Always Another Country

by Sisonke Msimang

  Praise for Always Another Country

  ‘Brutally and uncompromisingly honest, Sisonke’s beautifully crafted storytelling enriches the already extraordinary pool of young African women writers of our time. Sisonke, a child of the struggle, revisits the metamorphosis of the value system embraced by the liberation movements and she emerges as a powerful free spirit, nurtured by its resilient core values.’ – Graça Machel

  ‘Every South African who wants to define their own path to the future must read this book and hear this voice. Sisonke challenges us not to cry for help, but to scream for change.’ – Jay Naidoo

  ‘A lyrical and admirably subtle exploration of how elusive our place in the world is … a reader’s delight.’– Eusebius McKaiser

  SISONKE MSIMANG

  Always Another Country

  A Memoir of Exile and Home

  JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS

  Johannesburg & Cape Town

  For Mummy

  Prologue

  These stories begin with the tale of a young man. One winter’s morning in 1962, in anger and exhausted by the condition of being black, he joins an illegal army. The following year, he slips out of the country. The year after this, his leader Nelson Mandela is captured and tried for sabotage. In that trial, Mandela faces a life sentence but his bravery does not flag. Instead he rises to the occasion and utters the famous words ‘I am the first accused’, and the world takes note as it watches an African man stand firm in the face of almost-certain death.

  By the time Mandela appears before the judge to answer to sabotage charges in 1963 – by the time he has said he is prepared to die for the struggle against white domination – the young man who will one day be my father has fled the country and has already been in Russia for a year, learning how to shoot a gun and decipher Morse code. Like other recruits, he leaves without saying goodbye to his parents or his cousins or his best friend. He wakes up, after months of careful and near-solitary planning, and disappears into the mist.

  A decade later, he is in Lusaka. After leaving the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow, he goes to Tanzania where he works alongside other comrades to establish a military base. He travels to Guinea-Bissau and stands alongside Amílcar Cabral’s forces staring down the Portuguese on the frontlines. By the time he reaches Lusaka, the man is no longer so young and has seen friends die.

  He meets a pretty young Swazi woman who is pursuing her studies. That woman becomes his wife and, eventually, my mother. She loves him, although she is ambivalent about his revolution. She is smart enough to mistrust wolves in revolutionary clothing but wise enough only to air her scepticism in private.

  Together Mummy and Baba travel the world. My sisters and I are born in the 1970s, when my parents live in Zambia, where the African National Congress (ANC) has its headquarters. From there we move to Kenya, and then to Canada, then back to Kenya and after that there is a brief stint in Ethiopia. Eventually, after Nelson Mandela is released from prison in 1990, we come home.

  My sisters and I are freedom’s children, born into the ANC and nurtured within a revolutionary community whose sole purpose is to fight apartheid. We are raised on a diet of communist propaganda and schooled in radical Africanist discourse, in the shadows of our father’s hope and our mother’s practicality.

  On the playground we cradle imaginary AK-47s in our skinny arms and, instead of Cops and Robbers, we play Capitalists and Cadres. When we skip rope, we call out the names of our heroes to a staccato beat punctuated by our jumps: ‘Govan Mbeki,’ hop, skip, ‘Walter Sis-ulu,’ skip, hop:

  ‘One!’ Jump.

  ‘Day!’ Jump.

  ‘We!’ Jump.

  ‘Will!’ Jump.

  ‘All!’ Jump.

  ‘Be!’ Jump.

  ‘Freeeeee!’

  South Africa is now free and those of us who care about the country are coming to see that the dream of freedom was a sort of home for us. It was a castle we built in the air and inside its walls every one of us was a hero. When we first returned from exile the castle stayed firmly in our mind’s eye. We told ourselves we were special and we sought to build a Rainbow Nation. We knew South Africa was a complicated and brutal place and not just a country for dreamers, but this did not stop us from dreaming.

  Today, South Africa is politically adrift. Many of us – the ones who went into exile, the ones who were imprisoned, the ones who lost loved ones to the bullets of the white minority regime – are unsure about our place in the country, and uncertain of South Africa’s role in the world. People used to point to South Africa to demonstrate that good can triumph over evil. We used to be proud of ourselves. Today, suffering and poverty – once noble – are not only commonplace (they have always been), but acceptable. We no longer rage against them. We have come to look past the pain of black people because it is now blacks who are in charge. The wretchedness of apartheid is ostensibly over, so the suffering of blacks, under the rule of other blacks, is somehow less sinister – which does not change the fact of its horror.

  So, here we are: Nelson Mandela is dead and so are Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki. Lillian Ngoyi and Ruth First and Fatima Meer and Neville Alexander and Dennis Brutus and a whole raft of great women and men who stood for and embodied a more just humanity are all gone. In their place is a new country, one that is ordinary and disappointing even as it has its moments of startling and shiny brilliance.

  The South Africa I had imagined as a child was a place of triumph, a crucible out of which a more dignified and just humanity would emerge. My parents were freedom fighters, so they cast our journeys around the world as part of a necessary sacrifice. Our suffering was noble. South Africa would one day be great because the indignities meted out to us were teaching us to abhor injustice, to inoculate us against inequality.

  And yet here we stand in a South Africa that is free but not just. For me, this is perhaps the most difficult fact of all to accept. It is hard to say, but I am coming to understand that perhaps it is true – that heroism is impossible to sustain during ordinary times. When the guns died down and the smoke cleared we discovered we were not exceptional. All along, we had been only human. This may be a message I have been fighting my whole life. I have always been a believer and the thing that I have believed in more than anything else has been South Africans’ ability to triumph over apartheid. I have not had much of a faith in God, but I have been guided by a belief in humanity – in the leadership of the ANC, in my parents, in the collective of South Africans of all races to be better than their circumstances dictated. I believed in all these things until apartheid ended and, if I am to be honest, even though the past two decades have been disappointing in many ways, I am grateful that my wide-eyed wonder has been tested. For what is life if we live it only in a dreamlike state, believing what we are told and not knowing what is there in plain sight for us to see? In South Africa, the past twenty years have taught me that some people are complicated, that they will disappoint you and that you will love them still. It has taught me that some people are unrepentant and will never be sorry and that there is a place for them here, too, because history tells us grace is more important than righteousness; that uneasy peace is better than war.

  In spite of what it stole from me – many of the securities usually associated with home, my ability to speak my mother tongue, access to aunts and cousins and nephews and neighbours whom I may have been able to call friends – exile was my parents’ greatest gift. Still, reft of a physical place in this world I could call home, exile made me love the idea of South Africa. I was bottle-fed the dream: that South Africa was not simply about non-racialism and equality, it was about something much more profound.

  When you are a child who grow
s up in exile as I did, when you are a refugee or a migrant, or someone whose path is not straightforward, you quickly learn that belonging is conjunctive: you will only survive if you master the words ‘if’, ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘either’ and ‘both’. You learn that you will be fine for as long as you believe in the collective, your tribe. Trusting them, and knowing they have your best interests at heart, is crucial for survival.

  You belong and you stay close that you may live. I grew up believing in heroes, so the past decade of watching the moral decline of the political party to which I owe much of who I am has been hard. My idols have been smashed and I have been bewildered and often deeply wounded by their conduct. I have asked myself whether I was wrong to have believed in them in the first place. I have wondered whether it was all a lie. I have chastised myself. Perhaps I was simply a foolish child.

  If I were given five minutes with my younger self – that little girl who cried every time it was time to leave for another country – I would hold her tight and not say a word. I would just be still and have her feel my beating heart, a thud to echo her own. I would do this in the hopes that the solidity of who I am today may serve as some sort of reassurance, a silent message that, no matter the outcome, she would survive and be stronger and happier than she might think as she stood at the threshold of each new country.

  This – I think – is all she would need: a message so she may know the road is long, the answers incomplete and the truth fractured and, yes, still worth every tear and scrape, every bruise and stitch. I would hold her in her woundedness and her pretending and in her striving and her need, and hope she might learn on her own and without too much heartbreak what I know now, which is that her own instincts will be her best comfort and, time and again, her heart her will be her saviour.

  This book is both personal and political – it is about how I was made by the liberation struggle and how I was broken by its protagonists and how, like all of us trying to find our way in South Africa, I am piecing myself back together so that never again will I feel I need a hero. I’ve written this book because too few of us – women, refugees, South Africans, black people, queers – believe in our instincts enough to know that our hearts will be our saviours.

  Burley Court

  When I was little, we stayed in a series of flats. First it was Burley Court, then some apartments near the University Teaching Hospital and then a small complex in a neighbourhood called Woodlands. The one imprinted on my mind is Burley Court – perhaps because it was the biggest, perhaps because it was the one Mummy spoke of the most. Burley Court was just off Church Road, which was a busy street close to the centre of Lusaka. The residents of Burley Court were part of a new generation of urban Africans who were not concerned with what whites thought of them. Each block smelled like kapenta fish and frying meat. As you walked past open doors and windows you could hear the tinny sounds of Thomas Mapfumo’s ‘Matiregerera Mambo’ or the elegant chords of Letta Mbulu’s ‘There’s Music in the Air’.

  Like most kids in newly independent Zambia, I was born free and so carried myself like a child who had every reason to believe she was at the centre of the universe. Our parents also conducted themselves with an unmistakeable air of self-assurance. They behaved as though the ground beneath their feet was theirs and the sun in the sky had risen purely for their benefit; as though the trees were green simply to please them. They laboured under the merry illusion that the Copperbelt three hundred kilometres north of Lusaka would power their gleaming futures forever more. They believed they would have the kind of wealth that generations before them had been unable to attain, shackled as they had been to a colonial yoke.

  They thought – naively, with hindsight – that their own children might become doctors and lawyers and mining magnates. They were innocents, you see. Though they were grown men and women at Independence, their liberation had come in the heady times before the price of copper plummeted, before the plunging currency brought them to their knees and made them beg for reprieve. When I was little the adults in my life were still buoyed by the idea that they had found their place in the sun.

  Each morning the men who were breadwinners in our flats left for their government jobs. Their wives waved them off because they were almost middle class and had been persuaded to believe in the curious colonial set-up in which women stayed home and took care of the children and behaved as though this precluded them from other forms of economic labour. Housebound – but assisted by poorly paid housegirls – they turned to idle gossip and raucous laughter. They shelled peanuts and tightened their chitenges and prepared meals fit for their husbands, who were little kings in their own homes. The men for whom these women preened and clucked returned at dusk, striding with great purpose towards their families, making their way to tables laden with nsima and meat stews, to smiling and wives whose middles were slowly broadening as they settled into city living and children brimming with book learning and shiny with achievement.

  Mummy talked about Burley Court with such rich memories – about how, every afternoon, once their homework was done, the Burley Court children ran up and down the polished concrete stairwells of Building One or Building Three. In her recollection, we were a rowdy crew of polyglots who screamed in Nyanja and Bemba and saved English for the best insults. Terrence, a beanpole of a kid with a Zambianised British accent, was the most eloquent of us all. He would fire off jokes veiled as insults that were halfway threats to whomever happened to catch his eye.

  ‘You! Your legs are so thin. Eh! Please eat so that I can beat you nicely and not worry about breaking you! Isn’t it that every night when your mother calls you upstairs for food she just pretending? How can you be eating and still staying so thin-thin like this?’ Terrence himself was long and bony with skin that looked as though it had never been near a jar of Vaseline, let alone lotion, yet somehow he had the market cornered on skinny jokes.

  I was not as brave as Terrence. I understood perfectly well that I was an easy target. I spoke Nyanja – though not as fluently as the rest because I was not Zambian. This meant that, although I had all the hallmarks and memories of an insider, I wasn’t one. I could not afford to make the same kinds of jokes. I tended towards the middle of the pack because I knew I was vulnerable. The wrong joke about the wrong child, and the pack could turn against me. Laughter can dry up quickly when you are a child: one minute you are making the gang howl, and the next you are in tears because someone has called you a refugee.

  I had to choose how I would distinguish myself and I knew that it had to be safe.

  So, I never joined Terrence in his attacks and I never laughed too heartily. I was simply one of the pack – playing hopscotch on the bumpy pavement in front of the steps of Building One in the evenings as twilight settled on the city and cars whizzed past. No one would have thought to look twice at me, nor at my little toddling sisters. We were children like all others; our skinny arms flew and our brown legs kicked high into the air. It was the same evening after evening: we jumped and landed, threw the stones further and faster, desperate to get in one last skip before we were called inside.

  * * *

  There were three of us. I was the first. Then came Mandlesilo, born in 1977 when I was already three, and then Zengeziwe, who followed in 1979. As a child, Mandla was stubborn in the way that middle children must be if they are to survive childhood emotionally intact. She was quiet in a manner more thoughtful than it was shy. She also cried easily – a trait that has followed her into adulthood and which has a great deal to do with the fact that she is the kindest and most sensitive among us. Wedged between an overbearing older sister and a younger sibling who never met a show she couldn’t steal, Mandla was our conscience, the moral ballast that kept us out of trouble simply by virtue of her own principles. Zeng and I would happily have hidden our crimes from our parents, but Mandla wouldn’t let us. She preferred that we not sin in the first place.

  Zeng was a crowd-pleaser and remains one today. She was the kind of b
aby who woke up singing and then gurgled her way through the day, a sweet manipulator whose every sin you forgave because she was too brazen and too gorgeous to resist. This has been her enduring trait. She makes you laugh until your belly aches, even as you know you ought to be weeping with the knowledge that she is not as happy as she seems and is far more complex than she would have the world believe.

  As children we were moon-faced and medium brown with plaited hair and ashy knees. We were observant and thus preternaturally sarcastic. We wisecracked our way through breakfast and joked through lunch and told hilarious stories as we played in the dimming light. And because the world was not yet cruel we were innocent in a way that softened our repartee.

  Bath time was special. In the tub, Mummy often teased us about our dirty fingernails and scraped knees, about our blistered palms and our chapped feet. She would run a wet cloth over our torsos and soap our backs wondering aloud how we got so filthy. ‘And this cut?’ she would ask in an exaggerated voice. ‘Where did this one come from?’ She would wag a finger playfully and smile. Her staged anger made us laugh and her delighted voice was like honey in warm water. We knew that other mothers hated it when their kids came home with torn dungarees and bloody knees, so Mummy’s revelling in our constant state of raggedness was a novelty of which we never tired.

  Mummy loved the small casualties of childhood that marked our bodies. She was riveted by our stories – playground triumphs and the physical indignities of falling and getting scratched – because she knew that the little dings and nicks on our bodies would forge our personalities. We were wriggly and outsized because she encouraged us to exaggerate and amplify. In our retelling, every cut was actually a gash, every scrape a laceration. At home, we were brave, even if outside we navigated with a little more caution.