Foreigner

Khayelitsha has never seemed far away. It's 30kms down the N2 and I can drive there in 20 minutes if there's no traffic. I have friends whose daily commute to work takes them longer than that. I suppose what I'm getting at, is that conceptually, Khayelitsha has always been part of my city.

This week, I went with one of my students to her research site in Harare. We wanted to experiment with different modes of transport to get there, so after some time perusing the Golden Arrow website, we squeezed on a taxi and made our way to the terminus in town. I bought a packet of Niknaks, and sat down next to the window. We were off to a good start. An hour later we were as far as Nyanga. Alfonso, who drives our students to their placements during the school term, says his GPS always triggers off an alarm when he enters Nyanga, letting him and the tracking company know the van has just entered a dangerous area. I get it, it's dangerous, but hells, it's also just Nyanga. People live here and love here, go to school, go the bank, sell Tupperware at the terminus.

So we left Nyanga via the perpetually winding Lansdowne Road. Stopping, starting, past shacks, past goats, past shiny cars and donkeys carts. Wet laundry hangs in long lines along the railway fence, potholes, taxis, mostly just people. People, people, people. Site C and we're in Khayelitsha. Past the Caltex petrol station with it's bright red Coco-Cola sign, reading "Welcome to Kuwait". It's a mystery that one. Mew Way finally and the end is in sight. I stop the bus somewhere along Spine Road, the driver shouts at me as we leave, he only charged us for tickets to Rylands, a stop about an hour earlier. I explain that it's not my problem he made assumptions as to our intended destination, I asked him for two tickets to Harare. He grumbles and waves us off.

We walk down Spine Road, into Ntlazane. The wind makes this walk seem longer than it is. There's a man lugging rubbish down the road, another cleans his front yard. Two toddlers play in front of the door to their shack. I wave to them as we walk past, but they're too lost in their game too notice us. After two hours, we arrive. I'm exhausted.

An hour later, we leave. I can't do the bus again. Just can't. So we wave down a taxi and go through to Site C. At the taxi rank we change taxi's and hop on one going to Town. We sit in the front row with two other girls and their luggage: two massive traveling bags. I sit in the gap between sits, the weight of my neighbour's bag pulling my body forward and keeping me balanced. I realize as we drive that we're going to get to town as the after-work exodus begins. So instead, as we reach the crown of the freshly named Nelson Mandela Boulevard, the taxi pulls over to the edge of the highway and drops us off on a narrow shoulder. We walk up the highway, to the pedestrian bridge at Roodebloem Road. Over the highway and we start the trek down to Main Road. Get on one last taxi, and back to the office.

The round-trip has taken close on five hours.

Suddenly, the distance between here and Khayelitsha becomes vast, impregnable, uncrossable. This is the seventh year I've spent moving from west to east of the airport, and never before have the parts of my city felt so apart. But now, I get it. I get how the suburbs and city bowl can seem like a foreign far-off place. I get it how it's so much easier for here to go there, than for there to come here.

The world is unfair, welcome to Kuwait.