It is a few minutes shy of 9:00pm and I am in a Bolt ride home from Johannesburg Park Station. The driver is Eritrean and we are talking about African immigrants. He seems not to trust Malawians and Zimbabweans; the ones he has met so far are trouble. He likes Nigerians very much. He almost swears that he can tell them apart from other Africans once they open their mouths to speak. I reply that I can tell Eritreans apart, too – they sound a bit like Ethiopians. Ethiopians! Oh, he does not like Ethiopians; he was brought up not to like them. He cannot escape his upbringing, he says. Just before we reach my home in downtown Johannesburg, he confesses that he cannot place me. ‘I’m Nigerian,’ I say. ‘What?’ he says. ‘You sound nothing like them.’
Not sounding like them has been quite the aspiration since I got here. It has emerged from a lifetime of trying to blend in and not be picked out. I feel such an unsettledness in the close presence of my people that I need to make myself unrecognizable, at least until I feel safe enough to reveal myself. There is a part of me that’s aware of the ‘safety’ that the ‘Big City’ can offer to migrants, particularly queer people. I need every inch of it; homophobia is everywhere.
