
look to the continent first, to the world. Not because leaving South Africa solves
South Africa but because freedom should mean more than being legally allowed to
move, it should also mean being able to imagine yourself somewhere else.