African Asylum: Back in the 'hood

There’s something quite satisfying about returning to a foreign place you have visited before. You still get the thrill and excitement of travel – of a different landscape, different sounds, languages, food, road rules. But you also get the smug feeling of not being a total outsider and the comfort of recognition. Ah yes, I remember this drive from the airport to the city. Look, there’s the Hillbrow Tower, the Carlton Centre, the Nelson Mandela Bridge. Here are the streets I wandered last time. There is my favourite café! The only one in Braamfontein that really knows how to make a good soy latte.

My trip from Sydney to Johannesburg was only as unpleasant as any other long haul flight. Two striking features were the all male crew (reverse affirmative action by Qantas?) and the spectacular views of Antarctica we were treated to at the mid-way point. The latter almost made the 13 and a half hours of economy travel worth it! The pilots informed us that the views of endless sheets of ice, broken up only by icebergs and water, were some of the best they’d had in a long time.

Arriving at OR Tambo Airport I was greeted by Linda, one of my trusted tour guides and friends from my last trip to Jo’burg. She took me to my apartment in Braamfontein – just north of the CBD and next to Wits University, and one of the ‘new’ Jo’burg’s up and coming suburbs. The apartment is exactly what you’d expect from a rapidly developing precinct catering to students and hipsters. It’s new, funky, kitsch as it comes, and kind of lovely despite the cheap, falling off doorknobs and power points that don’t work. The rental administration here is about as useless as the doorknobs, but thankfully the security guards (who are here 24/7) are lovely and keen to be helpful. And after raiding some of the other uninhabited apartments in the building (helpfully left unlocked) I now have almost enough kitchen utensils for one.

Actually I am rather loving my little apartment and the feeling that I will be ‘living’ in Jo’burg for the next two months. It is exciting to go to the supermarket and shop like a local. Here, I have discovered, the fresh produce is limited – bananas, apples, strawberries and grapes were the only fruit on offer in the Braamfontein Pick’n’Pay – but there are more varieties of rice than I have previously encountered (brown basmati – who knew?) and you can slice your own bread at the slicing machine next to the cash registers! Stocking the cupboards makes a place feel more homely too – there’s nothing like being able to make a cup of tea and grab a pack of ginger biscuits off the shelf. And when I run out of biscuits, the student living in apartment 327 is advertising home made muffins and scones in the foyer.

The apartment itself is two storey - though it would be more correct to say it is two rooms, separated by a staircase. I'm on the top floor and the corner of the building, so I get spectacular roof top views from both the living and the bedroom. Below my living room is a bus depot that throngs for most of the day with buses, vans, trailers and people. Buses depart from it to all across Africa, and judging by the kind of luggage people load up (a mattress went into one trailer) there are some pretty serious journeys commencing over the road. The buses leaving from there are apparently renowned for their woeful safety record though - when I leave for Kenya I think I'll stick with the plane.

I have even met one of my neighbours. Heather also comes from Sydney, where she recently enrolled in an Arts degree, to stop her ‘playing bridge and golf’. Her daughter works in Jo’burg, running a youth leadership program she started with two others (Enke - see their website here) and so Heather decided to spend a semester here on exchange at Wits Uni, studying African history and literature. Perhaps more importantly, Heather turned up at my door last night to check I had managed to obtain some food for dinner and offer me a glass of wine! It'll be great to have a friend in the building - you have to make your own entertainment in the evening, when it's not really safe to go out. I plan to return Heather's gesture by inviting her for dinner. She’ll have to bring her own fork though, I only have one.

So this little apartment will be my Jo’burg base for the next seven weeks, after which I will travel to Kenya. The trip is part of my continuing research on the expanded refugee definition that operates under African law, purportedly providing wider protection than the international refugee definition which applies in the rest of the world (see earlier blog post here). In the coming weeks, I hope to meet with and interview South African refugee lawyers, advocates and government officials. The latter apparently have an official policy of not talking to researchers, but my apartment building has a policy of not supplying bedding, and I had no trouble grabbing some from next door…

The living room - note the lovely 70s decor

Bedroom (obvious really)

The picture at the top of the stairs is of Jan Smuts - South African statesman, Prime Minister in
the early C20th, philosopher and a major proponent of the League of Nations