Hatfield 2021

South Africa can be a beautiful place if it puts its mind to it. And her people can be incredibly beautiful when they let you in. If you are as starry eyed as me and have lived here long enough, you must have loved across the spectrum and arrived at the conclusion that there is no one South Africanness. Whether or not you spend your Saturday at a chisanyama or a fancy art gallery will depend on whether or not you are seeing Tshepo or Christof. The weddings and dances here are also quite alot to look at. The Makotis and their their sisters or the men with the wide hips and narrow shoulders. Then there is the gumboot dance that the university choir choreographed that still has me in awe. And the way Lacantina, the gay club down town Pretoria, can come alive and give you a rebirth every other Friday. In 2021, I returned to Hatfield, Pretoria from Aleto, Nigeria. It was going to fresh start, a blank page. Being back home during the pandemic lockdown was quite the blessing. Amidst all that went down in 2020, I was only to thankful to be in a place where I could die with a smile on my face, home. However, coming back to Pretoria was also a blessing in its own right. I was in the class of Nigerians that could come and go as they please, provided, there was enough to purchase a return ticket. There was not always a lot, but when I could I would seize opportunity to see my family again. This was especially the case when only late in 2019, there had been an upsurge in xenophobic sentiments in South Africa. 2021, was a quiet because most of the systems were still yet to recover from the shock of covid. Hatfield, which would ordinarily be a festival of student discotheques was became a ghost town too early on most days. And the load shedding/power outage became a more of real thing. Laying by yourself in a dark room in a ghost town can make ones mind run a mile a second. In these seconds I wondered