I have been hovering at the brink of this essay caught in a dizzying paradox. The editors’ invitation to contribute to this collection is a call to write about race and the politics of friendship in South Africa, or, as the title puts it, ‘the ties that bind’. Early on, I decided to adopt a new genre, to write a more autobiographically grounded essay than usual, but as I've sought to take up their invitation I've had to reckon with the fact that many of my most obviously interracial friendships depend on race remaining one of the unspoken and indeed unspeakable subjects. When in doubt one goes back to one's beginnings, and for me these are my too-quickly eroding mother-tongue chiShona, where kutamba naye means both to play and to dance together. What I am doing here is playing with ideas, ideas about friendship, the passage of time and yes, dancing.

As a Zimbabwean who now resides and holds citizenship in the U.S., my relation to South Africa is a transitory one, but I have often found that as a relative stranger, a sort of national poorer cousin, I have been free to speak more frankly about race with Zimbabwean friends in South Africa than at home. In this chapter I want to think about two related questions. The first concerns the silences upon which interracial friendships rest, and what might be gained and lost when such silences are breached. And the second concerns the relationship between place and friendship, a question that opens onto considering what it means to befriend another abroad, what the relationship between nostalgia and friendship might be, and how memory restructures the narratives of ‘home’ for diasporic subjects in ways that can productively and mutually unsettle fellow travelers. In other words, what happens when old friends meet, and speak frankly at last, and how can we make sense of the irreconcilable differences that give rise not to conflict so much as a recognition of structural antagonisms otherwise masked and mystified by the conviviality expected in schools, rehearsal spaces, apprenticeships, and other ideological state apparatuses. As the daughter of a white American mother and a black Zimbabwean father, the invitation to think about interracial friendship is necessarily confounding.