We were little black girls born into an era in which talk of women’s rights swirled around in the air, but in which those rights were still far from tangible. The first ten years of my life coincided with the UN Decade for Women, so there were always speeches and conferences bringing people together to talk about the urgency of equality. Africans took the UN seriously back then; so, perhaps sensing the imminence of women’s liberation, Mummy set about raising us to be ready for the tipping point – the moment when assertions of female independence would be met with praise rather than admonition. She did this deftly. Somehow she knew that the key would lie in the cuts and the bruises and the shared laughter of our baths.
* * *
Although most of the Burley Court mothers didn’t work, in our house Mummy earned the money and Baba – being a botany and entomology student at the University of Zambia (UNZA) – went to school to learn about plants and insects. Baba’s other job was being a freedom fighter, but the income from that line of work was negligible. Before he met her, he had been wedded to the Movement for the Emancipation of his People. But then he had seen her one day and liked her smile and liked her legs. They had talked and he had discovered that she played tennis and there was something about that he liked, too. Soon he began to think about her all the time: the Swazi girl with a killer backhand who pretended not to notice him when he and the other guerrillas stood at the courts, watching.
For her part, Mummy liked the tall handsome man whose corduroy pants fitted him just so. She liked his sense of moderation. He drank, but seldom to the point of forgetting. He spent time with the others, but was often on his own. He smiled often, but wasn’t the type of man who laughed gratuitously. In her experience, those types of men always had something to hide.
She qualified as an accountant the year after they met and soon after that he borrowed a tie and she wore a pair of white knee-high boots and a cream-coloured minidress that barely covered her swelling belly and they got married at Lusaka City Hall.
The women of Burley Court gossiped about all manner of apartment business but nothing occupied their time and energies quite like a good discussion about the Guerrilla who refused to work and the Swazi who was so in love with him that she allowed it. Whenever the subject of my parents and their relationship came up – which was often – the women would speculate about the peculiar madness that besets some women when it comes to matters of the heart.
Because their area of specialisation was rumour-mongering, Mummy and her friends referred to them as the Rungarers. Mama Tawona was the lead Rungarer. She couldn’t accept the unchristian relationship that was unfolding before her eyes: Zambia was then, as it is now, a deeply conservative society. Women and men had separate domains and never the twain should meet except where it was sanctioned by God.
Mummy was casually pretty and had nice fit legs, which she was always showing off in miniskirts and dresses that stopped far too high above her knees. She knew how to drive a car and generally lived her life as she wanted. Yet in the eyes of the Rungarers Mummy possessed a number of traits that would doom her to a failed marriage. For one thing, she worked too much, sometimes only arriving home after six, while her Guerrilla came and went whenever he pleased, collecting insects that were ostensibly related to his ‘studying’ and dragging the children along with him in dungarees and denim. They always came back muddy and sticky. It was obvious that he wanted to turn those three poor little things into boys – their hair was cut short and they did not have pierced ears, among other notable offences. Worse, they never went to church. There just didn’t seem to be any order in the lives of the Swazi and the Guerrilla and their children. It was not clear what the organising principle was that kept their household together: it was not God, nor was it family or tradition.
The Rungarers often huddled together in the hallway next to Mama Tawona’s house, bent towards one another in conversation. When they were not laughing loudly, they spoke in hushed tones. They cackled with their mouths behind their hands and then smiled and said hello and imitated politeness when someone walked by. Mummy couldn’t stand them. She smiled broadly whenever she passed them in her smart work suits, but never slowed down to have a conversation. She did nothing to cause them to twist their faces and turn their lips upside down at her but they did it anyway, rolling their eyes as she passed, staring at her new shoes or eyeing her old handbag. She couldn’t win and knew it. She was either a show-off for having too many nice things, or a pitiable mess for having too many items requiring mending.
She gave them as little attention as possible. Her apparent lack of interest in them only fed their envy, though. It stoked the fires of their outrage. On Saturday mornings Mummy would leave early for her French class and as she passed they would harden their eyes. Heh! Maybe this is how people behaved in her country, but in Zambia, she would lose her man if she kept leaving the house for unnecessary things like French classes and tennis matches.
For the most part, the contagion of the Rungarers did not spread beyond their small group. Adult business was largely adult business and kid business stayed among us kids. But there were moments of crossover, when the mutters moved out of the shadows and the hurts that grown-ups inflicted on one another writhed before us like the grass snakes we would occasionally catch and kill when they strayed onto the playground.
* * *
One day, we were playing a game of hide-and-seek and Terrence was ‘it’. I hid in a stairwell. I knew he wouldn’t think to look for me in that particular area because it was in Building One and Mama Tawona lived in Building One, which meant we rarely played in Building One. I took the chance, though, because I had seen her and two of the Rungarers standing at the bus stop waiting to go to town earlier. I thought I was safe.
I was wrong. Just as I settled into my spot, Mama Tawona and the Rungarers trundled down the hall, loud and out of breath. Perhaps the bus had not come and they were complaining about how unreliable public transport was becoming; perhaps they had been to the market and were back for lunch. I don’t remember precisely but I remember feeling the way they always made me feel – on edge. It was a hot day and they talked freely and easily – the way women do when they are not in the presence of their husbands or their children.
They stopped in front of Tawona’s house and their minds turned to gossip. Soon, they were talking about Mummy. Mama Tawona wondered aloud how stupid that woman could be taking care of that man. She suggested that Baba was not a real man in any case – just a boy chasing childish dreams, playing with guns and travelling all over the place using the Zambian government’s money. And all those parties and all that coming and going by the other guerrillas at all hours of the night! Always someone new sleeping in the house – men and women, men and women, sometimes children also there, inside. What about their own children? Some of those people were criminals. The Rungarers were convinced that a lot of the exiles coming from South Africa were actually just common folk, ordinary people who had concocted elaborate stories to escape punishment for being thieves and muggers. It was so easy to pretend to be a hero – meanwhile, they were just common criminals! Eh. Most of those ANC people were just crooks.
It had never occurred to me to think about my parents as dreamers nor had I thought about our family as being all that different from others in Burley Court. The aunties and uncles and the students who slept in our beds for weeks on end and then disappeared were just a fact of life. I saw, now, that it was only a fact of life for us. This was precisely why I would never make the jokes Terrence made – my difference made me vulnerable to derision.
Until I ran into Mama Tawona’s outrage and consternation, I hadn’t thought about the fact that there were other ways to live. Mama Tawona and the Rungarers represented the moral police. They were arbiters of who would get into the Kingdom of Righteousness and who would not. It was they – and not the landlord – who decided whether you belonged in Burley Court or not.
Mama Tawona was nothing like the other women who pop
ulated my life when I was a girl. The rest of them were like my mother. They were members of the ANC or they were students with strong ties to the liberation movement. Many of them were members of MK, which meant they were training to become soldiers.
These women were the ones I loved the most. They were sharp of tongue and hungry of gaze and they belonged together in the way of a pack. They were glorious in the multi-toned way of African women – long and lean with upturned buttocks, or sturdy and wide-hipped with slender ankles and wrists tapering neatly into broad feet and slim fingers. They were richly dark with closely shorn hair, or they had pitch-black just-so Afros haloing their walnut skin.
They smoked and drank and laughed out loud; free in one sense, you see, but not free at all in the ways that mattered the most. They wore minidresses and long boots and jeans that allowed them to move quickly and jump effortlessly, to run the way women weren’t supposed to. They had arms strong enough to carry AK-47s and their braided hair was pulled magnificently tight; brows always plucked to perfection. They radiated a strange sort of lawlessness. It was as though their half-smiling, half-sneering lips had been moulded to defy the rules. Their ease with words, their comfort with the art of flinging barbs at one another, at women who happened to be passing by – at rival and friend alike – made my heart jump, pump, barapapumpum, barapapapum. I was in love with them.
Plump bums, bony haunches, spread thighs; they sat on our kitchen counters, calves swinging, shoulder to shoulder in sisterly solidarity. When someone put on a Boney M record, they would crowd into the centre of the living room, laughing into each other’s eyes. ‘Haiwena, sukuma!’ they would shout, urging anyone who still thought they might sit down while the music was playing to stand up. ‘Sana, ngiyayithana le ngoma.’ And there they would be, doing the Pata Pata to ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’.
I realise, now, these were new girls, stepping out of old skins. They roared, these young lionesses. They snapped gum and talked about how long they would wait before they were called to the camps. They laughed at their elegantly shabby men. They smiled sideways and sucked their teeth when a beautiful man they could see themselves loving happened to pass by. They breathed fire and revolution and I longed to be them.
The men were just as glamorous. The men who came to drink and laugh late into the night with my parents, the ones we called Uncle, and whose laps we climbed into and who tickled us and gave us sweets, these men were all ‘firsts’. The first African accepted at such and such university, the first black man to live in such and such place, the first black to lecture at so and so university. Because of this, they had an air of invincibility and supreme confidence about them – even when they were falling-down drunk.
We were mesmerised by the poetry of their intellect. Every weekend there was a debate about when Africa was going to put a man on the moon. And because they didn’t snicker or seem to think this was absurd, neither did we. In the Lusaka of my childhood it was perfectly plausible that we could go to outer space under our own steam. I had no idea that a man had already been sent to the moon and that his name was Neil Armstrong. When I was little we only compared ourselves with the West in ways that favoured us.
In escaping apartheid, the men who crowded into our flat were part of a new breed of Africans who had left South Africa and Zimbabwe and Mozambique determined that they would shine and shine and shine. They were possessed of the secret of freedom, a sort of inner spirit that propelled them forward and made them look – to my wide eyes at least – as though they were soaring.
They were heartbreakingly handsome, these men. They lounged loose and long-limbed across our couches. They had guerrilla beards and unkempt hair, and sinewy thighs and bell-bottom jeans. They drove beat-up falling-apart cars, laughed as though their hearts were not burning and drank as though their nightmares would never stop.
They were idealists and gangsters and hustlers and bright-eyed students who had left girlfriends and mothers and wives and babies who would never know the circumference of their fathers’ arms – little ones who would grow into girls who would grow into women who would hate the men who loved them for not being their fathers. But in our house, they were heroes. My sisters and I knew nothing of the lives they had left behind and so to us they were new men, unmarred by responsibilities and ties to painful pasts and mundane yesterdays. In exile, they created themselves as though from mud and ochre.
Upon leaving South Africa, they had shed their old skins and become the men they had been born to be. Their backs straightened as they had descended into Moscow’s frigid embrace; their muscles lengthened as they marched across bush and mosquito-infested swamps in Angola; their spines elongated as they squelched through bog and marsh. Nonsense may have spewed from their malarial lips in Kongwa but they were free. They marched across Africa singing freedom songs until they lost their voices. They sang until they were dry mouthed and croaking so that, by the time they arrived at the end of all their convoluted journeys in Lusaka, this place of cigarettes and laughter and hard-soft women, they were exhausted and ready to smile.
Having made it to the headquarters of their movement, which was supposed to emancipate the people, many of them simply collapsed. I see, now, that this is how we found them. We found them fathering fat brown children and loving free women. We found them sitting on red polished verandas feeling the warmth of the Lusaka rain on their brown shoulders. We found them smoking zol and singing Bob Marley’s ‘Buffalo Soldier’.
They came to Lusaka broken by many more things than the struggle for justice. But their demons did not matter here. What mattered was that they had decided to make our little city with its outsized ambitions and its orderly roundabouts their place of safety. For them, Lusaka became the place where black was equal to free, where nobody, not Queen Elizabeth or John Vorster or Richard Nixon, could tell them anything. Lusaka – in all its peaceful futuristic pan-African glory – was theirs and they meant to burrow in its peace for a while.
Some of the residents of Burley Court did not find the women and the men who visited us especially interesting. They found them loud and they resented the fact that their president – His Excellency Dr Kenneth Kaunda – had given all these revolutionaries special status in the country. Dr Kaunda was a dreamer who believed that Africa belonged to Africans. He had said that independent Africa had a responsibility towards the parts of Africa that were still in chains. And so, because Africans in South Africa and Zimbabwe and Mozambique were not free, Dr Kaunda had given us refuge in Zambia.
For ordinary Zambians, our presence was a daily reality, not just an empty political slogan. Most were gracious and embraced our cause. But for others, like Mama Tawona, we were rule-breakers and layabouts. For them, the word ‘refugee’ was a slur. The refugee women took Zambian men while the freedom fighter men caroused and broke Zambian women’s hearts.
I crouched on the ground, waiting to be found. But the problem with Mummy and Baba was bigger than their being refugees; problem was, they were in love and that idea struck her as laughable.
Their gossip was about this strange and laughable fact. Mama Tawona threw her head back and cackled, talking about my mother as though she were a silly child. ‘Ha, mwana! That love she is feeling for that man makes her think he is wonderful. Meanwhile we all know that is just foolish. Isn’t it that when you are in love even a desert can have the appearance of a beautiful forest?’ She roared with laughter, and Mrs Mwansa (who had no children but at least had a husband, so she was spared from total irrelevance) and Mama Terrence nodded their heads in agreement.
‘She will learn,’ said Mama Terrence.
‘Ehe, she will learn. It will be pain that teaches her,’ said Mrs Mwansa sagely.
Mama Tawona continued. ‘Mmn, but you know men. One day he will wake up and decide that the only thing he wants in this life is the one thing that she has not provided him. Then we will see if she still smiles and says “Good morning” like that in her high heels. Eh! I don’t think so. No. Instead sh
e will be crying, crying, crying tears of sorrow. Eh-eh! Because men are like that. If they don’t get their heir, they will leave you. Until she has a son, she will never be guaranteed that man’s love.’
And so the world’s obsession with boys revealed itself to me. We needed to have a baby brother and it needed to happen soon because my sisters and I would never be enough. The absence of brothers would bring untold misery to our parents. I hadn’t known boys mattered more than girls, that one fictional first-born boy was more important than a fistful of girls. This revelation – that a family without boys is really no family at all – was so significant I didn’t hear Terrence thundering around the corner. I was sitting there turning over our family’s boylessness in my mind, thinking about how I would formulate the question to Mummy when she got back from work, when I felt Terrence’s skinny knee connect with my face. I screamed, and the Rungarers jumped. My cheek puffed out instantly and I saw no sympathy in Mama Tawona’s eyes. She looked at me as though I was a thief.
It hurt.
I only learnt the word ‘primogeniture’ much later in life, but this was my first lesson in the concept. What an absurd idea: that my father may have grounds to find another woman so they might make another child, a boy who would ostensibly be made more in my father’s image than any of us. With my cheek swollen and this new idea thudding in my head I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or vomit.
How could anyone be more like Baba than me? Wasn’t his face in mine? Wasn’t he our dad who loved us more than anything in the world because he took us places – to the market and the mechanic and to visit with his friends to show us off?
Yet once it had been spoken I understood it. It explained all the other times Mummy had been asked – by women she had just met – whether she was going to try one more time. It provided a basis for all the times someone had said, ‘You can’t stop until you get a boy,’ all the times Mummy had turned her face away in anger and pulled us along quickly.
Always Another Country Page 2