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Illustration by Alex Siklos
At the age of 24, I was detained by the German police. By “detained,” I mean eight hours confined to a small but cozy lounge, endlessly offered tea and chocolate cookies, and repeatedly slapped on the knee by a sympathetic woman who couldn't understand a word of what I was saying. So, while it was a gentle detention, I was not allowed to leave. This point was made crystal clear to me as the tea took effect and I was escorted to the ladies' room, one of the attendant's hands resting gently on my elbow and the other firmly on the gun holstered on my hip.
My crime was being 24 and stupid, not thinking through the logistical challenges of travel for someone with a passport. That is, not thinking through the logistical challenges of travel was the real problem. In the summer of 2009, my sister and I were both living abroad, she was studying in the Netherlands and I was working in Ukraine.
We had agreed to meet in Holland and then tour Ireland before flying back to South Africa. We spent a couple of weeks doing all sorts of things. First, we visited distant relatives in Dublin. They were oddly posh and we were surprised that they preferred us to wander around the Wicklow Mountains National Park rather than go to the tennis club. We hopped on a bus and were in the centre of the country in just an hour and a half, disembarking in the bustling metropolis of Doune, close to where our family's old homestead still stands. Doune is the kind of village where even if you're a little nearsighted you can see both ends of the town at the same time. We had a wonderful time with our little cousins, generations removed, who were happy that we were foreigners.
When it was time to leave, we both returned via Munich, where my sister caught a connecting flight to Amsterdam, and I stopped in Frankfurt to catch an international flight to Johannesburg.
This is where it all went wrong. If you're not a 24-year-old idiot, you should know that the Netherlands is part of the Schengen area. Schengen is a geopolitical region of Europe that allows travel and trade without many restrictions. Germany is in Schengen too. The Republic of Ireland is part of the EU but is not in Schengen. This little detail prevented me from traveling from Munich to Frankfurt with the single-entry visa I successfully obtained before boarding my international flight from the Netherlands, Ireland, and Frankfurt to South Africa. This was a domestic flight, and since I had already entered Schengen once, I had to stay within the borders.
It took me a paragraph to explain this in English without panicking or causing my bank account to plummet, and the customs guard spoke to me mostly in German so you can imagine how long it took me to fully understand the issue.
If this happened today, I might only have been detained for an hour or so. But this was before smartphones, Wi-Fi, and Google Translate, so I waited in this tiny room and made multiple phone calls to my parents in South Africa, trying to get them to help me arrange a shockingly expensive direct flight from Munich. I ended up being escorted to the airport by two armed German police officers, who dropped me off at the check-in counter and refused to let me touch my luggage until I handed my ticket and passport directly to them. You can, of course, feel embarrassed by all this, or you can, like me, hold your chin up, put on your biggest sunglasses, and pretend to be a minor celebrity.
Now, more than a decade later, I am both South African and Canadian. Recently, my partner and I roamed Europe, traveling to 22 countries over two months. We moved around quite a bit, but missing connections and rerouting didn't really matter. We had Canadian passports, which gave us the privilege of not having to prove ourselves every step of the way. It's a great privilege. I was honoured by that privilege and worked hard to earn it. But I'm not the same person I was before. As a South African, I may have made one costly logistical mistake, but I never overstayed my visa. I was polite, considerate and respectful. I still am. The difference in how I'm perceived at the border is arbitrary, and the blue cover of my new passport is more powerful than the green cover of my old passport. But the assumptions made about me based solely on my nationality are nonsensical. I love being Canadian. I love being South African. Neither defines me.
Caitlin Mooney lives in Vancouver.
