Home Affairs
The trip back from Mozambique was really nice. The highlight was the two guys we picked up at the South African border: two South African guides who work at one of the game reserves here. They’d been backpacking around southern Africa for six weeks, and we drove them a few hours into South Africa. They shared many amazing stories about walking and camping their way through Mozambique, and we shared a campsite with them and a fabulous dinner, then breakfast, over the fire.
On the way back, I was hoping to get a renewed 3-month tourist visa, but had been warned that it might not be that easy. In fact, it wasn’t. So I spent the last two mornings heading down to the office of Home Affairs downtown Johannesburg. Usually people hire someone to take care of this bureaucratic work, but I went myself, thinking that I was longer on patience and persistence than on funds to hire someone for theirs…
But I have a new theory about why expats don’t go to home affairs on their own: it’s actually kind of a scary part of town. I decided to take a taxi instead of driving because I don’t know my way around that part of town to drive, and wasn’t sure where I would be able to park. I think ultimately, this was a good decision, but on foot from the taxi station to the Home Affairs office was quite a gauntlet: small sidewalks, lots of people, many of them standing around scanning the crowd, and me the only white person I saw until I got into the government building.
Now, I’m an overly-cautious and actually pretty paranoid person in general, so perhaps I was being hyper-sensitive, but there were at least three distinct times when I felt like I was starting to be targeted: sometimes discreetly, sometimes not. One guy got up in my face and started threatening me - my sense is that he was trying to “play” on white fear rather than actually intending to carry through on his threats, but instead of sticking around to find out, I ducked into the nearest store with a security guard at the door. Another time I was jostled, and it seemed pretty intentional - the guy leaned into me, and just after making contact with me shouted in the direction I was walking. I assumed this was a signal to someone further up the sidewalk, so once again, I ducked into a store and waited before continuing. The other time, I just felt like I saw too many people walking at the same pace as me - across the street, behind, in front, and decided to buy a candy bar in a nearby shop to break up my pace.
Although being white made me really stand out in the crowd, I might not have been able to so easily evade a perceived danger by walking into these stores if I looked different. (I’d also shaved, so I looked less like a bum than I sometimes do) Anyhow, I don’t want to make it into more than it is - it’s just my experience, and my impression, but I was definitely on-guard and still pretty nervous. People do warn about downtown here, and near bus stations are usually pretty sketchy areas. It was actually, more than anything, exhausting to expend so much energy watching and worrying. When I was missing one document and had to come back the next day, I thought “no problem - I know the routine now.” But the next morning, I was just not in the mood to go through it again yet… but since my visa was expiring soon, I kinda had to do it. Overall, it was not as bad as it might have been, and now that I know what I’m doing, I’ll definitely do the same routine when I go to pick up my new visa (as opposed to driving or hiring someone).
That’s all for now!
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