THE BORDER IS LAUGHING Poems from a Country That Forgot Who Came From Where By: Charles Neville Seven chapters. One border. A continent of cousins. Copyright © 2026 Charles Neville All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author, except for brief quotations used in reviews or critical articles. This is a work of poetry. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental. First edition 2026 Copyright © 2026 Charles Neville All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author, except for brief quotations used in reviews or critical articles. This is a work of poetry. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental. First edition 2026 THE BORDER IS LAUGHING i DEDICATION For every grandmother who never needed a visa, and every cousin who now does. For the man who fixed my phone on a Friday night and the woman who sold tomatoes at the taxi rank until the month she couldn't anymore. For anyone who has ever been asked, sharp sharp, where are you from, and felt the whole weight of a border sitting inside that question. This book is for you. Sit down. The pap is warm. THE BORDER IS LAUGHING ii FOREWORD I did not set out to write a funny book about a serious wound. I set out to write about xenophobia the way it actually arrives in this country, which is to say, quietly at first, dressed as a joke, hiding inside a WhatsApp forward, waiting at a taxi rank with its arms folded. By the time it stops being funny, it has usually already burned something down. So this collection laughs on purpose. It laughs at the border, at Home Affairs, at the WhatsApp Economist, at the politician who loves foreign investment and hates foreign shopkeepers in the very same speech. It laughs because laughter is often the only door still open when the subject itself has become too heavy to walk through directly. But it never laughs at the m an packing his shop into three bags, or the child asking his mother if he is the bad kind of foreign. Some doors, this book keeps firmly shut for that. The seven chapters move the way an honest conversation about this subject tends to move. We begin at the border, laughing at its absurdity. We move to Ubuntu, and notice, uncomfortably, that we have quietly added conditions to a philosophy that was never meant to have any. We go back to 1884, to a room in Berlin where fourteen countries drew our future witho ut inviting a single African to the table. We sit with 1994, and ask Madiba, gently, what happened in the room after the cameras stopped rolling. We follow the rumour from the taxi rank to the burning spaza shop. We sit, quietly, with the human cost, the e mpty shop, the suitcase, the neighbour who becomes a stranger. And finally, we arrive somewhere close to home, at the idea that we were Africans before we were foreigners, and that the border, for all its stamps and fences, was never quite as real as it in sisted. If you laugh while reading this, good. If you wince right after, even better. That second reaction is the whole point. Sharp sharp. Welcome to the book. THE BORDER IS LAUGHING iii PREFACE This book was written in a country still arguing with itself about who belongs to it. I grew up hearing two contradictory stories at the same time. The first said we are one continent, one struggle, one Ubuntu, brothers and sisters from Cape to Cairo. The second, whispered at taxi ranks and shouted at rallies, said some of those brothers a nd sisters should go back to where they came from. I wanted to understand how both stories could be true in the same mouth, sometimes in the same sentence, sometimes in the same breath. The poems in this collection are not academic essays with line breaks. They are closer to the way an uncle tells a story at a braai, funny at first, wandering, full of impressions and voices, until suddenly, without warning, he says something so true it stops the whole yard. That is the tradition this book borrows from. Town ship slang sits next to a Berlin conference table. A grandmother's proverb sits next to a government stamp. Ubuntu sits, uncomfortably, next to its own fine print. I have tried, throughout, to be fair to the anger this subject provokes without excusing whe re that anger lands. Unemployment is real. Frustration is real. But the shopkeeper on the corner did not draw the border in 1884, did not sign the deal in 1994, did not lose the tender that should have built your local clinic. This book asks, again and aga in, whether we have been burning the right problem. Mostly, though, I wrote this because I believe a difficult subject deserves a book people will actually finish, and laughter, used carefully, is one of the oldest ways of keeping a reader in the room long enough to hear something true. Sit close. The kettle is on. THE BORDER IS LAUGHING iv Contents CHAPTER I Welcome to Mzansi, Please Produce Your Passport 1. Welcome to Mzansi 2. Please Produce Your Passport 3. My Neighbour Is From Somewhere Else 4. The Border Has a Sense of Humour 5. Seven Languages and One Argument 6. The Taxi Driver Knows Who Is Foreign 7. Dear Foreigner, Welcome Home 8. Home Affairs Is Not Home 9. The Passport of My Face 10. Sharp Sharp, Where Are You From? CHAPTER II Ubuntu Has Terms and Conditions 1. Ubuntu Has Terms and Conditions 2. I Am Because You Have Papers 3. The Kwerekwere Dictionary 4. My Brother Needs a Visa 5. Eish, You Sound Like Me 6. Braai With a Border 7. African Brotherhood, Limited Edition 8. The Hospitality Clause 9. We Love Africa, B ut Not Africans 10. Who Told You I Was Foreign? CHAPTER III The Map Was Drawn Yesterday 1. My Grandmother Never Needed a Visa 2. The Map Was Drawn Yesterday 3. A Line Called a Border 4. The Colonial Ruler 5. The Conference Table 6. They Divided the Cousins 7. Before the Passport 8. The Ancestors Didn't Know the Border 9. Africa's Family Tree 10. Dear Colonial Map, We Are Still Confused CHAPTER IV Mandela's Receipt 1. Mandela's Receipt THE BORDER IS LAUGHING v 2. Dear Madiba, We Need to Talk 3. 1994 Came Wearing a Suit 4. The Rainbow Has a Missing Colour 5. The Deal Nobody Read 6. Mandela's Ghost at the Border 7. The Freedom Charter at the Pub 8. Was the Rainbow on Sale? 9. The Constitution Has Entered the Chat 10. After Apartheid, Before Breakfast CHAPTER V Somebody Said They Are Taking Our Jobs 1. The Rumour Has Legs 2. Someone Said They Are Taking Our Jobs 3. The WhatsApp Economist 4. The Foreign Shopkeeper 5. The Matchbox Economy 6. Unemployment Has No Passport 7. Blame the Man Next Door 8. The Politician's Favourite Foreigner 9. A PhD from WhatsApp University 10. We Burned the Wrong Problem CHAPTER VI The Night Ubuntu Went Missing 1. The Night Ubuntu Went Missing 2. A Mother Packs Her Shop 3. The Word "Foreign" 4. My Name Was Not Foreign Yesterday 5. The Emp ty Spaza Shop 6. The Man Who Came to Work 7. No One Asked the Constitution 8. A Suitcase Knows Too Much 9. The Street Forgot My Name 10. When Your Neighbour Becomes a Stranger CHAPTER VII We Are All Foreign Somewhere 1. The Border Is Laughing 2. Africa Bef ore the Passport 3. We Were Cousins Before Colonialism 4. The Passport Office of Heaven 5. No Country Owns the Sun 6. Africa, Please Come Home 7. The Border Asked Me Who I Was THE BORDER IS LAUGHING vi 8. Ubuntu, Uncensored 9. My Grandmother Still Doesn't Recognise Your Border 10. We Are All Foreign Somewhere THE BORDER IS LAUGHING 1 CHAPTER I Welcome to Mzansi, Please Produce Your Passport 1. Welcome to Mzansi Yoh, welcome to Mzansi, where the taxi hoots before it greets you, where the sun rises for free but the serpentine queue at Home Affairs will cost you your entire Tuesday. Welcome, my brother. Sit. Eat. The pap is warm, the gravy doesn't ask where you're from. But, where are you from? No no, I mean, where are you really from. I said Bulawayo. He said, "Ah." That "Ah" carried more weight than the entire Immigration Act. He looked at my forehead like it owed him a signature. "Zimbabwe?" Yebo. Zimbabwe. "You got papers, my bra?" I looked up. The sky had no papers. Hawu, has anyone stopped a cloud THE BORDER IS LAUGHING 2 crossing from Beitbridge to Musina and asked it to declare its business? The wind doesn't carry a permit. The rain falls on both banks of the river without applying for asylum. Even the ancestors, walking thi s soil before Berlin drew a line on it with a ruler and a wine glass, never once produced ID to demonstrate they belonged to the land that grew them. But me? Me I must explain myself to a man whose own great grandfather came off a boat from somewhere he no longer recalls the name of. Eish. Haibo. We are a funny people, us. We built Ubuntu with our bare hands, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu , a person is a person through other people, then went and installed a password on it. Terms and conditions apply. See consultant for details. Bring three copies, certified, not older than three months, mfethu. Sharp sharp. Aweh. Welcome to Mzansi. Welcome home. Just don't get too comfortable, the border has a long memory and an even longer queue. THE BORDER IS LAUGHING 3 THE BORDER IS LAUGHING 4 2. Please Produce Your Passport Please produce your passport. Okay. But first, can the border produce one of its own? Can it show me which king signed for it, which chief agreed to it, which grandmother was consulted before her homestead woke up one morning split cl ean in two, one half in this country, one half in that one, same soil, same rain, distinct flag now, distinct rules? No answer. Not even a mumble. The border just stands there, arms folded, like it's always been there, like it wasn't drawn by a man in Berlin who'd never once smelled a mango tree, never heard a talking drum, never crossed the equator except on paper. 1884. Fourteen countries. One table. Zero Africans invited. They carved this entire continent like a Sunday roast, took their portions home, left us the bones and the paperwork. So please, produce your passport, THE BORDER IS LAUGHING 5 he says again, tapping his stamp like a judge with a small angry gavel. I produce it. He flips through it slowly, too slowly, like he's reading a novel instead of a docum ent, then he stamps it, hard, one clean thump, and just like that, a line drawn by a stranger in a country I've never seen decides, for today at least, whether I get to go home. Hawu. Ncese. Even God rested on the seventh day. The border never rests. Not even for lunch. THE BORDER IS LAUGHING 6 3. My Neighbour Is From Somewhere Else Chommie, my neighbour is from somewhere else. I don't know precisely where, until Sunday morning tells me, speakers up, sungura on full volume, and, by nine o'clock, the entire street has capitul ated to its rhythm. He fixes phones. Cracked screen, dead battery, SIM card stuck since 2019, bring it to him, he'll fix it before the kettle's finished boiling. Friday night my charger died. Load shedding, stage four, entire block dark except one small light in his shop window, counting coins by candle, still open, still smiling, still saying "come in come in, no problem." Someone at the corner shop warned me about him. "You know how they are," they said. I said, "How is that, exactly?" Silence. Th en, "You know. They take things." I said, "He's fixed my phone four times. Never once taken anything but a fair price and half an hour of my time telling me about his daughter back home." My neighbour is from somewhere else. THE BORDER IS LAUGHING 7 So is the maize on my plate. So is the language I greet him in. So is half this flag, red and blue and white, borrowed cloth, stitched together, told to call itself original. Ag shem, we are all visitors here. Some of us just got here a few centuries earlier, that's all. THE BORDER IS LAUGHING 8 4. The Border Has a Sense of Humour The border has a sense of humour. Dark. Dry. A consummate comedian, this one. The kind that coaxes a laugh from you a breath before it wrings out the tears. It lets diamonds glide across freely, polished, boxed, first class, no questions asked, "welcome sir, this way please," but the man who dug them up, it stops him right at the fence, weary hands, empty pockets, "sorry sir, incomplete documentation." Eish. It lets a truck of stolen timber through at three in the morning, lights off, no inspection, but it flags a grandmother carrying tomatoes to sell because her permit expired yesterday, and bureaucracy, unlike hunger, does not believe in mercy, or in weekends. You want to hear the real joke? The border laughs loud est at the mining company, foreign owned, foreign funded, profits flying home first class, champagne in hand, no queue, no stamp, while the miner's son waits four hours holding a birth certificate THE BORDER IS LAUGHING 9 from a country that changed its name twice since he was born. Sharp sharp, chief. Even the border knows it's a joke. That's why it keeps moving. THE BORDER IS LAUGHING 10 5. Seven Languages and One Argument Eleven official languages, they tell the tourists with pride, a veritable spectacle. Eleven, though by some quiet alchemy the arg ument at the taxi rank only ever needs one. Loud. Fast. Final. "Foreigner, you don't belong here," said in Zulu to a man born right here in Soweto, whose only crime was a surname that sounded like it came from north of the river. Said in Xhosa to the woman selling amagwinya, who has stood on that corner longer than the man shouting at her has been alive. Said in Sotho. Said in Tswana. Said in Afrikaans with extra pepper. Said in the particular English we reserve for telling people to go back to a home they may never have left. Funny thing about eleven languages, you'd think with all that vocabulary we'd have found a kinder word than kwerekwere , a softer way to say