Africa lives in our bones and whispers our names

My brother still has that faraway stare that only a son of Africa can have when he talks about this country.

He has been living in Australia for nearly a decade now.

“This is still a wonderful place,” he told me this week. “After everything I have heard, I expected decay, but not much has changed. The roads are still decent, the shops and malls are great and the standard of living is excellent. My daughters say they can easily live here again.”

I could not ignore the sadness in his voice. You can try to shake the dust of Africa from your feet, but it clings to you forever.

“Smell the rain,” his wife said. “The first drops don’t smell quite like this anywhere else.”

Early yesterday, when he left, I couldn’t look at him. I inspected the tyres on his hired car and looked at the sky to see if they could expect rain. I don’t think I fooled him – he knew I didn’t want him to see the tears in my eyes.

Afterwards, I sat down at the kitchen table to write this column. I battled to see the letters on my computer screen through the tears.

Over the years, a lot of our loved ones had to leave the country – first to fight apartheid, then due to crime, or to make a living in places with healthier economies.

Dear reader, yesterday morning I was crying for all the men and women of this sad country who missed a sibling over the past decades. My heart was aching for mothers who longed to see their daughters; children who pined for parents.

We all belong here – those of us who live here, but also those who used to be here and whose places are now empty. Southern Africa has the heart of a mother – the only place with the compassion to hatch ubuntu.

Humankind was born here, but we have left the southern tip of this wonderful continent for millennia to conquer the world. First explored the rest of Africa, then Europe, Asia, the Americas … but in our bones, every man and woman on this planet are South Africans.

Over the centuries some of us have come back from India, England, Holland … but the unknown will always call us – it’s in our genes.

And the winds of Africa will always whisper the names of those who belong here.

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