Always Another Country

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by Sisonke Msimang


  * * *

  A few days after the hallway collision, my cheek was still tender and slightly bruised. Tawona and I were playing hopscotch and – unusually – she was losing. I threw the stone and it landed firmly in its box. I began to hop. ‘You touched the line,’ she shouted.

  I hadn’t touched the line.

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘You did. You’re a cheater.’

  ‘You’re the one who’s cheating. Because I’m winning you want to make up stories? You get out of here and go and cheat somewhere else!’ I shouted. I was still angry with her mother, still mulling over the conversation I had overheard, still mad that my face was sore.

  Tawona was never one to take an insult lying down. She shouted, ‘Maybe it’s you who needs to go to the witch doctor, and not your mother!’

  I had no idea what she was talking about but I felt my face flush.

  ‘Oh! Now you have no words, eh?’ she continued. ‘Let me tell you something, you stupid girl. If your mother was from our tribe they would have taken her to the witch doctor by now. Anyway, maybe it’s because you people are foreigners. In Zambia we don’t have such things. How can a woman have three girls in a row? Non-stop. Three? Two is okay. But three!? Eh! Three is a curse.’

  She ploughed on, determined to do maximum damage.

  ‘If she doesn’t fix this problem your father will leave her for a woman who can give him what he wants. No man on this earth doesn’t want sons. I mean! Eh! She should be careful. Do you think that man will stay in the house where there is no one to inherit?’

  She continued.

  ‘A man can never ever love his daughters the way he will love his sons. Boys belong to their fathers. So now, what does your father have? Just girls? So then? Eh! So then he has nothing.’

  I don’t remember going for her. I only know there was blood everywhere and I was not sorry that I punched her. I was not sorry at all and she was shocked and no longer smirking and that made me feel better although not much because she had just broken my heart.

  Then there was a ring of screaming excited kids around us and she was up and livid, and storming towards the stairwell with the crowd billowing out behind us as she cradled her split lip and smoothed her bloody dress over her paunchy tummy. I hung back, afraid. Terrence turned, then ran back to me. His lips were dry as usual but he was serious. The gravity of the situation was clear to him. ‘You better come, you’ll just make it worse if you don’t.’

  Terrence took my hand and led me to the front. We stood, facing Tawona, who was a bloody mess by now. Someone handed her the tooth I had punched out of her mouth. It was dirty and very small and looking at it set her to wailing once more and it made my lip quiver too. I hadn’t meant to knock her tooth out. I was scared; terrified, really. Mama Tawona would have my head.

  By the time we reached the top step, Mama Tawona was waiting. Tawona’s little brother had run up to tell his mother that his big sister had been beaten and that I was the culprit. She stood there with murder in her eyes. I didn’t wait for her to start shouting. I couldn’t. I committed an even worse sin: I bolted. I broke the cardinal rule of all African households and ran from an adult who was trying to discipline me. I pushed past her and ran down the hallway and into our house. I was desperate for Baba to be home.

  He was. He was sitting at the dining room table with his books on the table and a few beetles spread out in front of him. Mummy hated it when he labelled his specimens on the table and under normal circumstances I would have told him this but this was an emergency and so I rushed forward and crawled into his lap, which I was getting too big to do, and I started to cry. In the chaos of those few moments he thought I was hurt and so he looked for the cut, searching my body for the place where the skin was broken.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, confused.

  ‘No,’ I cried. ‘No. But, but Tawona said you won’t love me because I’m a girl.’ The words were a jumbled tumble – a snotty rush. ‘She said that, that you only want boys and that we don’t belong here in Zambia we are foreigners and we should go back where we came from and then she said we don’t even belong to you, that only boys belong to fathers, girls are a curse.’

  I wailed. Ruptured.

  He said nothing and this calmed me because, as every child knows, silence is always the beginning of listening.

  Baba bent into my hurt and pulled me close. His insides thumped a sonata, his heart thudding dully against my chest: ‘You are mine, you are mine, you are mine.’ Tawona’s words lost a bit of their edge. My own little heart thumped back: ‘I am yours, I am yours, I am yours.’

  That night, after she came home from work and heard the story, Mummy made me apologise to Tawona. We went to her house together and knocked on the door. Mama Tawona peered out imperiously.

  ‘So you have come to say what?’ she said abruptly.

  Mummy didn’t let her continue. She was curt.

  ‘We have come to apologise,’ she said. ‘Sonke should not have hit Tawona.’

  Mama Tawona began to interrupt her. ‘You think that just saying sorry will be enough—’

  But Mummy cut her off. She was not finished.

  ‘But understand this: your bitterness needs to find another home. It is not welcome in mine. And if it doesn’t, if you insist on this nonsense, then you will see. You will see me and you will know me. That same curse you think has been put on me will be on you. You will be cursed in ways your people do not even understand. Do you know the Swazis? The Zulu people? If you want to see powers, you will see them.’

  Mama Tawona’s hands had stayed on her hips in defiance as Mummy spoke, but her face was frozen. Mummy gave her a hard and thorough look and then asked, ‘Do you understand me?’

  Mama Tawona remained silent. Ashamed.

  ‘Heh?’ Mummy repeated, sounding rougher than I had known she could be. ‘Do you understand me?’

  Mama Tawona nodded. Then she looked down. She was not the type of woman who admitted she was wrong. That would have required the kind of introspection that women like Mama Tawona studiously avoided. Observing the rules of respectability, and policing the gates, requires a kind of hard-nosed vigilance that precludes sensitivity and thoughtfulness. My mother knew this so it is unlikely that she expected an apology.

  But I was still young and so I did expect it. I thought we would wait for her to say, ‘I’m sorry too.’ It was obvious that both Tawona and her mother owed me an apology. That would not come. Mama Tawona shrank in the face of Mummy’s anger, but she was not convinced she was wrong; she had just been caught.

  Mummy took my hand and we walked away. We entered our flat and I imagined Mama Tawona still standing at the door – rooted and, for once, speechless.

  Baba put us to bed as usual. He told us a story about a girl who found a rock that turned into a star that shot across the sky and I was very tired but I knew that he intended me to know that I was that girl and also that rock that turned into a star and maybe also that sky. He wanted me to know that I belonged in his heart and in his imagination and that I was the centre of the universe.

  S.E.X.

  My earliest memory of sex is bound in pleasure and voyeurism. I was only six when I stumbled upon a man and a woman in flagrante, but I was old enough to know that she was having far too much fun. I knew this because I could hear it in the way she chuckled, which I knew she was not supposed to do because what she was doing was something only men were allowed to like. I knew it even though I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why. There was something off limits about the way men turned their heads whenever a plump-bummed woman passed them by. Women were supposed to pretend they hadn’t noticed, and other men were supposed to look as well.

  I was very young when I realised men were supposed to like things to do with women’s bodies and women had to guard themselves against the things men liked. They had to not smile and pretend they didn’t notice. Men were fools over sex and women were silly about love.

 
The women around me must have talked about men and sex and pleasure but those discussions were never fit for children’s ears so I didn’t get to hear them in any detail. I heard only the talk about love and romance. I saw the looks exchanged, and sensed what it was they weren’t saying, but I never heard them talk about sex.

  The men were different. They talked about everything in front of us: white settlers and ditched lovers and fallen women they had picked up. Often, they had drunk too much. They leered and laughed and didn’t mind their manners unless they were told by the women that there were children around and they should shush.

  * * *

  My sisters and I spent a lot of time at Aunt Tutu’s house. Aunt Tutu was one of Mummy’s best friends. She had married a Zambian man, Uncle Ted, and they had three kids, the same ages as my sisters and me. We were a crew, a less raucous group than the Burley Court group, but only because we were fewer in number.

  At seven, Masuzyo (Suzie) was a rotund dispenser of wisdom, a slit-eyed know-it-all whose spectacles made her seem far older than her meagre years. Wongani was five, only a year younger than me but she, too, seemed far older: she was her mother’s child. Tapelwa was only four, an age so inconsequential that he was relegated to shuffling around on his own, not small enough to be with the babies and not old enough to be with us big girls.

  Mandla and Zeng were always toddling around in the background, oblivious to the ways in which they were being excluded, while Wongani, Suzie and I spent most of our time discussing the latest news, gossiping and arguing about episodes of Wonder Woman. Aunt Tutu was rarely home. She spent her days driving around town, visiting people so that she could remark about the state of their houses, the quality of their biscuits and the cleanliness of their servants.

  Despite its downsides, one of the best things about Suzie and Wongani’s house was the guest bedroom, which was just big enough to accommodate a beige couch and king-sized four-poster bedroom suite. As we played, we would listen out for the crunch of Aunt Tutu’s car coming down the driveway. We knew that if she caught us in there with our dusty feet, and our grimy nails, the consequences would be dire. Invariably, we would get carried away and the person assigned to keep their ears pricked would forget and it would be too late – she would be standing right there behind you.

  One minute you would be mid-jump, giggling and about to land on the plump mattress, and the next your arm would be pinned behind your back and Aunt Tutu’s voice would be an edgy vibrato, oddly sing-songy and menacing and urgent and hot in your ear: ‘Didn’t I tell you not to play in this room?’

  During the school holidays before I turned seven, our enjoyment of the guest room was interrupted for two weeks. Aunt Tutu’s brother and his German girlfriend visited from Berlin. When they were in town, our de facto playroom was off limits. This meant our relationship with them was initially antagonistic. Long before they arrived at the gate, crammed into a rickety metered taxi in a dishevelled, cigarette-stained heap, we decided we didn’t like them. They weren’t our visitors. They weren’t in town to keep us company and make us laugh. No. They were just a two-week-long inconvenience.

  The Uncle and the Girlfriend turned out to be more than that, of course, mainly because they were nothing like the adults we were used to. They lit incense, which reminded me vaguely of the Indian restaurant in the centre of town we sometimes went to when there was something to celebrate.

  Also, they dressed very strangely – the Girlfriend especially. Whereas Mummy and Aunt Tutu poured their still-trim figures into tight polyester trousers and white knee-high boots, the Girlfriend wore long, flowing skirts and gypsy-like tops. A sliver of her hollowed-­out belly was almost always showing, which we found somewhat disgusting and alluring all at the same time. The women we knew would never have bared the flesh on their stomachs. Legs and arms were one thing, but among African women, even those who defied stereotypes, tummy skin was an altogether different story.

  As for him, unlike our fathers, the Uncle looked dirty. Baba’s scraggly beard and Afro had a certain air about them: a cultivated unkemptness that nodded to forethought and therefore to some form of guerrilla stylishness. Not the Uncle. The Uncle looked positively downtrodden. His hair was beginning to mat in some places like the madman who used to dance lewdly in town right next to the Playhouse, the one who cackled at any woman with a big bum who happened to walk past and who picked up newspapers as though he would be able to divine the future if he just collected enough of them.

  In addition to their shaggy appearance, the Uncle and the Girlfriend spent much of their time engaged in what they called ‘jousting’. When an exhausted adult wished to end a heated debate with the Girlfriend, she would retort, in her guttural German accent, ‘You caaan’t be afraid of jousting. That fear of questions and questioning, it represents the death of curiosity, which is the beginning of the end of any society yearning to be free.’ The Uncle also liked the word. He would say things like, ‘What will Africa become if those entrusted with its empowerment aren’t capable of intellectual jousting?’ He shook his head and sighed a lot.

  Suzie and Wongani’s father was Uncle Ted and he was very important because he worked for Zambia Airways. Instead of letting him rest when he got back from work, the Uncle and the Girlfriend insisted on talking to him about the Anti-Colonial Project. We all knew that once Uncle came home we were supposed to go outside and let him rest. The visitors did not know this. So, they badgered him with questions and ignored our wide-eyed looks. Uncle Ted would take on the baffled and exhausted countenance of a man who had been working too hard to have to worry about thinking after he had knocked off and he would try to steer the conversation towards safer, more intelligible territory. Uncle Ted was not particularly interested in social interaction. So, even at the best of times, he let Aunt Tutu do the talking, preferring to smile aimlessly into his beer.

  The Uncle and the Girlfriend weren’t concerned about his baffled expression or his body language. So intent were they on making their own points that they simply couldn’t see his signals of distress. Every night they hounded him, peppering him with questions to which they already had answers, walking him through analyses to which they had subjected him already. Their favourite topic was Zambia Airways. It was a Vanity Project, a useless money-guzzling enterprise designed to appease the mighty Nationalist Ego. ‘How ironic,’ the Uncle would spit out, ‘that the great nationalist agenda has now been trampled by the forces of Neocolonialism.’ They argued in forceful, spittle-inducing paragraphs, saying things like: ‘All these African presidents flying in and out of Jakarta to foster consensus amongst the Non-Aligned Movement will do nothing to build basic infrastructure! They are just Robbing The Poor of the revenues that are rightfully theirs.’

  Now Zambia Airways was the pride of the nation and it was well known that it only hired those who were enthusiastic about the project of African unity to work in its sales and marketing department. This meant that Uncle Ted had no idea what the Uncle and the Girlfriend were talking about with their critiques of nationalism and neocolonialism, which was lucky for everyone because it prevented hurt feelings all around. In fact, one of the best things about working for Zambia Airways was that its employees were not required to be anything other than patriotic and enthusiastic.

  To most Africans in newly liberated countries, the national airline symbolised, in all the easy and trite ways, everything that was possible for a new nation. Airlines were the gleaming future. African pilots, resplendent in their uniforms, demonstrated the intellect and sobriety that colonialists had long accused Africans of lacking. However, their ground staff were something else entirely. They were sycophants, whose role was to burnish the reputations of their countries and herald the greatness that was yet to come.

  Men like Uncle Ted, obsequious enough to have secured jobs with the national carrier, were elevated in society by mere association with the airline. His employment at Zambia Airways, and the fact that his office was physically at the airport, made Unc
le Ted a big man in a small society. His position as a senior figure within Zambia Airways also made him singularly unqualified to critique the institution, certainly not in the way the Uncle and the Girlfriend were attempting.

  In fact, it was quite the opposite. Uncle Ted’s role was dependent on his being a yes-man. Whenever President Kaunda returned from one of his whirlwind world trips, his arrival at the airport on a Zambia Airways plane would be marked with ululation and thanksgiving, but also with the awe befitting one who has just alighted from an aircraft. Uncle Ted was always there, on hand to greet him and to ensure everything functioned smoothly as the president made his way through the airport.

  Since he was the president and there was no paperwork to be done, and since the chief of protocol, the minister of foreign affairs and most of Cabinet were also always present to welcome the president home, there was technically very little for a Zambia Airways manager to do on these frenetic days, but this never occurred to Uncle Ted.

  As the spouse of a senior Zambia Airways manager, there was even less for Aunt Tutu to do at the airport when the president arrived, but this never occurred to her either. Indeed, sometimes, if the trip had been an especially important one – say to Moscow or Beijing – Uncle and Aunty dressed up Suzie and Wongani in their frilliest, whitest dresses, as though they were going to be christened, and they would shroud Tapelwa in a charcoal-coloured suit that was three sizes too large. Thus appointed, they would drive to the airport to stand in the VIP section on the runway in the hopes that senior members of Cabinet would note their loyalty to ruler and country as they sweated in the glare of the concrete.

  On those days, my sisters and I would watch on TV, hoping for a glimpse of Uncle Ted and Aunt Tutu and the kids. When he landed, the president always stood at the top of the stairs of the plane with his white hanky in his hand, waving to the crowds and officials gathered to greet him before he descended. There were always busloads of supporters dressed in UNIP colours – women wearing green for the land and orange for the copper that lies beneath the land and schoolchildren in checked uniforms sweating in the sun.

 

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