Nevertheless, he refused exile. “No one will force me out of this country,” he warned. “If it is not fit to live in, then our job is to make it fit.” Instead, he chose a life on the margins that rejected all the material excesses of Africa’s post-independence elites. He saw the Africa that he and his parents inherited as “not the real Africa.” The Kalakuta Republic he set up in the heart of a large, sprawling ghetto was his attempt to reinvent and reimagine another Africa: a space of belonging for all, especially the dispossessed.

I was going to live out my life in a home that reminded me of the loss of home and a school that offered shelter but not the certainty of home. Both, ironically, were colonial constructs, but I feared that even they might clash at any moment and crush my dreams.

Her grandma, a former domestic worker, had used her entrepreneurial skills to save up and buy a house in the multiracial area of Sophiatown in the years before my mum was born. When police and bulldozers forcibly moved more than 60 000 residents in February of 1955, the Mxakato family was deposited in Soweto’s Diepkloof Zone 1. Her grandma saved up once more, eventually buying the two-bedroom house that is still the family home. Back then it usually had around 15 people living in it; relatives from the Eastern Cape, friends or people who just needed a place to stay for a while.

I asked her to expand, explaining that I was trying to understand what led us to having to leave. ‘I can’t go into those things, Kealeboga, because they belong in the domain of the African National Congress!’ she snapped. And so we continued, me trying to open the door, her letting me a tiny way in and then closing it. We ended the conversation saying ‘I love you’, but our nerves were frayed.

PART TWO: the business of burning

6. The Hole She Called a Window

“No onlooker asked, Why fix a house where the airport authority might demolish it? Almost

everyone here improved his hut when he was able, in pursuit not just of better hygiene and protection from the monsoon but of protection from the airport authority. If the bulldozers came to flatten the slum, a decent hut was seen as a kind of insurance. The state of Maharashtra had promised to relocate those families who had squatted at the airport since 2000 to tiny apartments in high-rises. To Annawadians, a difficult-to-raze house increased the odds that a family’s tenure on airport land would be acknowledged by the relocation authorities. And so they put their money into what would be destroyed.