When we left Tembisa last year, we thought we were leaving more than just a place. We thought we were stepping into something lighter, something safer, something closer to what people call freedom.
But freedom, it turns out, is not always a clean break. Sometimes it follows you, sits beside you in the silence, asks you questions you are not ready to answer.
In Tembisa, silence did not exist. Life announced itself constantly. Our house stood on a main road, a thoroughfare of movement, survival, urgency. Just down the road, the tavern pulsed with music, laughter and sometimes violence. Up the road, Madelakufa stretched out, an informal settlement alive with its own rhythms, its own negotiations with dignity and survival.
To get anywhere, people had to pass our house. We lived inside the movement of others.
At 3am, the first taxi would arrive, a low rumble that signalled the beginning of the day for those chasing work before sunrise. That sound was as dependable as a clock. It was how the body learnt time.
Gunshots were less predictable. Sometimes distant, sometimes so close they tore through sleep and sent us to the floor, instinctively folding ourselves into safety.
There were nights when lovers fought their way past our gate, their arguments stretching down the road until their voices dissolved into the dark. Even in rest, there was no real rest. The body remained alert, coiled, listening.
This is what it means to grow up in many townships, not just to witness instability but to internalise it. To have your nervous system shaped by unpredictability. To understand, long before you have the language for it, that safety is temporary, negotiated, fragile.
And then, one day, you leave. Leaving is often framed as success. It is spoken about in the language of escape — you made it out. You moved up. You found something better. In many ways, that is true.
The new neighbourhood offered things that once felt distant: space, stillness, the absence of constant threat. There were no taxis announcing the morning, no tavern spilling noise into the night, no gunshots puncturing sleep.
But what no one prepares you for is what happens when the noise disappears. The quiet was immediate, almost aggressive. It pressed in on us. For the first time, there was nothing to drown out our thoughts.
No external chaos to distract from the internal one. We could hear ourselves think deeply, painfully, without interruption. In the stillness, something began to surface. Not peace, not immediately. But memory. Tension. Questions about who we had become because of where we had been.
Freedom, in that moment, did not feel like relief. It felt like exposure.
There is a misconception that once you leave a place marked by hardship, you also leave the effects of that hardship. But trauma does not obey geography. It travels. It embeds itself in the body, in the way you respond to sound, to silence, to sudden movement. It lives in the reflex that tells you to switch off the lights when you hear something unfamiliar at night. It lives in the instinct to gather everyone into one room, to make yourselves small, to wait.
That night, when we heard gunshots in the distance, everything we had carried with us rose to the surface. We moved without speaking, turning off lights, finding each other in the dark, hearts beating in sync with an old fear. For a moment, it was as if we had never left.
Then my father spoke, gently cutting through the panic: people in this area hunt at night. There is nothing to fear. Nothing to fear.
It is a simple sentence. But it landed with complexity. What does it mean to be told that there is nothing to fear when your body has been trained otherwise? When fear has been a form of protection, a necessary awareness that keeps you alive?
This is the paradox of freedom for many who leave the townships. You arrive in spaces that are objectively safer but your internal world has not yet caught up. Your body does not immediately trust this new reality. It takes time, sometimes years to unlearn the constant vigilance. And even then, it never disappears.
For those who remain in the townships, freedom is often imagined as elsewhere. It is the dream of leaving, of finding a place where sleep is uninterrupted, where mornings are not announced by urgency, where the soundscape is not dictated by survival. It is a valid dream, shaped by real conditions. What is often left out of the narrative is the cost of carrying the environment in yourself.
Leaving does not automatically translate to being free.
Freedom, in its truest sense, is not just about physical relocation. It is about the ability to exist without the constant anticipation of harm. It is about a nervous system that can rest. It is about feeling safe enough to be still. For many, that kind of freedom is not granted simply by moving to a different neighbourhood.
There is also a quiet grief that accompanies leaving. A recognition that the place you come from, with all its difficulty, also held community, familiarity and a shared understanding of how to navigate the world. In the new space, that understanding is not always present. The silence can feel isolating. The absence of noise can feel like the absence of life.
You find yourself in between worlds. No longer belonging to the chaos you left but not at ease in the calm you have entered. You carry both. The memory of sirens and taxis, of gunshots and late-night arguments, sits alongside the unfamiliar quiet of suburban streets. Somewhere in the overlap, you try to define what freedom means for you.
Perhaps freedom is not a destination but a process.
It is the slow work of teaching your body that it is safe to rest. It is the conscious unlearning of hypervigilance, even as you acknowledge why it existed in the first place. It is allowing yourself to sit in silence without immediately filling it with fear. It is recognising that while your past has shaped you, it does not have to confine you.
It is also, importantly, a collective question. Because as long as townships remain spaces where rest is a luxury, where safety is inconsistent, the idea of freedom will continue to be unevenly distributed. The burden should not be on individuals to escape in order to experience peace. Freedom should not require departure.
For those who remain, freedom might look like small, daily acts of resilience — creating moments of joy within constrained circumstances, building community in the face of instability, finding ways to rest even when rest is interrupted. These are not insignificant. They are forms of resistance, of survival, of insisting on humanity despite the conditions.
For those who leave, freedom is often more complicated. It requires confronting the ways in which trauma lingers, the ways in which the body remembers even when the environment has changed. It asks for patience, for compassion towards oneself, for an understanding that healing is not immediate.
That night, after my father explained the sound of gunshots, we slowly returned to our rooms. The lights came back on. The house settled. But something had shifted. We had been reminded that while our surroundings had changed, we were in the process of changing with them.
Freedom, then, is not just about where you are. It is about what you carry and what you are willing to unpack. It is about learning, over time, that silence does not have to mean danger.
That quiet can be a form of safety, not a prelude to harm. That rest is not something you have to earn through exhaustion or vigilance but something you deserve.
And maybe, one day, the sound of nothing will no longer feel like a confrontation. It will feel like peace.
Leaving the township can change your surroundings but unlearning the fear it taught your body is where the real work of freedom begins
