Mehlomadala

A Greeting Older Than Memory. On Return, Recognition, and the Memory That Knows First

I arrived in Stone Town, Zanzibar, and it did not feel like a place meeting me for the first time. The feeling was not arrival. It was return. I had no evidence to support this sensation, only certainty. The kind that does not ask permission from logic. Stone Town felt like a place that already knew my footsteps, my pauses, my way of looking at old doors. The air itself seemed to speak a greeting that required no translation. And it so happens that it is the first trip ever I took outside of the Republic of South Africa.

Mehlomadala.

Not hello. Not welcome. Something closer to, you are late, but you are here.

As I wandered, I spoke to a man whose admiration for King Shaka burned with unusual clarity. His reverence was not academic. It was intimate, as if history had once sat beside him and shared a meal. We spoke easily, skipping over introductions, speaking as though we were continuing a conversation paused long ago. I left him unsettled, not by what he said, but by how natural the exchange felt. History had not passed through him. It had lingered.

That night, I dreamt.

It was not the kind of dream that dissolves upon waking. It arrived whole, deliberate, structured. I found myself in deep conversation with someone who felt profoundly familiar. We spoke of things done together, plans once imagined, moments shared in other arrangements of time. There was warmth. Humour. Reflection. I woke with the strange ache of having ended a conversation mid-thought.

The trouble was simple. In this lifetime, we had never met.

I will not name this person. Some experiences require no witnesses. They collapse when exposed to ridicule. I learned long ago that truth does not need applause.

Weeks later, intuition began to tug at me again. A persistent thought about a friend I had not seen in years. The feeling was not concern. It was knowing. A quiet certainty that he was no longer walking among us. I resisted it. Surely this was imagination, nostalgia playing tricks.

Then coincidence stepped in, wearing a familiar face.

I bumped into someone I had not seen in over a decade. No planning. No anticipation. Just a crossing of paths that felt scheduled by something other than calendars. He was the one who had once connected me to the friend I now suspected had passed on. When I asked, he gave me another number, another thread.

I called.

The confirmation came gently. Yes, our mutual friend had passed. There was sadness, but also relief. The knowing had been correct. The world had simply been catching up.

A few weeks later, he visited me in a dream. Not as he had been, but as he now was. Lighter. Settled. Relocated. There was no mourning in the encounter. Only reassurance. And once again, the greeting arrived without effort.

Mehlomadala.

These are not isolated incidents. They form a pattern that refuses to be dismissed. I have met strangers with whom conversation begins in the middle. We speak as if resuming something paused, both aware that familiarity has arrived without explanation. We search for shared coordinates, schools, cities, names, and find none. Yet the recognition remains.

Perhaps Mehlomadala is the correct greeting for such moments. Not hello. But, we have met before, somewhere that does not keep records.

Even pain seems to know this greeting. Years after an incident, long after scars have learned to lie quietly, a trigger appears. A smell. A phrase. A place. And pain returns, sometimes not violently, but familiarly. It does not introduce itself. It simply says, remember me. I have not finished speaking. Pain, too, remembers where it has been -our hearts.

I remember another day. University. 2003.

I was hungry. Properly hungry. The kind of hunger that sharpens the edges of the world. I had no money, and no apps to perform miracles, yet I felt the urge to walk to the nearest Standard Bank ATM on Russell Street because walking was all I had.

When I pressed my pin, my balance was an amount you cannot withdraw from the ATM, then a woman approached me with the confidence of kin. She hugged me tightly, scolding me for my long absence, laughing as though time had merely folded itself for convenience.

Mehlomadala, she said.

She pressed a R50 note into my hand. A fortune, then. Enough for fried chicken, chips, and a drink. Enough to soften hunger into gratitude. She told me she would inform my cousins that she had finally seen me. No amount of protest could convince her otherwise. I was who she believed I was, and she was satisfied.

I left with food in my stomach and questions in my chest. Why that day? Why that time? Why that walk?

Maybe no one will ever know. I certainly do not. But I have learned not to argue with grace when it chooses an unusual costume.

Perhaps Mehlomadala is not a word at all. Perhaps it is a recognition that travels ahead of explanation. A reminder that time is not as disciplined as we pretend. That memory is not stored only in the brain. That some meetings are older than names.

Stone Town knew me before I knew why. Dreams continue conversations we do not remember starting. The departed do not vanish. Pain waits patiently. Hunger finds witnesses. And somewhere between coincidence and intention, life greets us softly and says,

You again.

Author’s Note

Mehlomadala is written from lived experience, dream, intuition, and the quiet spaces between explanation and belief. This essay does not attempt to persuade, prove, or defend. It simply bears witness.

Some experiences arrive without permission from reason. They ask instead for honesty, restraint, and care. I have chosen to honour them as they were felt, not as they might be explained.

If this essay unsettles you, I accept that. If it recognises you, even briefly, then perhaps we have met before. If that’s the case, Mehlomadala.