It’s tough to remain pleasant when you’ve had to manoeuvre through Wynberg main Road traffic with no air conditioning, swerving out the way of taxis, barking expletives with every breath.
Sweating more than a paedo in a Santa suit, the inside of your nostrils is assaulted by the thick odour of a Home Affairs office resembling a busy bovine slaughterhouse, and the woman behind the counter sports an expression like she’s personally removed her cancerous vagina sans anaesthetic.
“Hello,” I smiled broadly, on what they call the charm offensive, “all I need is the BI-31 form.”
I wasn’t sure if she’d gone for a Botox treatment and they’d accidentally filled her whole face up with lead, or thought she’d look younger if she could just get her jowls to hang lower than her tits. Either way, the look she’d gone for didn’t inspire confidence.
Her tongue convulsed like the slow-motion replay of a Yellowtail’s death, in a voice like a suicidal housewife from Oranje she said, “What do you want to do?”
The fun part about Home Affairs isn’t the sweltering heat inside, the endless queues, or even dodging TB-laden coughs like a Matrix baddie. It’s not zoning out the shrieks of teenage mothers’ babies or humming a favourite tune so as to avoid getting some cell-phone’s blaring kwaito music stuck in your head.
The most exciting bit about Home Affairs is the anticipation of speaking to the government employee on the other side of the counter.
Like opening a lucky packet or popping a Christmas cracker, you’re never sure whether you’re going to pull out a key ring or nail clippers, or a plastic spinning top and one of those roll-the-ball-into-the-hole games.
The woman behind the counter was definitely in the spinning top category.
“I want to marry my fiancée from England,” I said, “I got one of the papers here a week ago but we lost it,” and then repeated, “it’s the BI-31 form.”
I’d foolishly believed that if I got my facts in order – visited the website and found out the exact name of the form I needed – it would be a quick, in and out job.
With less emotion than a ventriloquist’s dummy, without even the slightest facial wobble, she said, “You need to go to the Immigration offices in Riebeek…”
“No, no,” I interrupted, “a man last week gave me exactly what I needed. It’s the BI-31 form.”
She spoke a bit louder and slower; the way she’d learnt to talk to her slightly backward, fully inbred nephew, “What is it you want to do?”
I looked around for a piece of paper, a map, or Ken and Barbie dolls to help my explanation, then slowly said, “My fiancée is from England. A British citizen. A foreign national. I am a South African citizen. I was born here. We want to get married. We need the BI-31 form. Please.”
This exchange replayed itself in varying ways, each coming up short in the joy department. How I longed for a koeksuster with which to bribe this greasy-haired, no-neck behemoth of a woman.
She stubbornly refused to move her chubby legs across the room and through the little door – where the previous week a polite, young, black gentleman had retrieved said form – and as my ire rose and my hope sank I realised my hair would be grey and thin, and my fingernails long and curly, before her sausage-fingers would place a BI-31 form in my clammy palm.
I gave up, but not before demanding to see “the person in charge!”
She looked out at the disorganised, teeming mass of people angrily complaining at the tops of their lungs, then across to her colleagues shaking their heads and directing people to other, longer queues to slowly die in, and in dead seriousness and deader monotone replied, “There’s no one in charge here.”
And so the penny drops.
Words: Nathan Casey
Photograph: Ross Hillier
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