How many times have I travelled this road? How many times in the last few months? As I set off again in a bus across the Eastern Cape, I feel that familiar sense of insecurity. I wonder sometimes if all wanderers, all those who travels without fixed abode, experience this strange sensation. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing; part of travel is learning to embrace a little insecurity. The isolation, the sense of being un-rooted, the sometimes loneliness, the often fear, all mingled with anticipation and the little joys that go unnoticed in the everyday.
A few minutes beyond King William’s Town, a field of boys plays soccer, barefoot, on a makeshift field. The dust they kick up hovers in the air. I look up as we pass and catch an image of silhouettes frozen in the golden light as it slants through the dust and across the winter-dry grass.
We drive on, through the last of the Border Area. The Border Area. “The Border”. So called not, as some assume, because of the frontier wars but because it was, for so many years, the small strip of land between the Ciskei and the Transkei. Border-country – an outpost of trade and white rule between two countries that never really existed. It’s not a legal designation. I doubt anyone uses the term much now except for those who grew up here at that time. Late 80s, early 90s, the height of the transition tensions. That time.
I’m always leaving it, always travelling to somewhere else, by bus or plane or car. Since I was 18 and first left the Border Area to go to varsity; always leaving. Of course, I’m not alone. This area (and the Eastern Cape more generally) seems always to have scattered people across the country and beyond, from migrant labourers leaving for the mines to educated professionals seeking fortunes far away. Several of the friends I am going to see this weekend scattered from this place. You meet Border people everywhere. Each goodbye is like a wish and a dream and a waving hand. Like boys going off to boarding school. Or men going off to war.
No matter how short the trip, it always feels like goodbye. Each time is an exquisite mix of the nervous unease of leaving,with all its built-in risk of loss, and the butterfly-fluttering, stomach-knot of dreams followed. I know I’ll be back. I’m just going for a little while. But still, somehow, the movement of the bus, the fading lights of King, the sounds of the night road, feel a little like the anticipation of a dream.
As twilight fades to night we cross the Fish River and leave behind the Border.