Always Another Country

by Sisonke Msimang

  ‘On your marks!’ she would shout. ‘Get set. Go!’ And I’d be off, running as fast as I could. It was me against the clock. ‘Good time,’ Gogo would say. ‘You beat your previous record by about five seconds.’ Then I would begin my tumbling routine. I would cartwheel and handstand and roll for a few minutes in some order I had decided made sense. ‘Beautiful,’ she would say. ‘Absolutely stunning. Even better than Nadia Comăneci.’

  We were a conspiracy – a secret shared in hot breath and stifled giggles. She knew I was smarting from the pain of having new siblings, so she gave me whatever I wanted. Others could get sidetracked by the antics of Baby Zeng or the cleverness of genius Mandla, but she remained unmoved. Gogo kept her eyes fixed firmly on me, never once even vaguely interested in the other two. They didn’t notice, so they never harboured a grudge. But I knew and it meant the world.

  Most nights Gogo was in the studio broadcasting stories into South Africa. She was in charge of Radio Freedom and was the head of culture and arts for the ANC in exile.

  Lindiwe Mabuza had earned her master’s degree in American Studies in Ohio. I only realised later what a feat this was. For a black South African woman, born in 1935, to have made her way out of Natal, to the Transvaal, to Lesotho and then on to America, was pretty remarkable. In the 1960s she had become a professor and married a man there, a black American.

  She talked a lot about these people who were risen from slaves, about the parallels between us and them, about how our struggle was intertwined with those ‘brothers and sisters from across the pond’.

  Whenever she said this I imagined a lost tribe of jive-talking Afro-­wearing urban negroes (as we called them) wandering the plains of America bumping into Indians. What I knew of America was incongruously derived from a combination of old Western films full of Apaches and Navajos on empty expanses of land . . . and sitcoms like The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son and Good Times.

  For many years, the brothers and sisters from across the pond would occupy this curious place in my mind. I would dream about them speaking a version of English that I struggled to understand and humming ‘Kumbaya’. Perhaps this was the reason why, when I finally made it to America, I embraced them like long-lost cousins.

  Gogo Lindi’s ex-husband had carried a white man’s name – Brown or White or Brody or something like that – but he was black as midnight. Years later, when I became a teenager, I would stumble across his pictures in a trunk of things she had left with Aunty Angela for safekeeping. I felt that I had looked at something I wasn’t meant to see, so I carefully put them back, even though she was miles away by that time. Still, I got enough of a glimpse to see he was as handsome as Sidney Poitier and looked as though he loved her very much.

  The marriage hadn’t worked out and I loved her because she had been strong enough to mind terribly but not to have been broken by it. After all, hadn’t she stood on the streets of Jobstown, with her skirt hitched up, when she was only nine years old, watching the man who denied that he was her father through slit eyes? Hadn’t she yelled at him on the streets of that barren Natal town where she was born?

  ‘Hey you, I know who you are.’

  Hadn’t she shouted it so loud that he had turned on his horse and tried to bore a hole into her unwanted head with his eyes? And hadn’t she refused to back down?

  She had said, ‘You are my father, you must buy me shoes.’

  And hadn’t he finally turned disdainfully and just kept on riding?

  This had been about 1943 when she was a poor child to a single mother. She had been born into hatreds both resilient and limber, hatreds that told her that she was nothing.

  Gogo Lindi could cook but chose not to when she didn’t want to. She was in a bad mood sometimes and that was just life. On those days, she would sit in the Sangwenis’ house like a visitor, expecting to be served. Her immaculately plaited head would be in the clouds as she stewed in a spectacularly bad mood that was often of her own making. Everyone would tiptoe around her.

  Except me. She was my special friend.

  I loved her because she was not my mother and didn’t want to be. She loved me because she liked the light in my eyes, not because she was my flesh but because in my veins there was something of her – something restless and yearning that wanted to belong and also to be free.

  The odour of teeth

  In the middle of 1981, just before my family left Lusaka to go to Nairobi, I experienced an unexpected violence on the quiet edge of a big yard.

  The scene of the crime is 10 Kalungu Road and on the morning of the violence I am dropped off at the Sangweni house, as I am on most days. Mummy greets Aunty Angela with a wide smile and they discuss the pick-up plan. Aunty nods at Lindi and Dumi who are wolfing down their breakfasts and says, ‘These guys have sports after school today so I’ll go out and fetch them at about four-thirty but Praisegod will be here to look after Sonke.’

  Mummy says it’s fine and tells Aunty that she will come by at five, five-thirty. She waves goodbye and I dig in for a second breakfast.

  Ten minutes later, as Lindi and Dumi pile into the back of Aunt Angela’s car, I hop onto Praisegod’s bike and he rides me to school.

  Praisegod is a dutiful servant. Compared to others, his life at Kalungu Road is easy. There is little need for protocol with the Sangwenis. Uncle Stan works for the United Nations as a fairly senior official, which means a lot in terms of stability and comfort. Mummy often says that, despite the perks and benefits that come with a UN job, Uncle Stan is completely without Airs and Graces. To which Baba always says, ‘That’s good because Aunt Angela would not know what to do with him if he suddenly developed them, given what a Humble Soul she is.’

  * * *

  On the day in question, Praisegod whistles a joyful tune. As he works, clipping the hedges and sweeping the ground underneath the mulberry tree, he hums and chirps as though there is an assortment of birds in his voice box. He sounds like he is hiding an exotic and dying species in his throat. Maybe he is mimicking birds he kept in his youth.

  This is not unusual. He is the best whistler I have ever heard – even to this day I have never met another person who had the gift Praisegod had. When he whistles is he imagining that he is flying? Is he imitating a bird that he heard in his youth? Is he even conscious of it or does the sound merely come out?

  I never ask him these questions, which is a pity but not strange. It isn’t that I am not inquisitive. I have plenty of questions about worms and moths and neighbours and cars and the shape of the clouds. It simply doesn’t occur to me that he might have another life. In my mind, Praisegod exists for the sole purpose of tending to the garden. He would not breathe if there weren’t packages to be carried to and from the car. If it weren’t for me to take to school and keep company maybe Praisegod would turn into an overgrown statue standing in the middle of the garden.

  Like all middle-class African children, I am accustomed to living with domestic workers. I know that they are always to be spoken to politely and respectfully. In our house we call women servants Aunty and, later, when we move to Kenya and there is an askari planted in front of our gate, we call him Brother Patrick because he is only a few years older than me.

  Although Mummy and Baba tell us all the time that we should be respectful to servants – both in our home and in the homes of our friends – we understand that there are alternative ways of treating The Help and that, in other households, The Help are treated very badly indeed.

  Sometimes when the grown-ups are talking in the sitting room we overhear things that are not meant for little ears. This usually happens when we are deliberately still, crouched in the flowerbeds underneath the big living room window. We hear things we should know nothing about: madams beating The Help until the vessels in their eyes burst; The Help that has to be carried out of the house by The Boy who has stood as a silent witness to the crimes of the madam. Our eyes widen as we hear about village girls sent home abruptly when the swelling of their tummies can
no longer be ignored.

  The Help are whispered about when children are around.

  ‘That child was only fifteen when she started working there, but you know how Malawian men are. They will marry a twelve-year-old if their mother tells them to.’

  We giggle and make sick eyes when Aunty Pulane – one of Mummy’s closest friends, who has a sharp tongue and even sharper eyes – says, ‘No wonder that man has never spent a single night in his own bed. She caught him fondling the helper’s son.’ They invoke God’s name and somehow it is insufficient to say it in English.

  ‘Thixo!’ says Aunty Angela, invoking the deity herself. The rest shake their heads in knowing disbelief.

  When certain visitors come over, it is hard to forget the things that have been said about them from the safety of the Kalungu Road settee.

  The women’s responses – their rejection of the acts, but their tacit acceptance of the inevitability of this behaviour – make the abuses seem like a natural extension of men’s bodies. They never ask why men do the things they do. What some men will do is taken as a given. Instead, they are interested in why the child was not better protected. They want to know how the mother could not have foreseen that this would happen. They have unflinching common sense, so they are not concerned with the politics of blaming women. Instead, they want to know how to keep their girls safe. They are the kinds of mothers who don’t let their guards down for long enough to let their daughters get close to fire.

  Though there is never any significant drama with our servants, the general rules of engagement for maids and madams are very clear. Middle-class men are allowed to do what they like to maids. They can lurch for breasts. They can get home early and lock all the doors so that no one knows what they are up to. Boys can bed the neighbours’ housegirls and learn how sex works, and they can deny the children that swell bellies after those liaisons. Servant women are given no such leeway. The most minor infraction – a slowness in standing up when the wife of the house comes in, or a long face when a request to borrow money is declined – can signal the beginning of suspicion, or worse, the end of patience.

  This possibility of brutality, no matter how remote (and often it isn’t remote at all), keeps the domestic labour system in Africa running smoothly. Because of this, African servants are trustworthy and hard-working and generally mute on matters that do not concern them. There are those who pilfer and, yes, there are some who beat the children in their care. But these are relatively rare exceptions.

  By and large, servants are loving and kind and reliable. This is not because the poor – who have no choice but to clean our homes and care for our babies – are better or humbler than the middle classes. It is because they have no choice. This is as true now as it was when I was a child. The exploited have much to lose, so they stay in line.

  Praisegod, it turns out, is a rare and malevolent exception.

  * * *

  Look at him. Watch him now as he fades into the trees, into the soil and the grass. He knows how not to be noticed. His skin is the colour of amnesia; his eyes have the dark-brown tint of forgetting. His features are nondescript. He is a man who looks down all day, sweeping and raking and planting. You can assign him whichever lips and nose you wish because you will soon forget them anyway. There is nothing about him that will make you think twice about his character or his intentions.

  You will assume that he is here only to collect his wages and to excel, in his own private ways, in the menial tasks at hand. You tell yourself, as you look at his blunt face, that he finds some satisfaction in sweeping the driveway and stacking logs. Look carefully, for this is a young man. He is gentle with children and deferential with the father of the house. Barely out of his teens, he listens carefully to the instructions of the madam and inspires confidence because he so rarely meets her eye.

  This everyman, this most lowly of African men, a mere uneducated servant, is broken. His soul had probably already been smashed by the time I was born. It must have happened when he was only just a boy. Maybe his father wounded him. Maybe his mother pummelled him. Maybe, because he was left-handed, they tried to drown him in a stream to see if the demon inside would come out. Maybe, on his first day of school, the letters began to swim before his eyes and, in fear and misery, he wet himself. And maybe, after the welts had risen on his buttocks from the caning, as he was running home to cry in his mother’s arms, maybe he was hit on the back of the head by a stone, and maybe he fell, then, and awoke alone and concussed.

  And maybe after that, after the headaches and the vomiting had subsided and he was left only with the memory of not being safe, maybe from then – which may have been from as early as he could remember – maybe after all that, everything was too hard and too complicated and little girls like me, with our endless questions and beaming smiles, with our almond eyes and neat braids, with our impossible expectations, and our offerings of brimming cups, maybe we now make him remember the times before he was broken. For those who have never been consoled, remembering is an awful burden to bear. What better way to ease a load than to forget it was ever there? What better way to forget than to be a child again, to play the games that children play, to exist as an innocent, in the time before wounds and pain and memory?

  I am speculating, of course. But I have the luxury to do so: I have been a resilient victim, far more capable of survival in the end than a poor, broken man who himself was a casualty – the victim of a stunted revolution. I am not being brave – only honest. What happened to me was a bad thing, for sure, but worse happens every day to people who are in no position to recover. I tell it to show that it is awful and also that it isn’t the end of the world.

  * * *

  So let us go there. Let us begin with the minute when he says to me, ‘See?’ with all the gentleness of a mild summer day. ‘Come. Come see this.’ He is smiling as though he has a secret to tell, so I crouch down beside him and look at the grasshopper he has captured in his hands. I marvel. ‘Can I hold?’ I ask, fearless as ever. He has something else to show me, he says and so I follow, traipsing behind as he leads me towards his quarters.

  This is ancient history now, but I can never tell it without wanting to stop the reel at this moment; without wanting to make myself turn around and walk away before I enter the cool, well-shaded room at the edge of the property. I want Aunty Angela to come out, wiping her hands on her apron, to say, ‘Sonke, let’s go and buy some bread at the French bakery,’ but it’s too late for that now.

  I hesitate at the door: I have been warned many times before not to go inside his room, because nobody wants me badgering him and disturbing his privacy. The room is cool and dark and sparse. His bed is narrow and neatly made up and the room smells like he does: old sweat and tobacco and something acrid and musty and strong.

  I enter.

  He sits on the bed and pats the space next to him so that we are seated side by side. My legs dangle loosely and I am not afraid. He moves quickly and is suddenly on top of me and then I am afraid. I am very afraid and there is fear in my bowels and drums in my blood and everything in me wants to live and die at once. But it is too late to decide which way it will go – life or death. It is too late and my powder-blue shorts are off and I am fighting to keep my panties on and he is trying to snatch them down and I am clenching so hard that he cannot roll them down any further and then he is ramming against me with his body and trying to prise my legs apart and then his breath is in my face and he is heavy and he smells so awful I want to cry and vomit at the same time and then he asks, ‘Is it nice?’

  I say yes.

  The ‘yes’ unlocks a door and he tenses up. He stops holding my arms so tightly and he just lies there. He is sticky and so am I. I am sore from where his fingers have gouged, and from where his penis has tried to enter me. He has not succeeded but he has hurt me.

  I am hurt.

  I lie underneath him and he is hot and he smells awful and tears leak from the corners of my eyes. Then he sits up and
buttons his trousers. He does not look at me. I get down from the bed and put my shorts back on and I do not look at him either. I move away from the bed and stand a few feet away, next to the door, waiting as he finds his own feet. Then he takes my hand and we walk, as we have walked many times before, hand in hand. We walk into the bright blinking day and I am not crying. I let go of his hand somewhere in the garden and I pick my way across fallen mulberries and papayas. I slip quietly into the house and then, once I am there, in the cool of the kitchen, away from the garden and the over-lush smell of ripening fruit, once I am leaning forward at the sink and drinking a glass of water, I make up my mind about what has just happened. I solemnly swear that he will never touch me again. I do not even cry, because I just know, in myself, exactly what I need to do to be safe.

  * * *

  Afterwards 10 Kalungu Road no longer feels like home. Mummy still drops me there before school and I continue to stay after, but now I cross the veranda quickly and never stay in the back yard. In the afternoons I am Dumi’s shadow. I stick to him and Cousin George, even when they are being mean and telling me they have boys’ things to do. When Lindi is home, I glue myself to her side and I don’t even care when her friends call me the tape recorder and shush each other when I appear at her bedroom door. ‘You know she’s just gonna run and tell the grown-ups what we’re saying,’ they snicker. It doesn’t bother me one little bit. I am a hard little ball inside and my mission is simple, clean, crisp. I will be fine, as long as I avoid the garden.

  A couple of days after The Incident, Aunty asks Praisegod to ride me to school on his bike – as he has many times before. ‘No,’ I say, interrupting her instructions to him.

  ‘Why not, Sonke? I have to go into town today. It will make everything much easier, big girl.’ No. I begin to cry. It is the first of many times that I will break my crying rule in the long months that follow.