Bulelani Mfaco
Bulelani Mfaco has always had an acute sense of the periphery. Over rooibos tea in a café on the north side of Dublin’s city centre, on a Saturday afternoon in February, he describes the difference which has repeatedly positioned him on an edge and put him in recurring pursuit of a centre. From childhood to present day, transcending domestic and international geographies, his is a search for freedom that has taken him from countryside to capital, and from one of earth’s hemispheres to the other. Born in rural South Africa, life has brought him to Ireland, in search of asylum, where today – and for the last two years and five months – he is in Direct Provision, resident in Knockalisheen Accommodation Centre, County Clare.
The room spills over with giddy weekend chatter. Trays of coffees and plates of Middle Eastern inspired brunch dishes are shuttled to and fro. The energy is high tempo and we are seated in the thick of it. This may not have been the optimal time or place for this interview, I think. Our order is taken, we are locked in. My quiet concern is unfounded. As Bulelani speaks, the surrounding frenzy falls away; the din relenting to the lyrical intonation of his accent, which itself very occasionally yields to an acquired regional Irish flatness. Two years and five months in East Clare might do that to you.
“As a child, I always wanted to get out of there,” he opens, speaking of Marhewini, the small village on South Africa’s Eastern Cape, where he was raised by his maternal grandparents. With no electricity and little to do, daily life extended little further than school and minding the family’s livestock. Education, however, offered limited escape from mundanity. Living in significant poverty, school shoes or a proper uniform weren’t guaranteed; a sense of difference sewn early, the alienation born from this driving a repeat pattern of dropping out. “When you start comparing yourself with other children in the classroom you begin to think that it’s not your place. You don’t want to be there.”
Home was bustling, with grandparents, an uncle and up to six or seven boys under one roof. The atmosphere was competitive, and boys were expected to behave like boys. “If you did anything that was effeminate, if you stepped out, that would be corrected with a whipping.” An arena of machismo, it was an early awakening to the difficulties that non normative gender and sexuality present for others – and the turmoil this creates for the self. “I grew up wondering, ‘What do I do? This is it. I can only be myself. There is no other version.’” Bulelani had little inclination for conformity, including the traditional male rites of passage in his community.
Life in Marhewini was isolating but not completely solitary. He recalls an older butch woman who would transport people between villages in her pickup truck. Selling fruit and vegetables with his grandmother near to where this woman parked, he would sit with her in her truck if he needed a break. He sensed a connection to, and identified with her. “We never really talked about our personal lives or our personal struggles but we got on quite well.” Aloud, he wonders what might have happened to her, the only person who made village life seem less lonely. “I don’t think there was any escape for her. To get out, you need to know someone – somewhere.”
Cape Town and his mother offered those necessary conditions, and the promise of cosmopolitanism, and a greater chance of belonging in the country’s ‘gay capital' awaited. While opportunities seemed more plentiful, queer fortunes vastly differed. "The life of a gay black man is very different to the life of a white middle class man in the same city,” he says. “You have to think about where it’s safe to be gay and where it’s not safe to be gay.”
Bulelani meets my request to hear his coming out story with amusement. There is none. “I don’t remember sitting anyone down to tell them that I’m queer. I just started living my life.” An ease that is admirable and enviable, it is in stark contrast to a lived experience in the country’s capital marked by constant hyper vigilance. “You knew where not to be queer, you knew where to play heterosexual. You needed to know what side of the road to walk on. If you walk on one side, there might not be a gate for you to run through if you’re attacked.”
Increasingly, life in Cape Town read like a grim litany of violence against the LGBT+ and queer communities. Bulelani describes one case on his college campus, in which a trans student was attacked as security looked on. “You didn’t know if the student sitting next to you in the library was the one laughing or throwing the stone. Nobody was charged.” The psychological impact of such an extended state of fear and ultra awareness is immeasurable. While organising and protesting took place against this backdrop, eventually one wouldn’t find themselves in the safety of numbers after the demonstration had disbanded.
Bulelani’s time in the capital was punctuated by a temporary move to Ireland, the only country he has ever travelled to outside of South Africa, where he studied for a master’s in Politics at UCD. “I never thought about living in Ireland. I thought Irish people spoke Irish,” he teases. Absent of any real conviction, I suggest that we all do. It is a rare and welcome moment of reprieve during our conversation. He remembers calling his brother from Dublin, and telling him he missed him – but not South Africa. “I remember thinking, ‘actually, I could live here.’”
Following his return home, two incidents stand out in his mind, galvanising his decision to claim asylum in Ireland: the abduction and murder of a young lesbian, the only openly gay woman on his street, and the rape, murder and abduction of a lesbian couple who were married for three years. While people might hail South Africa for having marriage equality, he says, that couple’s marriage certificate didn’t protect them. Looking ahead instead of constantly watching his back, he made his decision. “I needed to live.”
Even with the hardship he has survived in South Africa, only when Bulelani describes his ongoing experience of Direct Provision does a real personal exhaustion emerge. For those unaware, Direct Provision is a system in Ireland, in which asylum seekers are given food and shelter, with a weekly allowance of €38.80 provided to adults while their claims are processed. Overseen by the Department of Justice and Equality, the system is widely seen as facilitating human rights violations. According to a report from the Irish Refugee Council, the time period in Direct Provision can range from less than one year to seven years. “While you might be safe, you’re trading your safety for freedom,” he says.
That said, Bulelani questions what sanctuary he has really found, having been on the receiving end of homophobic slurs in his centre’s canteen, and told by his first roommate that men are supposed to be with women. “I left my country because I didn’t want to hear this, and now I’m hearing it. There are many others who would share similar experiences.” We remember Sylva Tukula too, a trans woman who was placed in men’s accommodation, who took her own life, and who was buried by the State without ceremony. Sylva’s friends weren’t notified of the burial.
On the mechanical insensitivity of the bureaucracy which handles asylum claims, Bulelani boils over. Exasperated, he mentions applicants who have been asked by officials if they’ve belonged to any LGBT+ organisation in their country of origin, to prove their sexuality. “In some places it’s illegal to be gay. You’re putting a target on your back if you do.” Particularly galling, he continues, was the Department of Justice and Equality’s offer of free transport to last year’s Dublin Pride for those living in Direct Provision. “I sent letters about my experiences of homophobia there and they didn’t even respond. Then they tell me they’re taking me to Pride to wave a rainbow flag?” Plainly, bleakly, this is pink washing.
To the extent that hope exists, Bulelani finds it in his involvement with the Movement of Asylum Seekers Ireland [MASI] which, among other aims, calls for the dismantlement of Direct Provision. “It’s easier to wake up in the morning and look forward to the next day when you have that,” he says. We talk about Ireland’s absence of hate crime legislation, society’s tacit and blatant racism and homophobia, and the role of privately funded individuals with extensive online followings who aim to incite.
We meet on the day of the General Election, and Bulelani remarks of scant mention of Direct Provision, or of addressing racism and homophobia during the lead-up. Having lived through extremes of violence, he offers a warning to heed. “It starts very subtly. When you start tolerating the slurs it suddenly grows into something else.” Tangible legislative action over empty press statements would be a first step, he says. “You get worried when you begin to see the [violence] change, and there isn’t a concerted effort among the political establishment or activists to counter it.”
We finish and move outside to take some photos to accompany this interview. The sky is compact and thunderous. The airs feels thick, heavy rain is threatening. I duck into a shop to withdraw Bulelani’s train fare from an ATM. There would be little if anything left from his paltry weekly allowance if he were to pay for even one leg of his journey to Dublin to speak with me.
From my bag, I give him my copy of Caelainn Hogan’s book, Republic of Shame. It tells the story of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, industrial schools and mother and baby homes through the voices of those who survived them, and of the nuns who ran them. I have dog-eared the corner of one page, in which a nun draws close comparisons between those institutions and Direct Provision today. The scandal is indeed approximate, as is the need for reckoning and reparations.
Amid the chaos of Capel Street, all manner of lives go on around us – uninhibited. Life-limited, existing in a state of some suspension, Bulelani makes a start for his trip by tram, train and bus back across the country to Knockalisheen. “You wake up every single day, you see people going about their business and you’re reminded that you don’t have the same opportunities.” he says. “It’s demoralising. I had ambitions and dreams when I moved here.”