I remember in the eighties that some Black people were in the habit of taking offense at being called “my people” by comrades all over South Africa. And I never saw the big deal. Nonetheless, I sit here, on another continent and I know exactly who my people are and what it is I am proud of as I get ready to celebrate being free for a decade, just under a third of my life. Because I have been alive long enough to remember being unfree. Some people, who are not mine, have the daftness to ask the question, “What was it like growing up Black under apartheid?” As if I could answer that as I pass the salt or salad on to another person. Something like, “Ah, well, it had the distinctive taste of metal on the tongue, a lot coppery. Yes, certainly, I’ll have more wine.” I imagine myself saying this with affected English accent. But I don’t want to talk about that now, I spend enough time on that topic and all it brings up. I want to talk about why it is so kwaai to be a young Black person from southern Afrika today.

When I heard the Ugandan poet-activist Jessica Horn tell someone from the BBC in an interview that she found home in people, smells, tastes and places that feel like they own her, places that she embraces, I recognised that feeling. So who are my people, then? Where is my home, apart from physically the house my parents own in Fort Beaufort, that I retreat to, or the walls I withdraw to at the end of the day normally when I am back in the country, in Westdene, Bloemfontein? My home travels with the people I own, who offer me heaven. The ancients among amaZulu understood how this works, that heaven is some place you make and carry within yourself. That is why they called themselves by a name that suggests that they are people who own heaven, live in heaven, and make heaven. The ancient AmaZulu also knew that things in the sky are not to be confused with heaven, like you can in English when you speak of the sky as the heavens. And kwaZulu may not be eZulwini, but that is a matter of semantics.

For me the last decade has been joyful above everything else. I am too much a product of my country, my region, and my continent, to be blindly optimistic, so there have been a range of feelings. But overall there has been an abundance of joy. I guess it is what they mean by freedom. It is that feeling of being okay with yourself and the world, and being fine with the surprises that offer discoveries of heaven. And choosing sometimes to sweat the small stuff.

All this business of freedom sounds like kwaito all the time to me. It is a story that plays to the soundtrack of the genius of a Bongo Maffin song. My heaven has the audacity captured in the brain that can think up poetry called an Azanian love song, never mind songs. So, my people are impossible to ignore, and they make heaven everyday. They make do, and eish! like, Don Mattera, mix things that are not supposed to be put all together and force you to take a second look. Make you want to claim him, show you how women who had a thing for bad boys could have fallen madly in love with his younger-gangster-self, and more chillaxed women’s minds wonder at his subversive poetic tongue. Yes, and see him as a brotha sisters could call comrade. I am not even talking about his Italian/Xhosa/Sotho/coloured thing. Not hybrid. Just complicated, but it’s fine like that.

The dialogue rests on tongues with enough grace to utter isiXhosa phrases with the eloquence of an Abner Nyamende poem, and the joyful surprise of a Peter Mtuze wordplay that can lead you anywhere, most recently to a rare dinosaur being named Nqwebasaurus thwazi. These people, my freedom-loving-doing people, are those for whom a stoned cherrie is something you want to wear on your sleeve, lapel or wherever. Neither a genetically modified berry with one too many pips, nor some kind of woman on a chemical high.

Freedom/home has the amusing confusion of a mid-Sunday morning in Bloemfontein trying to prevent my breakfast from spilling all over the bed as I race through the headlines of the newspapers, hurrying to read Phylicia Oppelt’s column. How I miss her on snowy Sunday mornings in Germany! After Phylicia Oppelt fascinates me, I read Xolela Mangcu with a combination of a frown and a smile.

Home/heaven has the distinctive saltiness of film-makers who do hooked on hemp, and make documentaries that dare to say transgressive is about the business of knowing how to be a lady and mshoza, somehow. Ask Nokuthula Mazibuko. Or others who shine their light and remind us that you can shout silent. Their knack astounds me because I know it is a knotty affair this, but Xoliswa Sithole looks so joyful. My mind continues to be blown by these phenomenal women-world-remakers. It is the seeming impenetrability of an artist named FrutQk whose name astounded me for weeks before I cordoned on to the fact that a fruitcake is a-mad-Blackperson-cake with raisins of all kinds in it and you never know what kind you will chew on next, kgaitsedi.

These are my people. They are Patricia McFadden, who makes you want to stop and catch yourself when you are acting a little dodgy, or faulty, as they say. Pat, who always speaks her mind, handing out all her nice middle class money in Harare because she can’t pretend she doesn’t know that some people need it more. And all the while I am wondering, how people like that manage to buy anything for themselves. It seems this thought never crosses their minds, and this makes me wonder about how I could be more generous, more consistent, and more joyful.

And, as I pack my bags one last time from Jamani, watching my soul gallop all the way down towards Mzantsi region, and I listen to my Tumi and the Volume CD for the third day flat, home and freedom light up my spirit-place. I know that in a few hours I will be battling to concentrate on the Zoë Wicomb fire-piece-of-heaven-novel that is my reading on this journey home, even though I have turned its pages so many times I almost know the thing off by heart. As I physically head home to start the tenth year of my freedom, I know I could not have chosen better people to be owned by. 2004 would have come around anyway, but when I smile too much this year, abandon myself to joy more freely, it is these people, my southern Afrikan people that I choose to live, walk, cry and shout among that make home filled with bits of heaven everywhere I look. They remind me that I am free.