Global Citizen.....Or Nationless?

“What do you think of the new government? Personally, I’d rather have seen the Icelandic Volcano Party in power.... it’s done more to stop immigration than Labour managed in the last 13 years!”

This was relayed to me last night by the owner of our local Indian takeaway...an anti-immigration joke told by one immigrant to another - he the son of Bangladeshi immigrants, me born elsewhere and to parents who were themselves both immigrants to that country. I’m not too sure the jolly Tandoori owner saw the irony.

Immigration is a highly contentious issue in the UK, and one that can sometimes make me feel a bit uncomfortable. Do those born and bred here look at me as “one of them, coming over here and stealing our jobs!”? Not that I am perceived as a typical “immigrant”... for one thing, with my father being British born, I have always held UK citizenship. Years ago I forfeited the citizenship of my birthplace...dual nationality is forbidden in Zimbabwe, and since the late 1990s, anyone born to parents who themselves were not born in that country is deemed a foreign national unless they renounce their parents’ ancestry.

I’ve now lived exactly half of my life in a country that is not the one of my birth....the past nine years in the UK, and the previous nine as a student in South Africa. There, I had to abide by the Aliens Control Act, allowed temporary residence provided that I paid my repatriation deposit (a lump sum of money to cover the costs of deportation if I misbehaved and had to be hoofed back over the border). I also had to promise not to seek employment in South Africa when I finished my studies.

And so I left Cape Town a week after graduation, and came to live in the UK. I arrived with no standing on ceremony, no pomp or circumstance, no “Britishness test” or citizenship ceremony to swear allegiance to Her Majesty and sing the national anthem....B went through all that three years’ ago, with me present as his guest. I simply landed at Heathrow late one night, joined the EU Citizens passport control queue and started living my new life....one that has been good so far. I am close to my family, I’m building a fulfilling career, I've made new friends and have many older ones that are living over here too, we've bought our own hovel house and travelled a fair bit.

I’ll never forget my background....I’ll always be told that I have “a slight accent” of indeterminable southern African origin, but I don’t exactly know how to classify myself..... just “British”, “British, originally from Zimbabwe” or “Zimbabwean now living in the UK”...and does it even matter? Perhaps I’ll be an “International Woman of Mystery”...

One Would Probably Not Approve