‘Yes, well, I’m not a tourist so don’t think you can play games with me,’ said Lindi. ‘Where is this wonderful brother of yours?’

‘You have to go to him, madam. The airport is not allowing him to pick up here.’ He reached down for Lindi’s bag.

‘Oh, all right, then. Let’s go.’

‘So you coming back after holiday, madam?’

‘Well, I’m coming back but not from holiday. I’ve been away for many years. I was born here.’

‘You are welcome, madam. You are an African. Now you are home again.’

Back in Britain, Lindi had applied her own rigorous, not to say fastidious, benchmark for achieving the right to be called an African. By that measure most of the white South Africans she knew, including her parents, didn’t qualify, despite their habitual use of the sobriquet. It had always struck Lindi as presumptuous and dishonest. It was all very well calling yourself an African when you were safely ensconced in Britain. That was what she had thought. She had always refrained from calling herself either African or an exile. That was for others to judge. As a white person, it seemed to her, you had to earn the right to be called an African. It couldn’t simply be an accident of birth. And yet that was all it had taken for this porter to confer the description on her. For him it was not an award, not a title bestowed on you for services rendered. It was what you were. It was simply a fact. It didn’t come with any value judgement. He wasn’t offering her a compliment. That she would have to earn.

Looking back, Lindi found new sympathy for the mostly white South African community she’d grown up with in London, an uneasy mixture of the disgruntled and disenchanted peppered with a smattering of draft dodgers and genuine activists. Whatever their varied antecedents, being ‘African’ offered a patina of credibility – even to those whose flight to London had been an act of pragmatism rather than political activism.

She began to understand, too, her own father’s resentful exile. What role did he occupy in this melee of migrants? Even as a child, Lindi had sensed his unease, remembered a sort of lassitude. He’d been quite surly in those early years.