#AfricaDay

Today I'm thinking about home.

This one I've chosen.

South Africa.

I'm thinking about this version of me in the photo.
(below)

Tentatively courageous. Ignorantly determined to love as fiercely as my own mother did.

I think about how my Mama chose the UK.

For Dad.

For Love.

For Family.

For Me.

I wonder if choosing South Africa will leave my children estranged from the UK, the way I'm left wondering if I'll ever know Germany as my own.

I read a comment on a post from the detention center today.

A few, actually.

Something along the lines of "Why didn't you stay at home?"

It ruffled me to lay my eyes on those words for the first time. Because, that's the point.

This IS home now.

A home I chose and a home I fought for. A home I've battled to stay with and battled to leave.

So I breathe deep into my belly and ask,

Yana, can you let the fear of being rejected consume you entirely?

Can you surrender yourself to it so deeply that its power is void?

Can you lay yourself into the arms of the music which played through your kitchen speakers as a child?

Miriam Makeba

Angelique Kidjo

Oliver Mtukudzi

Baaba Maal

Youssou N'Dour

Papa Wemba

Can you bow deeper than ever before to the song that sent Dad off.

Malaika

Remember the folder he had on his desktop with the 30 renditions of his favourite song?

The one he loved the most sung by the Soweto Gospel Choir.

Can you feel how those voices carried you through the darkest moments of his death?

Yana, can you remember the drum rhythms you learned with him? The way you poured through Mamady Keita's books tapping away on Dad's djembes.

Might you just be able to let your body remember the Ghanaian dance moves you learned as Kpanlogo rhythms beat the air with your heart, at just eleven years old?

Dare you summon all the moments of African Magick that rippled through your life in ways never to be told?

Might you listen to your Mama's words?

"Yana, I don't think you'll be together with someone from England" and remember how mothers are always right.

Can you hear the whispers of memory somewhere deep down? Gambian women reaching their hands to mama's belly, confidently declaring "It's a boy!"

Close your eyes and look upon the tender flight you took at twenty-one, to meet South Africa for the very first time.

To lay seeds of promise in a young relationship which already felt like forever.

And the six years plus that have unfolded since.

Dare you embrace your name, Nomtha? The one who shines light. Can you open you heart more than ever before to your Dzedze family, and then further still?

Could you breathe in the welcome and the want of this land and its people?

And fully RECEIVE your place here.

To realize that home has been here all along, just waiting for you to know it.

.

My soul chose this place, and my mind has caught up.