Departing the Metropole

After almost exactly a decade based in England, I have decided to return to southern Africa. Packing up is a pretty momentous time, and a chance to reflect on what has passed, or at least some of it. I sift through papers, find fragments of notes taken during my Zimbabwe travels -- fragments of chaos and desperation. I find photographs of my other world in Namibia, a Khwe woman weaving in the late afternoon shade of Mashambo, and satellite images of Caprivi and the ever-stretching sandveld. I find frantic to-do lists from the office -- yet again an other world, one of ambition and self-betterment and money. Cards from my mother on the southern oceans. A ribbon from Liz, 10 years ago in India just before we left, now fallen behind a bookshelf and retrieved, covered in dust. I have been using it to tie one of my scrapbooks. This time I tuck it into my hand luggage, because I can't bring myself to let it go. The "Cash Caviar and Champagne" dress is dug up from underneath the bed, no doubt ready for its Jozi debut.

I paste things rather frantically into my scrapbooks. It's hard to slow down. I vacuum, and again. I gather all my fieldnotes, those special and wordy rite-de-passage collections, and add them to the 'special box' pile, which includes photographs, my childhood stamp collection (yup, don’t laugh), my diaries. All my files from university are going too, including my first year anthro lecture notes, carefully dictated in green and purple ink. It’s debatable whether I should really be taking those, admittedly. My cello is de-bridged and de-sound-posted. We pack him up carefully and then into a coffin-like crate which is loaded into a cavernous van during an uncharacteristically heavy downpour. It’s really happening, this move.

I retrace the steps of my last day or two in London. Alice helps me clean the flat, vacuuming in her pencil skirt and heels. Even that she manages to do stylishly. I finally meet the proprietor of the coffee shop downstairs. I think he's Jamaican. I ask him for a bin bag, as I've run out. He gives me two, saying I might need more. I go to the gym on my final morning, and sit on the bike listening to Kaleen’s old playlists. God, I will be relieved not to go back to those gyms in the winter. I go to the British Library to renew my card. I’m not sure why. I suppose I have a small hope that I’ll want to come and absorb and reflect on knowledge again sometime. I remind some girl that she can’t go into the reading rooms carrying a cup of coffee, which she seems to find surprising, and then I go for bhel puri at the Indian restaurant on Drummond St where Ed and I used to eat.

Mary comes to pick me up. I heave those heavy cumbersome bags into her car and off we go to Heathrow. I tell her about Mishek's death last week, and how I had hoped one day we would sit together round the fire in Murehwa -- where I've never been because of my skin colour -- free of fear and the dark shadows of the past, him an old man, and me still listening. She tells me about one of her African clients who has been beaten in detention in the UK. I dispatch several copies of Chikwava’s ‘Harare North’ to friends. At the airport I am ever so tired. There is endless possibility now, and I don't know where to begin.