Kasiemobi Udok-okoye, Empilweni

For my service learning presentation on Monday, I led the group in an activity in which identity “tiles” were placed all over the room and everyone was given a simple instruction: “Find the place where you belong.” Each tile had a different identity label written on it, including “Black,” “Coloured,” “Son,” “Woman,” “Queer,” “American,” “Nerd,” “Student,” “Scholar,” “Hip Hop,” “Artist,” and “Activist,” to name a few. I used this activity as a physical illustration of the struggle I’d had in South Africa to reconcile my different identities as a Nigerian American woman, among other things, with my experiences, and to determine where my focus and responsibilities as a student, an activist, and a citizen should lie in the global context.

Some of the thoughts I grappled with personally and that I presented to the group were:

• Can I claim any sense of belonging in South Africa?
• I often wondered what place a foreigner like me could claim in South African history and politics? As a woman who proudly identifies as African, was I really a foreigner?
• What place and what identity, if any, could I claim in this context?
• I alternatively felt that I was not African enough, not South African enough, not Nigerian enough, not “international”(-ly aware enough), etc, etc.
• Could I ever possibly learn enough to feel like I understood enough about South Africa to really “get it”, to really belong, whatever belonging means? The things I learnt about South African history made me wonder just how little I knew about my home in the U.S. too, and about my home and culture in Nigeria.
• In many places I went to in Cape Town, I was the only black person, or the only woman, or the only person my age, and in those moments suddenly that one aspect of me would become the one defining feature of my identity
• I worried that this constant grappling with identity and cultural allegiance was self-centered and egotistical, but I realized that the reason trying to find the answers to these questions had become so important for me here in South Africa was because it was not only me trying to find a place to claim and feel comfortable but also trying to determine where my duty and attention as an activist and a human is and should be..
• How can you decide which space or identity you belong to when there are so many different definitions of what it means to be African, or Black, or European, or artistic, or modern, or queer, or Muslim? In the time I spent at my placement at Empilweni, at cultural events, and in conversations with South Africans, I realized that they too were trying to figure out what these categories of belonging and identity really mean.