A long time ago, in the late 1980s, when there was still Apartheid, I needed a passport to travel by bus from Cape Town to Durban in South Africa. On the face of it, this makes no sense as I was traveling within South Africa. Well, technically.  The bus was traveling a coastal route and going through the “independent homeland” or bantustan of Transkei in South Africa’s Eastern Cape.

If you forgot, Transkei was one of the white South African government’s myriad of “self-governing” territories where it banished surplus black people and from where capitalism’s urban factories, farms, and mines got some of its abundant cheap migrant labor.  But just as South Africa’s black “independent” states needed parliaments and national crests, they also needed borders. I can still remember the farce of crossing the “border” and having our travel documents checked by Transkei police in brown uniforms and ten-gallon hats.

Then last week, before a short trip to Toronto, Canada, I received this message from Delta for South African citizens visiting Canada:

Additional Information: – Passports, identity or travel documents of Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Transkei and Venda are not accepted.

I was surprised by this message. Who has even traveled or is still traveling with such passports? I wondered whether it was because I was traveling to a country that offered refugee status to white South Africans from democratic rule in South Africa. I abandoned the quest after a while.

Meanwhile, the trip to Toronto – where I was attending the Canadian Association of African Studies annual meeting – actually turned out to be worth it.

I was on a panel about “South African Modernities: Then and Now” with Neelika Jayawardane, one of Africa is a Country’s regular contributors and on the faculty of SUNU-Oswego, as well as Tsitsi Jaji, assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. My presentation was on “Soap Operas, Public Broadcasting and the “Aspirational Viewer” in South Africa.

Other highlights from the Toronto visit: I went to a screening of academic and filmmaker Daniel Yon‘s beautiful new film on Sathima Bea Benjamin (review forthcoming); went to visit some exhibits of the Contact Photo Festival in downtown Toronto (reviews and a possible interview on its way); drove around the Toronto suburbs and went for some cheap, very good Tamil food; met and hung out with scholar and activist John S. Saul and watched a lot of Canada’s version of FOX News.