By:  Jeni

Despite the fact that, during his long life, he had travelled to and lived in places all over the globe, Laurens van der Post had no doubt about where his heart belonged when he said, “I get terribly homesick for Africa. In that sense I have a home.”

My eyes, my ears, my nose are tremendously, permanently overcome with nostalgia for the bush and the desert and the natural world of Africa – and the skies and the sunsets and the natural things. For me these have permanently possessed all my senses.
 
Having left South Africa in 1960 as a ten year old, I found myself with bare legs and a cotton dress facing the bitter, wind-driven snow of mid January in Southampton. From that day, having swopped huge blue skies for small pockets of a cloudy grey ceiling, my country of birth ceased entirely to exist in my mind and my imagination. I lost my accent in a week, and adopted English idioms with all the ease that children do. And I became British. Thus, for the next few decades, South Africa never entered my thoughts and I was caught up in a life that matched those of the people around me - education, work, marriage, children, and everything in between. Though aware of the political situation at an unconscious level, it was all happening too far away in another world. My parents and adult brothers and sisters each had, no doubt, concrete memories of their own but I had turned my face forward. Nevertheless, as a family we never again referred to the place from which we had come. When asked where I was born, I would recite the facts as though they represented merely a book title. Nothing stirred in me. And so I went on.

There is, however, no accounting for the human soul. One ordinary day nearly four decades later (October ’98), my youngest child poised to leave home for university, I found myself sitting at my kitchen table drinking coffee with a friend and suddenly, quite literally, from nowhere, I heard myself saying, “I think I need to visit South Africa” – and for the first time, tears fell. That very afternoon, I booked a ticket for a three months stay and a couple of weeks later was boarding a plane destined for ‘home’. And having neither friends nor family here it felt as though I was heading into the unknown. I had decided to fly to Johannesburg and from there take a bus to Cape Town. I knew that to plop down suddenly in Cape Town airport was not the way to arrive. I wanted to see my home town coming slowly towards me, as slowly as it had retreated that day when we sailed away to new shores. This would give me the time to acclimatise and absorb an old sight that was nevertheless now, quite brand new.

To my astonishment, the mountain became visible from a great distance, some hours from our early morning arrival. As we approached and it began more and more to fill the sky I could feel small shock waves deep inside me. I had no memory of the mountain and yet instantly I felt connected. Almost forty years from our last encounter and I felt as if I had never been away.  

Needless to say from that moment I fell head over heels in love with my country of birth as though for the first time. My world seemed to turn upside down and nothing would ever be the same again. I rented an apartment in Llandudno and spent many hours sitting on the beach or my balcony, staring at the sea, realising that the ship that took us away from home all those years ago, would have passed by the very place I was sitting. Little did I know then, that nearly four decades later I would be back on this land looking at this ocean.

To cut a long story short, I am still here. Eventually selling my home in UK, I have built a house overlooking the sea on the west coast and although I miss the regular contact with my children and grandchildren, I cannot imagine living anywhere else. As I write this, I am spending a weekend in a small dorp not far from the west coast and am reminded of van der Post’s words as I stroll the stoep on one of those balmy evenings that often follow a scorching day. A nearby frog sings his long lone note while his backing group of cicadas chorus their reply, I stand and watch a group of praying mantis munching determinedly on a myriad moths and small flying insects which are dancing around the light. The church clock is chiming into the silence of a village evening and a long train chunters by with its unique sound effects, muffled by the night. These sights – these sounds – could only be Africa. After seven years, it still feels good to be home.