We Are All Just Trying To Be Home

I spent last week building an 
“explainer”
 about the 30 June deadline, for an online news platform that I operate. On the surface it was an ordinary piece of work: gather the reporting, check the numbers, find the line between what is known and what is feared, and lay it out so that a person scrolling on their phone could understand a frightening week in a few clear minutes. Ordinary work. And yet I kept getting stuck, and the places I got stuck turned out to be the whole point.  
The first time I stalled was over a number. Migrants are about 4.1% of South Africa (according to the most recent census), roughly one in every twenty-five people. It is a small, stubborn, useful fact, and I wanted South Africans to see it, because so much of the anger this month rests on the belief that we are being overrun. But every time I wrote “blaming the 4.1%,” something in me flinched. You cannot reduce a person to a decimal. The mother running a spaza shop, the man on his lunch break outside the workplace he has held for years, the families packing onto buses out of Durban because they are afraid, the woman looking after another mother’s child, none of them are a percentage. They are people. And the moment you let them become a statistic, even to defend them, you have already conceded something to the people who want them gone. 
That flinch is care. I did not have the word for it at first. I thought I was just being fussy about wording. But fussiness over wording, when the words are about whether someone is human, is not fussiness at all. It is the smallest unit of care there is. 

The wound below the words  

Somewhere in the middle of the week I went back to an essay by Lovelyn Nwadeyi, written from inside this same storm, as a South African who is also a Nigerian. Her argument stopped me. She has watched months of think pieces and infographics and clever statistical rebuttals all making the same case, do not blame foreigners, blame the government, blame corruption, and she says, plainly, that none of it has worked. Worse, that many people find it dismissive and alienating, exactly when you are trying to have a real conversation.  
Her explanation is the most honest thing I have read about this moment. The resistance you meet when you hand someone a fact is not an information problem. It is pain. And people in pain do not need your truth, they need their pain acknowledged first. Only once a hurt is named can a person begin to grieve what they hoped life would be. 
I sat with that for a long time, because it cut against everything my training tells me to do. We are taught to lead with the strongest fact. She is telling me the fact will bounce straight off a wounded person, and read as a lecture, and harden them. Some hurt sits below words, in the body, where no statistic can reach it. The unemployment is real. The fear in the street is real. The clinic that turns you away and the council that ignores your calls are real. To wave a percentage at that pain is not journalism. It is a failure of care dressed up as rigour. 
So I rewrote the opening of the piece. Before any of the facts, I put the pain. Not as a tactic, a softening-up before the real argument, but because it is true and it deserved to be said first. South Africans’ anger is not imagined and it is not irrational. The fury is the sane response to being failed for years. But it has been handed the wrong name. The failure is real; the foreigner is not its author. Only after that did I let the number speak. The number measures the lie that migrants caused this. It was never meant to measure the people. 

Care is not soft. It is brave.  

We treat care as the gentle option, the thing you reach for when you have run out of toughness. I have come to think the opposite. Care is the disciplined option. It is harder than indifference and harder than outrage.  
Care is what made me check, three times, that the helpline number on the final slide was right, because a frightened person screenshotting that card and dialling a wrong number on the worst day of their life is a small cruelty I would have authored. Care is what made me refuse to write “illegal” in my own voice, and only ever inside someone else’s quotation marks, because you cannot tell by looking at a person whether they are documented, and the whole machinery of this month depends on pretending that you can.  
This country has demanded papers before, to decide by sight who was real and who was not. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (2023) calls this the 
afterlife of apartheid
: a past that did not end so much as change who it is aimed at. The pass book is gone; the logic that made it has found a new target. Care is what made me leave room, in a piece defending migrants, for the honest truth that some foreign nationals do break the law, because a defence that flattens reality is not a defence anyone trusts. 
Care is precise. It does the unglamorous checking. It resists the satisfying oversimplification. It is, frankly, exhausting, which is probably why it is rationed so carefully and spent so rarely. And care has a politics, whether we admit it or not. To care, in a week like this one, is to decide that the person being dragged from a home is your concern even if they were not born where you were born. That is not a soft sentiment. In the current climate it is almost a dangerous one. 

Nobody holds the original deed  

I kept circling back to a question that has nothing and everything to do with migration: where do any of us actually belong?  
Go back far enough and we are all from somewhere else. Some of our ancestors moved, and some fled, and arrived somewhere new and frightened and were, for a time, the foreigner. But not all of it was movement. Many were taken – chained, shipped and sold in the trade in enslaved human beings, the gravest crime against humanity the world has committed. To call that migration is to launder it. It was theft of the person, and it deserves its own name. Nobody holds the original deed. And the borders we now police were not always there. They were drawn by colonial powers, in rooms far from here, across peoples and families who were never asked – drawn recently, and drawn in violence. To stand at the door of a country and decide who is real and who is not is not the guarding of something ancient and natural. It is the enforcement of a colonial wound that has never closed. 
What is left, when you see the border for what it is – a colonial line – is something quieter and truer. We are all just trying to be home. To be safe, to be known, to put our children to bed without fear. That is the want underneath all of it, the South African’s want and the migrant’s want, and they are the same want. You cannot meet your own need for home by destroying someone else’s. It does not work that way. It has never worked that way. 
This is the part the statistics will never carry, and the part care insists on. A country is not a fortress to be defended against the 4.1%. It is a home, and a home is measured by who it makes room for. South Africa is for all who belong in it, and belonging was never about a passport. A wound that goes unnamed gets passed on; named, it can begin to heal. So I name them outright – slavery, the colonial border – not to keep us trapped in the past, but to stop the past being handed on, unspoken, to the people we are turning on now. 

So on Tuesday, and on the days after, when it would be so much easier to look away, I am going to try to do the harder thing. Notice. Write down what I see. Refuse to pass on the fear. Stand next to my neighbour. These are small acts. But care has always been made of small acts, performed at the exact moment they are most inconvenient. 
Above everything, be kind. It is not the soft option. This week it might be the bravest one we have.