And then the officer at the Trans-Kalahari border post told us to eat the chicken.
Seven of us, a delegation of intent and ambition, stood between Botswana and Namibia, chewing through drumsticks like schoolchildren caught smuggling sweets. He watched us. Not with cruelty, but not quite with kindness either, just the quiet authority of a man who knows borders are less about lines and more about control.
We had bought 21 pieces of chicken in Botswana. It was still warm. Still innocent. But at the threshold of Namibia, it became something else: contraband, inconvenience, suspicion.
When we finished, bones in hand, he pointed to a bin far off, back on the Botswana side.
“Go throw them there.”
One of us walked back, carrying the remains of what we had just been forced to consume, crossing a border we had not yet crossed.
Somewhere between the last bite and that long walk, it dawned on us: this might be about more than chicken. It might be about where we come from.
South Africans. The word hung in the air before it was spoken. And when it came, it arrived wrapped in a question that was not quite a question:
“What are you doing here?”
One of the officers directed it to Kagiso King Hlungwani, the man who had carried us across borders and hours, driving one of our two cars in a twenty-hour convoy through Botswana’s long, uneven spine of road, swerving between potholes and cattle like punctuation in a sentence that refused to end.
“We’re here to launch a school, the Pan-Africanist School of Economics, Technology and Agriculture” he said.
A pause.
“No, but why don’t you do it in South Africa?” There it was. Not hostility. Not rejection. Just a quiet disbelief that movement across African borders could be anything other than escape or intrusion.
“We have already launched it in South Africa,” he replied. “The school exists in its foundational phases in seven African countries. We can’t leave Namibia out.”
The answer didn’t settle the air. It rearranged it.
Because this is the thing about being South African in the region right now: you arrive carrying more than your passport. You carry headlines. You carry marches. You carry the echo of what is called xenophobia, whether you agree with the term or not. You carry the weight of perception.
And sometimes, you eat the chicken for it.
The irony is that the road into Namibia is smoother than the welcome at its gates. Botswana’s roads tested our patience with potholes and wandering cattle, but its officials met us with quiet professionalism. Namibia offered a better road, but a more complicated reception.
Borders, after all, are not built on tar. They are built on memory. Which brings me to another crossing, this one ideological.
This week, AfriForum’s Kallie Kriel met with Jacob Zuma of the uMkhonto weSizwe Party. A meeting that should not make sense, yet happened anyway. It was called “constructive.” Perhaps. But what lingered was the feeling, the same quiet question beneath it: what are you doing here?
The same question we were asked at the border. Because whether it is Africans building across borders or unlikely alliances forming across history, the response is familiar: suspicion first, understanding later, if at all.
