“How do you expect to meet your soul’s counterpart, when he looks nothing like you.”
He was referring to my travel companion. It was early morning and I was sitting in a park, in the centre of Cali, after an overnight bus travel from Medellin. I was waiting for my partner who had just gone on a walkabout to find suitable accommodation for us.
A handsome African man approached me and began speaking to me in Spanish for he assumed that I was a fellow local. When he noticed that I was struggling with the conversation he switched to English and I was relieved. It turned out that he was not local either; he was an American who had fallen in love with the Colombian land.
He was curious about my origins and where I was headed, and I humoured him. He asked a lot of questions about my views on Colombia and racism against African people. I had to be honest and reveal that I knew little about that for I was seeing the country through the eyes of a tourist. He continued to share his strong views about the global oppression of African people and the cruelty they have endured under colonizers. I nodded, for as a South African, I could relate to the scourge of racism. I’m not very politically inclined but I understood what he meant by suffering and segregation. I know the face of racism: apartheid made sure that my generation did not turn a blind eye to inequality and oppression. I cannot claim to have personally experienced it as acutely as most people that grew up in Soweto, for example, because I grew up in a village, far from the heated action of the time. And my parents did not share their political views with me and I attended a multi-racial school and was thus exposed to a multi-cultural world from a young age.
Therefore, my experiences were not polarised and I think he assumed that they were. I obviously didn’t get into that with him. I simply listened and nodded. I was also too tired to engage deeply with the matter at hand because I hadn’t slept very well. He changed the subject and mentioned that he found it inspiring to see a sister, who is travelling far from the Motherland. And then in the end he said to me: “Well, sister I’m very glad to have met you, and I wish you a very wonderful journey.” But before he left, he made sure to ask if I was traveling alone because I was surrounded by a huge kite surfing bag and numerous bags.
And I said no, I’m travelling with my partner. And he dared to enquire about the colour of his skin and I said, nonchalantly, he is Russian. He had intuited that my travel companion was not a Brownie like me and this infuriated him. His fury hit me by surprise because he had been very cordial, up to that point. And he said to me: “I hate sisters, like you. How do you expect to meet your soul’s counterpart, if he looks nothing like you.”
I was flabbergasted and my eyes widened. I think I woke up for the first time that morning, I was truly confused, but the anger that he expressed hit me. It went through my body and I absorbed it like a sponge. And before I had time to react, or to even understand what was happening to me, my partner, appeared as if he was sent. It was humorous because he appeared like typical white angel from behind a tree and he was smiling, his boyish Peter Pan smile, and he said loudly; “Darling, I have found a beautiful home for us. You’re going to be very happy”
And I smiled, because what else is a person to do when so much excitement hits them after a wave of mad stupor. And my provoker understood that my knight in shining armour had just arrived to save my day. And he simply walked away.
But I was traumatised. And I shared what had just transpired with my partner and he could not relate, so I decided not to bother him with my emotional state. But the statement stayed with me for a long time and would revisit me time and time again. And today, it dawned on me that I’m in a country that consists mostly of a homogeneous population. And I stand out, as one of the few African people here. The friends that I surround myself with, my kindred spirits look nothing like me on a physical level.
We appreciate simple things like gazing at the moon and the stars, we dream about communities where people just can live happily ever after. These are my kin, the people with whom I resonate on many levels. They’re not brown-skinned but they dance to a similar rhythm and that’s enough for me.
I hail from a country where prejudice and an undercurrent of racism still exist. But I don’t have to be conditioned by the place that I come from, I don’t need to be conditioned by other people’s experiences because my experiences are unique to me. And they are unique because my perceptions, feelings and conditioning factors are unique to me. The people I meet are unique to my path. And so what if they look different? I enjoy them, just the same.
So will I meet my soul’s counterpart and will they look anything like me?
Who knows?
What if my soul’s counterpart does not exist? What if I do not have a soul?
What if she has been with me all along… the reflection in the mirror.
She | is | I | AM | no thing |
Racism and tribalism is our daily strife in this country. I may be married to a person who may be deemed as my soul’s counterpart but because he’s xhosa and I’m swati(Hlubi,well still on the journey of self discovery), I’m still viewed as being different from him, as made clear by his sister and mother. I find myself being kept at a distance because of traditional constraints on his side of his family, as if my culture is null and void with no meaning to theirs. My cultural beliefs being that when he’s done paying lobola I’m part of his family. Made me have questions whether is this happening because I’m of the swati people and not xhosa or do I have high expectations because of how my family has already adopted them as their own? Is it because his family is old fashioned ? If that’s the case;why then does my mother in law show so much malice towards me in my dreams, why are dreams I have of her accompanied with my maternal grandmother being in the dream as well in an aim to protect me?
Racism doesn’t hurt me as much as tribalism does… Aren’t we a human race at the end of the day? We are so accustomed to hate that we hate our own….Self hate
Thank you for such an open response. Thank you for your voice, it truly matters. I believe that at times we see others as outsiders because we are afraid of them and this is sometimes ingrained very deeply into our DNA. In a recent past, we had tribal wars because we saw others as being separate from us and I feel that this perception of us against them is rife everywhere and it is one of the main reasons for strife. This extends to how we treat animals, plants, our rivers etc. We do not yet remember that from the earth we have come and to the earth we will return, for we are no different from our brothers and sisters, humans, plant kingdom, animate and inanimate objects. We can hope for a re member ance that we are all members of One Thing.