The serial lair in me
My prayers and thoughts are with the people of Istanbul...
I hope you all enjoyed my last post. Well if you didn’t enjoy it, I hope this piece will live up to your expectations.
I am going to share with you a story and I will try to keep it short.
The story is about how I made people to believe that I was/am a Turk.
So we were at this camp in Turkey and everyone was enjoying the moment. Non-dancers like me were sitting down talking about football, politics, education and love.
As we were chatting one person asked me “Where are you from? Your Turkish sounds perfect!”
Without hesitating I snapped back, “I am a Turk!” There was a moment of silence, only the background music kept our ears entertained. I looked around me, everyone was staring at me with eyes of disbelief.
Deep down I knew that I was in for a huge task.
“How?”this was the first question to be asked.
“Are you from the Afro-Turk community based in Izmir?” this was the next question.
To avoid another question, I had to act in a very fast and decisive way.
So I pushed my chair to the center and made myself the focal point of the discussion.
Everyone was so keen to listen to my story. One guy offered me a cigarette, which I gladly turned down.
Here is how I began my story;
“My father is an African and my mother is Turkish,” I said. “So according to the law, I am a Turk!” I added.
One doubting Thomas asked a very legit question, “Which law are you referring to?”
I looked at my audience and smiled, “Do you all read the constitution?” I asked. I know that only a handful of people have the time to read the constitution. I enjoy reading constitutions of different countries especially the section that talks about citizenships.
One law student, who happened to be my friend, supported my assertion but that was not the end of it.
One curious girl asked another valid question: “How did your parents meet and are they still together?”
I looked at her and replied with a question, “Can you guess?” (This is a typical Zimbabwean thing, you reply to a question with another question).
She looked at me and said, “I cannot guess how they met but I can guarantee you one thing; your parents are no longer together, black men are good at cheating.”
She had guessed correctly and this is why I didn’t call her out for stereotyping. I had scripted the whole story in my mind beforehand, so the remaining question was, ‘how my parents met?’
I looked at my audience again, they were all eager to know how my imaginary mum and dad met.
I gladly said, “They met because of globalisation, my mum came over to Africa.”
To keep the story lively I added a very interesting fact, “I moved to Turkey to retrace my mother’s roots and learn about her culture.”
Making people to believe my story was not a hard task because I spoke what they wanted to hear and supported it with valid facts. The following day people started to refer to me as “Konyali Andrea” (Andrea from Konya- efore Mustafa Kemal Ataturk introduced the “law of surnames” in Turkey, most people were called using the name of the city or village they came from.)
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Reason Moses Runyanga 