Each one of us has to endure it, some time or another. And no matter your rank, race or class, your turn is your turn in those dreaded Home Affairs lines (not to mention the SASSA ones, a much deeper level of hell).
But here I am again – four years since my last stint of singing the “civil service blues” (Home, September 2021).
At the crack of dawn, having girded my loins and fortified the old spiritual ramparts, I humbly join the ranks of my fellow martyrs, already waiting in line.
Our chances at success are precarious at best: you might wait five hours only for the queue to get cut off just before you. Or you finally make it, but the system goes offline. Everyone gets sent home.
You generally do it at least three times – each time arriving a little earlier, much better prepared. Example: you try this in heels only once. Or without a jumper against the morning chill. Or a hat against the blazing sun. Or an umbrella, chair or water. Because your all-mighty government provides neither shelter nor care.
Yours to ‘enjoy’ are endless hours of feeling small and insignificant, standing outside exposed to the elements.
But you remain positive. Ignore your burning resentment at Squirrel’s grinning photo up there – as large as a single bed sheet – beaming down on us underlings.
Below him a phalanx of lesser all-mighties, framed in shiny glass, all teeth and gleaming spectacles. If they knew how much collective scorn their silly smirks evoked, those pictures would be gone yesterday.
On my third try, I arrive at 6am, all Pollyanna and Zen. There are already 30 souls waiting.
The young guy before me wears a surly face and headphones through which tinny hip-hop music pulses. I swallow my chagrin.
In front of him there’s an open-mouth gum chewer. And then a coiffured blonde with pearls and perfect eyebrows. She looks like she’s wearing tight underwear and smelling something bad – which might be coming off the grousing baby riding his mother’s hip in front of her.
My Zen-ness is wavering, but I hold on.
Behind me, Dawid joins the queue. I know his name and that he’s a self-centred jerk who loves his damned pigeons more than his own family, because he’s being told so by a stout woman in a kopdoek. He has crude tattoos on his hands and carries a bulky Shoprite bag, which I eye suspiciously.
Stoically, he listens as she lays out his great many flaws – a daily ritual, I suspect.
When she finally runs out of breath, he quietly asks for some coffee. She then takes the shopping bag from him, which turns itself miraculously into some sort of Mary Poppins-like picnic basket, containing a mountain of snacks: sandwiches and cold meats and bananas and sweets.
She lays it all out, but he asks for a naartjie, which she ferrets out from the depths of the cornucopia and then proceeds to lovingly peel for him.
She is Chrissie, I learn as she hands me a small mug of coffee. In turn, I share my newspaper with Dawid.
By seven o’clock the queue is already 70-strong. The veterans have unfolded their camping chairs, the elderly have been ushered forward and the coiffed woman with the eyebrows has taken the fretful baby off the mother’s hands. She’s removed her pearls and is chuckling happily as he tries to stuff them in his mouth.
The hip-hopper turns out to be a really shy country kid from the far Northern Cape, where I grew up too. We grin at each other as we recount all the things we both love and loathe about the place, from camel thorn trees to those nasty red roman spiders.
By half past eight, when a doorman unlocks the large glass doors, the queue is snaking around the block and most of us have had a turn with the baby – who is teething and thus a veritable spit-drooling machine.
Dawid, meanwhile, has told me everything there is to know about growing show-quality dahlias. And about the astonishing distances his top racer pigeon, Lady Koo, can cover.
And then suddenly I’m in front, like Lady Koo, and I’m being let inside just as the gatekeeper cuts the line behind me.
Giddy with happiness, I drop into a chair. Happy as I am, I realise my feelings are about more than just making it.
There’s a new kind of joy in my heart – for this country and its people, despite our shameless leaders. From my countless hours in queues, I have learned this: there is hope.
For we, the people, are the ones who keep mending our moth-eaten old ‘rainbow’.
There, in those endless queues, on equal terms, where we daily rub shoulders. Where we show how we care. Not only for one another, but for this land.
Translation: Gillian Eva
