Home Affairs

In an alternate universe, one in which I didn't get my visa, I left South Africa today.

Today was the day my original tourist visa was going to expire, and it took all my energy, all my composure, a lot of my money and a whole bunch of jumping through ever-more-ridiculous hoops to get a temporary residence permit that allows me to stay for the entire time Katie's going to be getting her masters.

Now that I have that little sticker in my passport, the story of what it took to get it must be told.

Or it could be told, except that it's very long and very boring, and would involve interminable paragraphs where I bemoan the fact that I spent interminable afternoons waiting in South Africa's version of the INS office. They call it Home Affairs.

But the story of inept bureaucracy is the same all over the world. I've been assured--by people who have been to both--that the local U.S. consulate here is just as annoying, only with the added hassle of having amazingly imaginative security guards who view every personal effect you could ever want to carry on your person as a direct threat to the United States of America. God help you if you try to bring your chap stick when you're applying for a green card.

So, to avoid the long and boring story, I'll skip right on ahead to my sixth visit (of seven) to the office, about a month ago, which was when my personal tale of woe veered briefly from the rather pedestrian to the downright absurd.

By this point, I had already officially submitted my application, but was returning to pay a deposit that is ostensibly supposed to be money that you will later use for your plane ticket when you leave the country. Since I had pretty much jumped through all their silly hoops, I was eyeing with pity all the other sad sacks who were standing in disbelief at the counter. They were appalled at the way they were being treated by the Home Affairs staff, and appalled at the odd requirements that emerge, one by one, on each return trip.

For example, did you know that, in order to get the type of temporary residence permit I wanted, you need to have a South African chartered accountant review your finances? That's in the application's paperwork; it shouldn't be a surprise. But even the accountant I found to do this didn't know that he had to include one very specific sentence, phrased just so, or else I'd get sent packing. I was quite proud of my accountant's letter, when he and I finally got it right.

So was the Department of Home Affairs, apparently. That day that I was there to pay the deposit, I noticed one of my fellow foreigners looking particularly dejected as he read a piece of paper on the counter. Then I noticed that whatever he was reading, it was from the same accountancy firm I had used. I knew that if I scooted over just so, and leaned far enough, and looked in the right place, I could see this guy's entire net worth.

I'm a curious person. So I scooted, and leaned, and looked.

And saw my own letter. The Home Affairs lackeys were handing it out as an example of what a letter from a chartered accountant should say.

It didn't have my address, or my social security number, or any identifying information other than my name, but it did have a rather large (to me, anyway) dollar figure. And they were apparently handing these out like candy to whoever strolled in off the street and asked about a temporary residence permit.

What does one do in this situation? Does one throw a huge fit? If one is just weeks from having their yearlong siesta cut nine months short, and one is facing the very people who will decide if one qualifies to extend one's stay, one does not. One simply grits one's teeth, walks away, and resolves to write scathing things on one's web site, which no one reads.

Then, one quotes from Dark Star Safari, a fantastic and acerbic book by Paul Theroux, in which he travels overland (mostly) from Cairo to Cape Town.

You could not spend a more wasted day than in an office of the Tanzanian government, as I discovered in Dar Es Salaam ... Tanzanians complained of unemployment--in the capital almost half the adults had no jobs. But those with jobs did next to nothing, if the Office of Immigration was anything to go by. I had my passport, my fifty U.S. dollars in cash, my filled-out application for a tourist visa, and I stood the requisite hour in line. I was no one special. Everyone else in line was encountering the same obstacles in the open-plan office of twenty employees: apathy, then rudeness, and finally hostility.

The crowd I was among just watched and waited. The office was dirty, the desks messy: one civil servant was eating a hunk of cake; another one, a woman with curlers in her hair, was reading the morning paper at her desk; yet another, a man, simply stared into space, drumming his fingers. I tried to detach my personal urgency from the charade... and watched as though it were a comic documentary. "You come back later," a surly woman said. But I wanted to monitor my application as it proceeded through all the stages, moving from desk to desk, getting cake crumbs on it from the gobbling man, tea stains from the fingers of the cup sipper. Six people examined and initialed my form. And then it was put in a tray, where it remained for twenty minutes. It was then handed through a slot in the wall, a side office...

Following my passport, I sneaked over to the side office door and opened it, apologizing-pretending to have entered the wrong office-and saw the visa officer in a white shirt and blue necktie with a tin tray on his desk, a hunk of bread in his hand, tucking into a big bowl of meat stew, slopping gobs of gravy on the stack of visa forms.

"Sorry," I said, and hurried outside to laugh.

There I found Christopher Njau. He was twenty-two, university educated, unemployed, trying to get a passport...

"I want to leave," he said. "That's why I am here. I need a passport to leave--but already it has been months."

"Where would you like to go?"

"My sister is in Texas. She is studying. She has her own car! With a car she can drive to work and also study."

He shook his head in disbelief. It seemed almost unimaginable that his sister, a woman of twenty-four, would own a car. I found it much harder to imagine that she had actually been to this office and gotten a passport.