Are you aching for home?

Before I moved to Glasgow in 2021, I lived and worked in Germany for almost 12 years.

As a native South African, I qualified to apply for German citizenship after a couple of years. There was, however, an important caveat. I would have to renounce my South African citizenship as part of the process. To many of my loved ones this was a no-brainer: “Do it,” they said, “a German passport is far more useful than a green mamba” – as we fondly refer to our bottle-green passports.

But I couldn’t bring myself to proceed. Germany wasn’t my home. I often found myself yearning for some notion of home. The longer I lived abroad the harder it became to be certain that a return to South Africa would satisfy this ache, but it was still the object of that deep-seated hope. To take some liberties with G.K. Chesterton’s words: “Home is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory … we are all kings in exile.”