Cops profiled me but I escaped by a whisker

I have been living a double life for the past 31 years. Apparently, according to the post-liberation visual test, there is strong evidence that I am an illegal immigrant of Congolese extraction. Remember, this wonderful rainbow nation is well versed in the “science” of racial and ethnic classification.

Coloured people with phenotypically white features, strangled by apartheid and colonial laws, understandably sometimes tried to beat the system to the greener pastures filled with the milk and honey of whiteness, across the great divide in the 19th and 20th centuries. All they often had to do was beat the dreaded pencil test. And light-skinned Batswana folks, also in search of the marginally better wages and living conditions afforded to their own extended family members across the native/coloured divide, were often subjected to the “pinch test”. Without warning the authorities would pounce on an unsuspecting applicant and pinch them hard. If they yelled out “eina!'’, they were coloured. Screaming “atchu!” relegated them back to the ignominy of Tswanadom.

 Fast forward to the year 2025 of our Lord and we’re still at it. Only now, we’re using different “scientific” methods to flush out the illegal immigrants from the African continent. According to the watertight “Ncegela test”, otherwise known by its other moniker, the "Poyoyo test", I have been identified as a Congolese foreign national a handful of times.

I know that this revelation will come as somewhat of a surprise to my mother with two South African parents: a father from the AmaPhephethe clan in Fredville, Inchanga and a coloured woman from the Kinlochs of Verulam. It will equally shock my paternal family from the AmaQadi clan of KwaMnamatha village in the Valley of a Thousand Hills.

Without skipping a beat the passenger cop points at me: 'The shape of your head'

Allow me to explain. Last Wednesday I am driving home, cruising along Osborne Road, window down, chatting to my seventeen-year-old son on Bluetooth. Driving abreast of me in the 5km/hour peak hour traffic is a police van, with a fellow in blue uniform in the passenger seat, his window also down. He interrupts my conversation with a loud, “Ola! Dintshang?” (That’s Tswana Joburg lingo for “What’s up?”).

I nod and respond, "‘I’m good!”

My brain was, at that moment stuck on English frequency because my blazer-wearing private school coconut was addressing me in English over the phone. Big mistake. A little later I’m pulled over to the side and my “papers” are politely requested. I’m confused momentarily, until the driver of the van asks me where I’m from. After a brief search through my car, I produce my green ID book (I don’t even remember why I had it on me), and everybody relaxes.

So, I inquire, what makes me look suspiciously foreign. Without skipping a beat the passenger cop points at me: “The shape of your head”. The penny drops. Thirty-one years ago, as a recently arrived “immigrant” to the City of Gold from the then Natal, I had been subjected to the same experience as I disembarked from a train at Mayfair station.

Apparently foreign nationals from West Africa and the Congos in Central Africa have flat heads at the back when looked at in profile. What got me out of that pickle at Mayfair station in 1994 is that the copper pointed at his elbow and asked me what the body part is called in isiZulu and I correctly identified it as “indololwane”. Urban legend has it that non-Zulus often called it “idolo elincane” (the junior knee). These two incidents aren’t the only times I’ve been mistaken for Congolese. But I get it. I have performed due diligence on my lineage and I’m well aware that my AmaQadi ancestors ended up in eastern Zululand circa the 16th century via the Catembe region in Mozambique, having originated from the Great Lakes and Central Africa regions.

 Back to 2025. As my interrogators started walking back to their van they left me with helpful advice: “Le wena o se ka bue sekgowa le mapodise mono Jozi” (Don’t speak English with cops in Joburg.) I nodded in conspiratorial understanding, grateful to be missing a free ride to Lindelani by the whisker of a hair on my poyoyo-less head. To avoid further mishaps and “hide in plain sight” I have been considering signing up for Operation Dudula or joining the “Mabahambe” movement led by the gap-toothed minister whose forebears must have passed the “eina/atchu” test with flying colours.