Théodore and the City That Did Not Welcome Him

People assume that moving within Africa is easier. That because you are still on the continent, still Black, still breathing the same general air, the distance is somehow smaller.

Théodore had believed this too, briefly, the way you believe things that sound logical before experience corrects them.

He left Kinshasa in 2015 not because of a single catastrophic moment but because of what happens when a thousand small catastrophes accumulate until the weight of them becomes indistinguishable from the country itself. The economy contracting year after year. The electricity that came when it felt like it. The sense, specific and growing, that no matter how hard he worked or how carefully he planned, the ceiling kept lowering. He was thirty-two and he was tired in a way that sleep did not fix. His cousin had gone to Johannesburg two years earlier and was managing. South Africa had a functioning economy. It had opportunity, or at least the architecture of opportunity. It was a border crossing, not an ocean.

He crossed at Beit Bridge into Limpopo on a Tuesday morning in August and declared himself at the Department of Home Affairs office in Musina. He said the words he had prepared: I am seeking asylum. The official behind the desk did not look up immediately. When he did, his expression carried the particular neutrality of a person who has processed this sentence many times and has learned to keep their response behind glass. He was issued a Section 22 asylum seeker permit, printed on paper that already looked temporary. It gave him the legal right to live and work in South Africa while his claim was processed.

What it did not give him was permanence. Section 22 permits expire every one to three months and must be renewed in person at Home Affairs offices that are chronically understaffed, where queues begin forming before four in the morning, where people sleep on the pavement outside to hold their place, and where it is entirely possible to arrive, wait eight hours, and be told to come back tomorrow because the system is offline or the officer has gone on break or the day's capacity has been reached. Théodore learned the rhythm of this early. He kept a calendar specifically for renewal dates. Missing a renewal by even a day meant existing without documentation in a country where documentation was not a formality but the difference between safety and exposure.

He settled in Yeoville, a neighbourhood in central Johannesburg that had been absorbing Congolese migrants for two decades, that smelled on Sunday mornings of palm oil and dried fish from the traders who set up along Raleigh Street, that had a Lingala-speaking church on a corner where the worship was loud enough to reach the pavement. The neighbourhood was not wealthy. It was precarious in ways that were familiar to him and ways that were new. But it had a Congolese community, and a Congolese community meant a support system that operated outside of what the formal systems could or would provide.

He had heard the word makwerekwere before he arrived. He had read about xenophobia in South Africa, the periodic eruptions of it, the names of the townships where it had turned violent, the statistics. Reading about something and having it directed at you on a Tuesday afternoon while you are walking to a spaza shop to buy airtime are entirely different experiences. The first time it happened he kept walking. He had been told to keep walking. You respond and it escalates, and escalation has a cost. He kept walking and felt the word settle into a place in his chest that he has not fully evicted it from.He learned the geography of safety. Which taxi routes ran without incident. Which landlords rented to Congolese without making it a problem. Which jobs were available to someone with a Section 22 permit and a French accent in a city whose primary working language is Zulu and English.

He found work at a mobile phone repair shop in the Joburg CBD owned by a Nigerian man named Emmanuel who asked few questions and paid cash on Fridays. He learned to fix screens, replace batteries, restore phones that water had killed. His hands, which had fixed electrical wiring in Kinshasa, adapted quickly.His formal refugee status, Section 24, came through in 2018. Three years after he arrived. He was standing in a Home Affairs waiting room in Crown Mines when the officer called his name and handed him the document. He looked at it for a moment. It said refugee. It had his photo. It had an expiry date further into the future than any document he had held in this country.

He folded it carefully into the inner pocket of his jacket and took the taxi back to Yeoville and went to the Congolese church on the corner and sat in a pew at the back, not for the service, which was already over, but for the quiet of the space and the smell of it and the particular comfort of being somewhere that did not require him to explain himself.

What kept him through the years between arrival and that document, and through the years since, was the community. The men who gathered on plastic chairs outside the building on Raleigh Street on Saturday afternoons and talked about Kinshasa the way people talk about a person they love who is far away, with exaggeration and tenderness and the specific sorrow of distance. The women who cooked on Sundays and fed whoever was there, no questions, just a plate. The WhatsApp groups that functioned as an early warning system for police checkpoints and Home Affairs operations. The informal economy of trust that operates between people who know the document doesn't always protect you and so protect each other instead.

He has a small electronics shop now in a market in Jeppe Street in the CBD. He sells phones, cables, chargers, accessories. He knows his suppliers. They know him. He knows which morning the Chinese wholesaler has restocked. He knows which customers will negotiate and which will not. He has a regularity to his days that he does not take for granted, not for a single day, because he remembers what it cost to build it.

He has not been back to Kinshasa. He thinks about it sometimes, usually when he sees something that reminds him of the river or the noise or the particular way the city smells in the rain, The smell of Kinshasa after rain. He has never found a word for it here.

He is still here. In Johannesburg. On Jeppe Street. Behind a counter that belongs to him.

That is not nothing. Some days, it is the whole thing.