Always Another Country

by Sisonke Msimang

  After waving and smiling, the president would make his way, in a slow-moving convoy, all the way to the stadium. There, he would shout in a voice quivering with patriotism, ‘One Zambia?’ It always sounded like a declarative statement blended into a question, the first part of a trademark call and response that all Zambians knew. In our tiny living room, my sisters and I would scream back along with the crowd, ‘One Nation!’

  Having been raised in a one-party state, we understood that our role was to respond in the affirmative when the great leader called upon us to do so. Although we never saw Aunty or the children, more than once the back of Uncle Ted’s bald head was beamed into our living room in Burley Court. The fact of his having been on TV made him seem larger than life. To us, Uncle Ted seemed a little bit like Clark Kent. He appeared to be a mere mortal, an ordinary man who went to work every morning, but, in an instant, there he was, standing within spitting distance of the President of the Republic of Zambia.

  Uncle Ted wasn’t someone you questioned about whether the airline could be viewed as an expensive monument to the ego of the president. Had he understood the nuance and complexity of the argument, Uncle Ted might have booted out his guests. But he didn’t get it. Uncle Ted could not have fathomed that anyone might suggest Zambia Airways was a waste of taxpayers’ money and so he simply looked at them quizzically across the dining room table and made no comment. It was as though they were speaking a different language, as though they had come from a distant planet where words were a form of nourishment rather than a set of sounds used for the purposes of communication. He simply ate his nsima and smiled in exasperation, content in the knowledge that they would soon be gone, and that in the meantime they would make their funny eating words and he would ignore them and pretend that they were making sense.

  While the ANC comrades who gathered at our house every week­end may have appreciated the robustness of the arguments made by the Girlfriend and the Uncle, they were also beneficiaries of President Kaunda’s largesse and were unlikely to be so direct as to suggest that their free flights should be stopped in the interests of the common man and woman on the street. They were so deeply invested in the Zambian nationalist project that pooh-poohing the idea of a national carrier would have felt counter-revolutionary even if its logic was sound.

  The hippie lovers, on the other hand, didn’t care. They weren’t tied up in Africa as an idea – they were only interested in The People as an idea and, although that had its own problems, it allowed them to be more critical than many others. When they weren’t debating the post-colonial condition, the Girlfriend and the Uncle spent a lot of time looking deeply into each other’s eyes, smoking cigarettes and holding each other’s faces: often simultaneously. They also complained that they were tired a lot and often they had to retire to their room to sleep off their fatigue.

  They developed a pattern. They would get up late and join us kids for the midday meal. For lunch each day the maid fed us a steaming plate of nsima with greens and tomato relish. We gobbled it up and giggled as the two of them stared at each other dreamily over our heads. The Girlfriend struggled to eat the food but liked the fact that she was eating in the same manner as The People and so she persevered. We were amused by the awkward way she used her hands to scoop up the relish and in a way this endeared her to us. She may have had strange clothes and odd manners but she was sort of childlike in her attempts to act like she was one of us.

  As we ate, the Girlfriend peppered us with questions. In these moments, we saw that she wasn’t like us at all, nor would she ever be like our parents. ‘How do you feel about the way the teacher teaches you at school? Aren’t you tired of being told what to learn?’ The Uncle chimed in, ‘Wouldn’t it be more fun if you could learn what you want to learn rather than what The System,’ (here he would grow more vehement) ‘what some strange people in a distant land, decide you should learn?’ We could understand the words, but it all sounded like gibberish.

  * * *

  On the fourth day of their visit, the Girlfriend and the Uncle disappeared as usual into the guest bedroom to ‘take a nap’. Suzie, the oldest and bossiest, explained that they still had Jet Lag. ‘That happened to me when we went to London,’ she said authoritatively, dragging out the word London the way I imagined Londoners would. ‘I couldn’t sleep for weeks because my body clock was ticking all night and the tocks kept me awake.’ I wasn’t sure whether ticks and tocks worked in this way. Still, I rarely questioned Suzie on matters of international import. Instead, I whispered to myself in a Benny Hill voice, ‘Let me hold my bloody tongue since I’ve never been to mother England.’

  Her sister did not show Suzie the same courtesy. Suspicious by nature, Wongani was not convinced by the Jet Lag theory. ‘They are doing something naughty in there,’ she declared. Half a decade into her life, she already had an air of resignation about the state of the world. She was prone to sighing and referred to everyone as ‘that one’. For example, apropos Daphne, the maid, one morning Wongani suggested, ‘Hmmn, that one thinks we haven’t noticed she’s visiting her boyfriend at the kiosk? How can we need to buy milk so many times a day?’

  Having surmised that Uncle and his guest were up to no good, Wongani decided to undertake an investigation. Once she had asked the crucial question, ‘What exactly are they doing with the door shut in the middle of the day when normal people are busy?’, it was impossible for any of us to ignore the possibility that they could be up to no good.

  It was on the basis of this question, and this question alone, that we found ourselves standing in front of their bedroom door, peeping through a slight crack. Inside the room, the mad visitors were wriggling under the sheets. Their legs were intertwined; their fingers and lips and hands and hips grinding ever so slowly. We got an eyeful and, for our sins, we were struck dumb and momentarily paralysed. We watched the contortions with our heads cocked to the side. We were caught flat-footed, our mouths agape. After a few minutes, we began to move, our grubby fingers clutching one another for balance as we strained on our tippy toes and struggled to take in everything that was happening under the covers.

  Then reality hit.

  ‘They’re gonna see us,’ I whispered. ‘Let’s go!’

  ‘No,’ Wongani and Suzie hissed. They were mesmerised.

  We watched for a few more minutes until we heard someone coming down the hall. Petrified that it might be Aunt Tutu, we scampered away. We ran outside and stood in the dusty yard. We looked at one another and then looked away, flushed and embarrassed and aware that we had just witnessed something that was Absolutely None of Our Business.

  For weeks after this we could talk of nothing else. We discussed the Girlfriend and the Uncle long after they had gone. They had disappeared as abruptly as they had come, leaving Aunt Tutu a vegetarian cookbook and pressing a ceramic hand-painted bird whistle from Hungary into the palms of a startled-looking Uncle Ted.

  We agreed that we had actually seen them having S.E.X. We always spelled it out when we said it, in case the babies heard us, and we always, always, whispered it.

  Until this incident, I had only had a vague sense of what sex was. I knew that it was something private and forbidden but now – thanks to my astute companions – I was also aware that it was simultaneously bad and pleasurable. Wongani was clear that people who liked doing it were dirty. Given that the two people we had witnessed in flagrante delicto were not exactly models of hygiene, it was hard to disagree with her on this score.

  We weren’t just fascinated with what we had seen, though. We were especially fascinated with her. We spent inordinate amounts of time talking about her. In part it was because, as we peeped into the room that afternoon, she was the one who was sighing and moaning and generally carrying on, while he whispered and grunted a bit but generally kept his cool.

  Perhaps we talked about her because we were girls and she was the girl, and we knew from previous sources of knowledge that she shouldn’t have let him do those things to her in the
first place. We had known this from before we suckled our mothers’ breasts. Every girl knows this. The rules are different for us than they are for boys and any girl who pretends that she doesn’t know this, or who momentarily forgets, will find out sooner or later. As different as we were from one another in temperament, the three of us could agree on this. There are some things you just know.

  A few days after the peep show, I was sitting outside in the barren yard next to Suzie and Wongani. Their heads had just been shaved and Aunt Tutu had slathered a liberal dose of Vaseline onto their scalps to ward off lice. She had ordered Daphne to ensure that they sat in the sun the whole morning to burn off any vestiges of the bugs. Given her relationship with Wongani, Daphne relished the opportunity to enforce Aunty’s instructions. I sat next to them and drew a line in the ground as Vaseline dripped down their necks and onto their shoulders. Every time one of them tried to move, Daphne ran out of the house and said, ‘Your mother said three hours. You stay there. It’s not yet time, not yet.’

  Aunt Tutu may have known the burning sun would do nothing but bake her children’s heads, but the shame of having lice in her house had most likely driven her to administer this particular cruelty. Aunt Tutu did not want it said that she had known about the lice and done nothing to prevent their return.

  So we sat and sweated together in the grassless yard – a sacrifice to appease other mothers who would ask where the girls’ hair had gone. Aunt Tutu would say, ‘They had lice so I shaved it and made them sit in the sun to burn the germs,’ and the other mothers would respect her in that fearful way and inflict the same on their own children next time, repeating both the unnecessary punishment and the boastful pretence of motherly sternness. Suzie wiped a trickle of runny Vaseline, preventing it from seeping into her eye, then picked up the conversation where we had left it when Mummy had come to take us home the day before.

  ‘As I was saying,’ she began.

  Wongani and I swivelled our heads to face her and she continued, ‘They aren’t even married.’

  ‘Yes,’ her sister agreed, ‘which is a pity because they are going to burn in eternal shame.’

  ‘Straight to hell,’ I sighed, ‘especially her since she’s the lady.’ I was surprised by how nonchalant and worldly I sounded.

  We nodded and then shook our heads in resigned consternation.

  In the coming weeks, we went into overdrive, spreading the story far and wide. My friends at Burley Court could have told you what happened as if they had seen it with their own eyes, as could my other set of friends at Uncle Stan and Aunt Angela’s house, which was where I spent most of my weekday afternoons when school was in session.

  Once the juicy details were shared, and on every street where they had been disseminated, there was almost unanimous agreement that the Girlfriend must have been A Lady Of The Night, brought to Lusaka specifically for the purposes of Doing Sex.

  Again and again we returned to the scene in feigned horror. Suzie was especially good at recounting the most salacious details. She always seemed to circle back to the one point: ‘Did you hear her saying “Yes, yes, yes!”?’ She would pant in a lurid pseudo-­Germanic imitation of the Girlfriend’s voice. We would giggle, and shift uncomfortably. Invariably one of us would wind up the conversation by saying, ‘Everyone knows, it’s only Street Walkers who like S.E.X.’

  I felt increasingly uncomfortable when the subject came up. The Girlfriend had actually been nice to us. It had only been for two weeks, but she had lived with us. She had shared our nsima and made us laugh. She had even made us think about school and about President Kaunda. With her questions and her wispy shirts and low-­hanging skirts, she hadn’t been a monster – she had just been a girl. She had given me a fragrance stick that smelled like vanilla, and she had given Suzie an empty matchbox with a picture of a dragon on it, and had left a tiny little square of magenta-coloured felt for Wongani. The Uncle had not even bothered, yet here we were saying nothing about him and telling every kid within a five-­kilometre radius about her moans and groans.

  The Girlfriend’s mistake was not that we had caught her; it was that she liked it. We may have been little, but we knew enough to forgive him and call her the sinner. We were big enough to see that she was not ashamed and this seemed deliciously wrong and also it seemed to explain everything that was off kilter about her. The Girlfriend said what she liked and did what she pleased and, because of this, and because I was a girl just like her, I wondered what it might be like one day to lie as she had, legs spread and arms held high; heavy-lidded, slack-jawed, writhing and unashamed.

  Gogo Lindi

  Lindiwe Mabuza arrived in Lusaka the year I turned five. She was the kind of woman who made people nervous. She had been living in America where she had mastered the art of not caring what anyone thought – of being a thoroughly independent woman. She had always possessed this trait; no doubt it had carried her to Lesotho and then to the US and back again. But living in America in the 1960s must have honed it.

  She was surly sometimes and unconcerned about what it meant to be a bad-tempered woman. She did what she wanted and argued as vehemently as she saw fit. She disagreed with people and didn’t care if they got offended. Men especially. She didn’t talk about feminism. She just stuck her nose in the air and looked down on men who were not as clever as her. She didn’t care what her intellect did to their egos.

  When I met her, she was almost forty, divorced and highly educated. Because Baba was technically her nephew, she insisted that I call her Gogo, despite the fact that she was far too young to actually be my granny. She was odd sometimes. Obstinate, even on minor points like this, but people learnt to back down and let her have her way. They said she was ‘difficult’ and she was.

  There were all sorts of problems with being almost forty, highly educated and divorced in those times, but I didn’t know about any of those problems. I just knew that she came along at exactly the point when I needed someone who would be all mine, someone I would not have to share with the big-headed toddler and the milk-­smelling baby who seemed intent on ruining my life. When it all seemed too much, Gogo Lindi arrived with the express purpose of adoring me.

  Before moving to Lusaka in 1979, Gogo had earned a master’s degree in America; then, she had gone to Minnesota to teach. In Minnesota she had fallen in love with a man but when that ended she picked up the pieces and stayed revolutionary. So, when she met me, I suspect she was still a little bit heartbroken and trying to find pieces of herself that she had left on the other side of the ocean, miles away. She was also searching for somewhere new to belong and for someone to belong to.

  She had a daughter, Thembi. Their relationship was complicated and by then Thembi was already a teenager – a big sister to me. What Gogo needed was a little one, someone who would simply adore her and not ask complicated questions about where she had been and why she had left her. And so, on the cool evening when Lindiwe Mabuza arrived in Lusaka, she found me, the little girl who had been waiting for someone just like her.

  Gogo looked straight through my little ribcage into my full-full heart and realised that I was a precocious and lavishly jealous little girl who could not get over the arrival of not one, but two, baby sisters. She recognised in me a fellow traveller, a little soul who could be tough if she wanted but also needed more than she was getting from the adults around her. She could see I was unsettled by all the faces and the voices and the comings and goings in my revolutionary house sometimes – as any child would be. She could see, too, that I dared not give voice to my worries: I had already worked out that there would be entirely no point in complaining. This was life.

  Gogo Lindi saw all this and set about doing what aunts have been doing for girls for centuries: standing in. She stood in for the attention Mummy could no longer afford to give, and for the ideas I could not yet shape about what it meant to be a girl. And, later, when I was old enough to decide for myself what sort of woman I would be, Gogo Lindi gave shape and colour and
contours to my ideas about how to be strong. She was one of the first women I ever loved who didn’t give a damn about the rules. She taught me above all else how to belong to myself first before I let myself belong to someone else. This is a lesson that is never fully learnt; wherever I have failed to use it as a guide, I blame only myself.

  No one quite seemed to know what to do with Gogo. She didn’t fit into any of the pre-assigned boxes. This didn’t matter to me, of course. I had no idea at the time how important the boxes were. I only knew what I thought, which was that she was the most beautiful and prettiest-smelling person I had ever met. With the innocence of the child who believes in the kindness of grown-ups and the fairness of the world, I thought she had arrived solely to give me love and affection.

  Our favourite game was called Olympics. In this game Gogo Lindi was the coach and I was the athlete. Each time we played the game we were catapulted into the future. In the imaginary world we constructed, it was 1992 and I was eighteen years old. I was the World Champion of gymnastics, representing a free South Africa. The games were hosted in Addis Ababa, the headquarters of the Organization of African Unity, because – well, because nothing else would have made sense. Even our games were pan-African.

  Gogo would stand at one end of the Sangwenis’ yard and I would stand at the other. The Sangwenis were extended family. Aunty Angela and Uncle Stan were like parents to us and Lindiwe and Dumi were the big sister and big brother we didn’t need to imagine because we had them in the flesh. I spent most days at their house when I was a toddler and, of course, a weekend would never go by without us going to their house. Gogo Lindi was Uncle Stan’s younger sister. So, when she arrived in Lusaka, naturally she stayed at Aunty and Uncle’s house and naturally she insisted that Baba call her Aunty in spite of the small gap in their ages. So it was here – at the house on Kalungu Road – that we began our lifelong adoration of one another.