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Illustration by Alex Siklos
When I was 24, I was detained by the German police. When I say “detain,” I really mean kept for eight hours in a small but comfortable lounge, offered endless cups of tea and plates of chocolate cookies and regularly patted on the knee by a sympathetic woman who couldn’t understand a word I was saying. So, it was a gentle detainment, sure, but I was not allowed to leave. This point was made clear to me whenever the cups of tea did their work and I needed to be escorted – one of my handler’s hands resting gently on my elbow and the other much more firmly on the gun holstered to her hip – to the ladies’ room.
My crime was that I was 24, and an idiot. I hadn’t thought through the logistical challenges of travel for someone with a passport that meant it really mattered when you didn’t think through the logistical challenges of travel. It was the summer of 2009 and my sister and I had both been living abroad; she had been studying in the Netherlands, and I had been working in Ukraine.
Before I flew home to South Africa, we had agreed to meet up in the Netherlands and then to travel around Ireland. We spent a glorious couple of weeks making our way around. First, we visited distant relatives in Dublin who we found to be oddly posh and were surprised that we would rather spend our time trudging around Wicklow Mountains National Park than accompanying them to the tennis club. After hopping on a bus that only took an hour and a half to reach the centre of the country, we got off in the heaving metropolis of Doon, close to where our family’s old estate still stood. Doon is the kind of village where you can see both ends of it at the same time, even if you’re a smidge short-sighted. We had a brilliant time with our little cousin, many times removed, who was delighted by our foreignness.
When it was time to leave, we both flew back through Munich, where my sister hopped on her connecting flight to Amsterdam, and I would pop over to Frankfurt to make my international connection to Johannesburg.
This is where it all went wrong. What I should have been aware of, were I not a 24-year-old idiot, was that the Netherlands is part of the Schengen Zone, a geopolitical region of Europe which allows for travel and trade free of many restrictions. Germany is also Schengen. The Republic of Ireland, despite being part of the EU, is not. Because of this tiny detail, the single-entry visa that I had successfully acquired before travelling to the Netherlands, then Ireland, then catching my international flight home to South Africa from Frankfurt did not allow me to travel from Munich to Frankfurt. This was a domestic flight, and as I’d already entered the Schengen Zone once, I had to stay within international boundaries.
This has taken me a whole paragraph to explain, in English, without overwhelming panic and a depleted bank account hanging over me. You can imagine how long it took me to fully grasp the problem from the customs guard, who spoke to me almost entirely in German.
If this had happened now, it’s possible I would only have been held for an hour or so. But it happened before smartphones and WiFi and Google translate, so I waited in this small room and tried to make multiple calls to my parents back in South Africa so that they could help me with a new, eye-wateringly expensive ticket back home direct from Munich. Eventually, I was escorted through the airport by two armed German police officers who refused to let me touch my luggage until they had deposited me at the front of the check-in counter and delivered my ticket and passport directly to the agent. Of course, one could be mortified by all of this, or one could do as I did, which was to hold my chin high, don my largest sunglasses, and pretend I was a minor celebrity.
Now, more than a decade later, I’m Canadian as well as South African. Recently, my partner and I trotted around Europe, travelling through 22 countries over two months. It was a lot of moving around, but if we’d missed a connection or had to reroute it really wouldn’t have mattered all that much. We had Canadian passports and with those, we were granted the privilege of not having to prove ourselves every step of the way. It’s a wonderful privilege – one I’m honoured to have, and one I worked hard to gain. But I’m not a different person. As a South African, I might have made one costly logistical error, but I never would have overstayed a visa. I was polite, considerate, respectful. I am now, too. The difference in how I’m perceived at the border is arbitrary, the blue cover of my new passport more powerful than the green of my old. But the assumptions made about me purely because of my nationality are meaningless. I love being a Canadian. I love being South African. Neither of them defines me.
Caitlyn Moony lives in Vancouver.