The Imaginary Bus: Khalo Who Foresaw His Own Death in a Dream — Volume One
I glanced at the woman in red. ‘Before Lena tells us the history of migration, I’d better make my own position clear. As a leftist, I oppose every kind of border drawn between human beings.’
The monarchist shifted in his seat but said nothing.
‘I believe the wealth of the earth belongs to everybody and ought to be shared fairly. One part of the world shouldn’t sit on stockpiles of gold, oil, gas, water, food and technology while another struggles with hunger, famine and war.’
The newcomer stopped stroking Coco and looked at me.
‘If the world’s wealth were shared fairly, countries would no longer send armies to seize the wealth of others. Children would not die of hunger. Nobody would have to leave home and family for a crust of bread, and nobody would be driven into exile by force.’
The monarchist smiled. I had not finished.
‘I believe people should be free to live anywhere on earth, without having to ask governments for permission to breathe, work, fall in love or grow old.’
The donkey pricked up his ears.
‘That includes you, of course. But if you get into somebody’s garden and eat every flower, don’t start invoking freedom of movement.’
The woman in red laughed. Lena smiled, and the newcomer returned to stroking Coco.
‘I’ve said this so you know how we on the left view the movement of people. The divisions we hear about today — political, economic, social, legal and illegal migrants, and dozens more — aren’t simply neutral words. Many are products of a world built by capitalist states: a world where wealth crosses borders freely, while a poor person must stake their life on the sea to cross the same border.’
The monarchist could bear no more. ‘Look, even the five fingers on a hand aren’t alike. Do you want to make everyone in the world equal? That’s utopia. Lovely, but it exists only in books.’
I looked at my right hand on the steering wheel and spread my fingers a little.
‘You’re right. The five fingers aren’t alike. But nobody cuts one off because it’s shorter than the others.’
The woman in red laughed out loud.
‘Equality means the little finger has as much right as the thumb to be part of the hand. People don’t have to become identical. No one should count for less because of their birthplace, skin colour, language, sex or poverty.’
‘Another slogan!’ said the monarchist.
‘Perhaps. But many things we now consider natural rights were once slogans: the abolition of slavery, votes for women, the eight-hour working day. Universal healthcare and education once sounded utopian too.’
‘Even the right to seek refuge was once no more than a plea from somebody running from a sword,’ Lena said.
I turned to her. ‘Your turn to do the history. Just make sure our passengers don’t get off in the middle of it.’
‘Perhaps Ms Lena could avoid starting with the dinosaurs,’ said the monarchist.
‘Don’t worry,’ Lena replied calmly. ‘Hereditary monarchy hadn’t been invented then.’
The woman in red laughed. The monarchist pursed his lips.
The bus passed a row of brick houses. The rain had eased; the streetlights stretched across the wet tarmac.
‘To understand the history of migration,’ Lena said, ‘we must begin by discarding one mistake. Migration didn’t begin with states, borders or religion. Human beings were moving long before states, organised religions or political frontiers existed.’
‘From the very beginning?’ the newcomer asked.
‘More or less. People moved in search of water, game, a kinder climate, safer land and ways to survive. Movement wasn’t an exception; it was part of life. There were no passports, visas or immigration offices, and no official to ask the purpose of their visit.’
I looked at the donkey. ‘What a fine age that must have been. Nobody would have asked him for documents either.’
Lena continued. ‘Over thousands of years, human groups travelled from one region to another. They encountered new surroundings, made tools, changed their languages and formed different cultures. You cannot separate human history from the history of human movement.’
‘So everyone was a migrant?’ asked the monarchist.
‘Go back far enough, and yes. Nobody can stand on one patch of earth and confidently claim their ancestors have been right there since the world began.’
‘Even people who shout at migrants to go home today are probably descended from earlier migrants?’ asked the woman in red.
‘Exactly. They’ve simply forgotten their own family’s journey.’
After a moment, Lena went on. ‘A great change began when some human groups took up farming and settled in particular places. Agriculture made it possible to produce more food and store it. But storing a harvest raised another question: whose land is this? Who controls the grain? Who does the work, and who commands the crop?’
‘Obviously the crop belongs to whoever worked for it,’ said the monarchist.
Lena gave him a brief look. ‘If the person who did the work had always owned the crop, much of human history would have been very different.’
The woman in red smiled.
‘As production increased, labour became more specialised. Villages grew, towns appeared, ownership took more regular forms, and some groups gained control over land, water, produce and other people’s labour. Social classes, governing institutions, armies and laws gradually emerged.’
‘Was that when people realised they could draw a line round a piece of land and say, “Mine”?’ I asked.
‘More or less. It didn’t happen overnight or in the same way everywhere. But once land, water and crops became sources of power, human movement was no longer simply a free search for survival. Sometimes people were driven off the land; sometimes they were taken elsewhere to work.’
‘Is that when exile began?’ the newcomer asked.
‘Ancient societies had forms of exile, forced migration, captivity and population transfer. After winning a war, rulers might kill the defeated, enslave them or drive them from their homes. Sometimes whole populations were moved elsewhere for labour, military service or to prevent rebellion.’
‘But there has always been war,’ said the monarchist.
‘There has always been disease too. Is that a reason not to treat it?’ I said.
‘Khalo, it’s as though you came with all your answers in your pocket today,’ said the woman in red.
‘No, the London rain has washed my brain clean.’
‘Many ancient wars weren’t just about differences of belief or feuds between kings,’ Lena said. ‘Fertile land, water, trade routes, labour, taxes and wealth mattered enormously. Rulers seized territory and then decided the fate of the people living on it.’
She paused. ‘In some societies religion later became part of collective identity and the structure of power. But we shouldn’t attribute every migration or war solely to religion. Sometimes faith offered shelter and solidarity; sometimes rulers used it to justify war, repression or expulsion.’
‘So it wasn’t only what people believed,’ I said. ‘What mattered more was who used those beliefs to secure power.’
‘Yes. As states, property, class and organised religion became intertwined, people were divided by ethnicity, language, belief and social position as well as where they lived.’
‘Did today’s borders exist back then?’ asked the newcomer.
‘No. Rulers had territories, built walls and defended their lands. But the modern border — a precise line on a map, passports and visas, checkpoints and the recording of everyone’s identity — is much more recent.’
‘So those kings who claimed half the world for themselves didn’t necessarily know which side of a stream their exact boundary ran along?’ I asked.
‘In many cases a frontier was a broad zone, not an exact line. People moved across it, traded and married, and sometimes did not even know which ruler they were subject to.’
‘But without borders a country has no meaning,’ said the monarchist.
‘Meaning for whom? For the people who live there, or for the line a politician drew on a map with a pencil?’
‘There you go again!’
‘I didn’t start it. The person who drew the first line and stationed a soldier beside it started it.’
The donkey brayed.
‘Perhaps the line went straight through his pasture,’ said the woman in red.
‘The history of private property probably began with one of this donkey’s ancestors lodging a complaint.’
Even Lena laughed. Then she went on.
‘As great empires developed, populations moved on a wider scale. Soldiers, merchants, enslaved people, craftspeople and farmers travelled between lands. Some went willingly; many were compelled. Sometimes a city was destroyed and its people fled. Sometimes drought or famine set a population moving. And sometimes conquerors carried people off as part of the spoils of war.’
Lena looked at the rain-speckled glass.
‘Centuries later, the expansion of world trade and colonialism gave human displacement a much larger and more brutal scale. Millions of people were abducted from Africa, put in chains and taken to other lands for forced labour. This wasn’t migration. It was the organised transport of human beings as commodities.’
‘And enormous wealth was built on those chains,’ the woman in red said quietly.
‘Yes. Many cities, banks, companies and wealthy families profited from slavery and colonialism. Colonialism didn’t merely take a land’s resources; it disrupted people’s whole way of life. It seized land, destroyed local production, drew new borders and moved millions to work in mines, plantations and colonial projects.’
‘But colonialism brought civilisation too,’ the monarchist said.
The woman in red looked at him so sharply that even the donkey drew back his head.
‘If someone entered your house, took your gold, divided the rooms among his friends and left you a wall clock on his way out,’ Lena asked evenly, ‘would you say he had brought you civilisation?’
The monarchist went quiet.
‘He’d probably set the clock to his own time too,’ I said.
Lena continued. ‘As capitalism grew and the Industrial Revolution unfolded, millions of people were pushed from the countryside into cities. Common land was taken from them, old ways of life fell apart, and factories needed workers. Some moved in search of work, but their choice was not always as free as books today might suggest.’
‘Because if they didn’t go, they would starve?’ the newcomer asked.
‘Exactly. When a person’s choice is between moving and starvation, it’s hard to say simply that they migrated freely.’
‘Freedom with death on one side looks more like a threat than a choice,’ I said.
The bus crossed a bridge. Beneath it, dark water broke the reflections of the lights and carried them away.
‘In modern times nation-states gained greater power,’ Lena said. ‘They counted their populations, registered identities, built standing armies and watched their borders more closely. Gradually it became clearer who counted as a “citizen” and who as a “foreigner”.’
‘And sometimes the paper in someone’s hand became more important than the person holding it.’
‘Yes. Passports and visas weren’t simply ways to identify people. They became ways to control movement. The right to enter and leave came to depend heavily on nationality, wealth and political power.’
‘So the human beings who once crossed continents without passports could now be stopped by a barbed-wire fence?’ the woman in red asked.
‘And even killed,’ Lena said.
The bus fell silent. We could hear the windscreen wiper.
‘Great wars, the collapse of empires, colonialism, new borders and the creation of new states left millions without homes. Some borders were drawn in rooms far away from the people who would have to live with them. Villages were split in two; families found themselves in different countries; people who had lived alongside one another for centuries were suddenly called “foreigners”.’
‘Still, you can’t do away with every border,’ said the monarchist. ‘What if everyone decides to go to the same country?’
‘Why would everyone go to the same country?’ I asked.
‘Because some countries are better.’
‘Why are they better?’
He paused. ‘They’re more developed.’
‘And where did some of their wealth come from?’
He did not answer.
‘That’s the central question,’ Lena said. ‘People tend to move towards safety, work, food and a future. If the world’s wealth accumulates in a few places, while war and poverty remain elsewhere, and resources flow from poorer countries to richer ones, we should hardly be surprised when people move.’
‘Capital can leave London in the morning, land in New York at noon and hide on an unnamed island by night. Nobody asks why it came without a visa. But a worker who owns no more than will fit in a rucksack is stopped at the border.’
‘Money has a passport that poor people don’t,’ the woman in red said.
‘And that passport works at every border.’
‘We’re back to capitalism again,’ said the monarchist.
‘Not our fault. Whichever road we take, we find it got there before us.’
The donkey gave a loud bray.
‘Yes, sir. You probably want to remind us that grass predates capitalism.’
There was a brief laugh.
‘The history of migration shows that people have always moved,’ Lena said. ‘But the reasons, forms and possibilities of movement changed with property, class, states, empires, colonialism and capitalism. A group moving to find water is one thing; an army driving them from their homes is another. Travelling to discover the world is one thing; boarding a rickety boat to survive is another.’
‘So “migrant” alone explains very little,’ said the newcomer.
‘Exactly. We must ask who moved, why, what drove them, what power blocked their way and who gained from the move.’
‘And who later sat behind a desk and gave them a new name,’ I added.
‘Yes: migrant, exile, displaced person, asylum seeker, refugee, foreigner, “illegal”. Every word reveals part of the reality, but sometimes conceals another part.’
‘So in your utopia there are no borders at all?’ the monarchist asked.
‘In the world I hope for, nobody is treated as a criminal for living anywhere on earth.’
‘Hope is tax-free.’
‘For now. If capitalism finds a way, it’ll tax that too.’
The woman in red laughed. We reached another crossroads, and the light changed to amber. I pressed the brake gently.
‘But we haven’t reached the most important part,’ Lena said.
‘Which part?’
‘When a person fleeing a government came to be recognised specifically as a “political refugee”, and how states decided which fugitives to admit and which to keep beyond their borders.’
‘Let me guess,’ said the monarchist. ‘More history?’
‘Yes. Political refugees did not fall from the sky. They emerged from the struggle between people and power.’
The light turned green, and the bus moved again.
I looked at the passengers in the mirror. ‘So now we understand: the earth had no borders before we came along. We drew lines, posted soldiers beside them, and then asked the person crossing, “Why did you move?”’
The donkey leaned his head against the window.
‘Don’t worry. Nobody has asked you for a passport yet.’
‘Perhaps they did,’ said the woman in red, ‘but rejected his passport photo.’
‘Naturally. Those ears would never fit in the frame.’
Laughter filled the bus. But behind it stood thousands of years of movement, war, hunger, conquest, exile and flight. And the question facing us had grown clearer:
If the earth belongs to all human beings, who acquired the right to tell another person, ‘You are not allowed to live here’?
To be continued…
Naser Kamali
Translator’s notes
- ‘Illegal’: The quotation marks reproduce the character’s criticism of labels applied to people; the term is not used here as the translator’s description.
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