Andy Duffy
The daughter of a founding member of the Pan Africanist Congress has been stranded in Germany for nine years because she cannot prove she is South African.
Joyce Vuyiswa Khayana’s struggle for a South African passport has been supported by sworn affidavits from high-ranking African National Congress and PAC officials. Even the president’s office has been drawn in.
But the Department of Home Affairs is unmoved. It says there is no documentary proof that Khayana’s late father was South African. It says she should apply for permanent residence instead, and then, maybe, she could be eligible for citizenship.
That avenue, however, is also blocked. The German government has refused Khayana identity or travel papers, and will not allow her to leave Germany without a passport. She was recently refused permission to attend her Ugandan mother’s funeral.
Khayana gets by on handouts from friends and grants from the German government. “I don’t have anything,” she says. “It’s like I’m non-existent.”
The Department of Foreign Affairs, through its embassy in Berlin, has been dealing with Khayana since 1992. Its hands, however, are tied by home affairs in Pretoria.
A foreign affairs official says Khayana is caught up in a legal net. Attempts by embassy officials to draft in help from the United Nations have failed. “This is a very sad case,” says the official. “She is completely lost.”
Khayana (29) was born in Uganda and has never set foot in South Africa. But she grew up in the heart of the exiled liberation movement.
Her father, John Khayana, came from the Eastern Cape and joined the PAC in 1959, soon after Robert Sobukwe founded the party. He fled into exile in 1964 and died in Uganda in 1972.
Khayana says her father instructed Ezekiel Mothupi, his long-time friend and now a senior official in the PAC’s Johannesburg office, that she and her younger brother Sipho “be brought up as South Africans”. She speaks several official languages, including isiZulu, isiXhosa and seSotho.
The PAC at the time could not cater for its operatives’ families, so responsibility for the children passed to a “social worker” in the ANC’s exile ranks. Khayana and her brother were adopted in Tanzania in 1981 by the late James Hadebe, at the time the ANC’s representative in Dar-es-Salaam, and a former member of the party’s national executive committee in exile.
Khayana was schooled at the ANC’s Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Morogoro until 1987, and then became a nurse at the ANC’s Dakawa training camp.
She went to Berlin in 1989 to study nursing science, on a scholarship the ANC organised with the then East German government.
Germany’s reunification threw the scholarship programme into disarray. Khayana failed to register for South African citizenship, because the German authorities lost her files. Her first application for late registration of birth went to the South African embassy in 1992. But Pretoria refused her request, and has blocked her since.
Minister of Housing Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele wrote a sworn affidavit to support Khayana in 1995. Mthembi-Mahanyele says she does not know Khayana personally, but that she had written the letter in her capacity as the ANC’s former representative in Bonn.
Mothupi has also given a sworn statement supporting Khayana’s efforts. He says he knew her father for nearly 20 years, and personally buried him in Kampala.
Mothupi is hoping to get a copy of Khayana’s birth certificate from Uganda, which he says records her father as a South African. He adds that Sipho Khayana has returned to South Africa, but has not been traced. He is also attempting to trace any Khayanas around Port Elizabeth and Cradock.
Home affairs officials, however, dismiss such lobbying efforts, this week labelling them as “hearsay”.
Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Lindi Sisulu ordered a new investigation late last year – when Khayana appealed to the president’s office, to PAC leader Stanley Mogoba, and to Truth and Reconciliation Commission chair Desmond Tutu. That investigation also found nothing new.
“No proof of the status and identity of Ms Khayana’s parents is available to consider granting her South African citizenship by descent,” says Sisulu’s administrative secretary, Francois Hugo.
Khayana says she believes the ANC has just neglected her. “They sent me out here,” she says, “but now I can’t get home.” The party says it had left the issue to the Hadebes to sort out. But James Hadebe died last year, and his widow, Busi, says she does not want to get involved.
She says Khayana never contacted the family after she went to Berlin. “Why should I worry about her?” Hadebe says. “If she wants my help, she must write to me.”