Always Another Country

by Sisonke Msimang

  A few times, when Aunty Angela needs to go to the shops, she suggests that I stay behind because ‘Praisegod is here’, I refuse. I join her, each and every time, and soon she doesn’t bother asking. She simply says, ‘Come dear, I need to quickly run to the bakery.’

  While my confidence grows with each new act of rebellion, it doesn’t occur to me to tell anyone about what Praisegod has done to me. Not for one minute do I even consider this. Not as I straighten myself up and walk into the house. Not as Aunty Angela says, ‘Where were you?’ Not when Mummy comes to fetch me. Not when I am in the back seat looking out of the window as we drive home with my babbling sisters putting their jammy fingers all over me. Not even on that day when they try desperately to put me on the handlebars of the bike so that he can ride me to school. Not as I squirm and kick and finally manage to break loose and run up the tree that stands over the gate.

  Telling would put everyone in the unbearable position of having to do something about it.

  ‘Why did you go there when we have told you not to so many times?’

  ‘What happened?’

  They will ask this with panic squawking through their voices.

  And in the telling of the tale, when I respond, I will not know how to explain the quietness of the room and the awful betrayal of my lungs which never once gave me breath enough to howl.

  Telling someone, telling anyone, will be the same as telling them all and it will box me for them. It will make me an outsider, a child who trails whispers and who will grow up and be followed by the lingering scent of ‘Why?’ If I tell them they will soothe me and hold my hand and tell me it will all be fine, but I will be marked. From then on, they will wonder, quietly and perhaps in my presence. They will ask why I never screamed. I will still be their child but I will be altered – damaged and no longer innocent. They will no longer be able to say of me, ‘Oh, that one never bothers anybody.’ I will be troubled.

  * * *

  A few months after The Incident, Mummy and Baba tell us that we are moving. We are going to Kenya because Baba has a new job working for one of the agencies of the United Nations, just like Uncle Stan. This news is no surprise. For weeks Mummy and Baba have been sitting together at the kitchen table, talking late into the night, discussing Something Important.

  I am floored when Mummy says that they aren’t taking me with them. I will have to stay in Lusaka for three weeks after they have left so that I can complete the school term here, while they set every­thing up in Nairobi. Baba’s contract begins a month before the school term ends, so Mummy explains that it makes the most sense for them to leave me here.

  She announces it very matter-of-factly. ‘We will drive to Nairobi, and you will stay here. Baba will use the ticket the UN has given him to fly back to Lusaka to get you at the end of term. Then the two of you will fly back together.’ I start to cry, and Mummy doesn’t fully understand why. ‘You love that house, Sonke. You’ll be with Lindi and Aunty and Uncle and Gogo Lindi will come and see you every day if you want. I’ll ask her myself.’

  I am mortified and petrified and resolute in my opposition to the plan. I am not opposed to moving to Kenya but I am dead set against sleeping in that house.

  * * *

  On the day of the big departure, we drive over to the Sangwenis’ house in the fully loaded car. The adults talk for a while and drink tea to delay the inevitable. After some time, Baba and Mummy exchange looks. He stretches on the couch, a long languorous unfolding of his limbs, which signals to Uncle Stan that the time has come.

  Uncle clears his throat and marks the occasion – as is his wont – by giving a speech. With his combed-back thicket of hair that is delicately greying, and his professorial maroon-and-green argyle cardigan, Uncle Stan is nothing if not solemn. Even when he is angry – which is rare – he speaks slowly and carefully. He is not a man prone to outbursts. And so it is that when he draws himself up to his full height to deliver a farewell sermon, he imbues today’s departure with an air of serious quietude.

  He talks firstly about where we come from. He speaks of Humble Beginnings and Man’s Capacity to Triumph Over Adversity. These are phrases he uses often, especially when he refers to Masondale – the village in the Natal Midlands where he and Baba were raised.

  He takes the opportunity to remind us that the architects of apartheid did not intend for Masondale to ‘produce men like Kaya; that is to say, men of courage and conviction and dignity. And yet all our stock is like this. We are sprung from the loins of people who have never allowed themselves to be conquered.’

  As he speaks, he uses Baba’s home name, the name that he grew up with. In exile, Baba has assumed a new name: Walter, which was his father’s Christian name. He shed Matthew, the one given to him at birth, when he crossed into Francistown in 1962.

  Uncle Stan continues, speaking slowly and with great deliberation. ‘We are descended from people who are noble both in word and in deed. Matthew, Ntombi, girls – travel well on this new journey. Make us proud.’

  Then it is hugs and kisses and waves and smiles, and everyone is saying how brave I am to not even be crying and the car is pulling out of the driveway and onto Kalungu Road. Aunty Angela takes my hand and we turn to walk back to the house.

  I cross the veranda and go to the sink in the kitchen to get a glass of water. I look out and see Praisegod sweeping under the mango trees in the back garden and suddenly I feel, in the most intense way possible, that I am only seven years old and it feels like too small a number in the face of so big a task and so I drop the glass and find myself running.

  There isn’t really anywhere to go, so I dive under the dining room table and I start to wail. I lock myself behind the sturdy legs of the chairs and grip the chunky wooden knees of the table as though my life depends on it. Aunty Angela – bless her – thinks that I am embarrassed that I broke the glass. Correcting her would be too difficult. It would raise too many other questions and so I don’t. Instead, I sniffle and look out at her through the wooden bars, my limbs indistinguishable from those of my mahogany refuge. ‘It’s okay, Sonke,’ she says, coaxing me to come out. I can only heave; words may hurt, but the sobs offer release.

  After some time Aunty pads away and goes to the bedroom. I sit under the table no longer weeping. I can still hear him sweeping outside. Then that, too, stops and all I can hear is the distant sound of a manservant whistling.

  * * *

  In the three weeks that pass between their departure and Baba’s return, I do not utter a single word to Praisegod, and nobody notices. The initial battles I fought to prevent him from taking me to school have been won so there is no need for me to restate my position. Aunty takes me to school, and Praisegod stays well away.

  I survive the weeks by playing on the streets and staying out of the yard in this place that is no longer really my home. At night I think about his breath. I hear myself say yes and blood warms my face. The softly grunting tangled and dirty man who, on that day, was not the Praisegod I had come to know is never far from my thoughts.

  Then it is over. Baba comes back and we drive to the airport and I am sitting on a plane next to him and Kalungu Road is on the ground and we are up in the sky and the clouds are beneath us and Praisegod is getting further and further away. I am moving at what feels like faster than the speed of light and underneath us Zambia has disappeared and instead it is the Serengeti and within it are thousands of acacia trees and scores of brown rivers, and wildebeest and elephants and ostriches, none of which I can see but all of which are in a picture book on my lap. My eyes and my mouth are a triad of awestruck Os and I have finally allowed myself not to think about the fear in my belly. I am all imagination now and Praisegod is far, far away.

  When she sees me at the airport Mummy hugs me longer and harder than she ever has before. She tilts my face towards her and says, ‘Ha! No scrapes on your knees?’ I shake my head, grinning and trying not to cry. ‘Nothing?’ She inspects my arms and my legs and for a minute I won
der if she knows and I secretly hope that she does so she can march back to Lusaka and Crush His Skull, the way Baba always threatens to do to other drivers when they block him in traffic. But the moment passes and instead she says with a wistful smile, ‘Well, then you must be growing up, my girl!’

  In Nairobi there is no Praisegod and no back garden, only a maisonette on Ngong Road. This is just at the turn-off to State House, which means that every day motorbikes and police cars wail past us, with the president somewhere in the middle and a body double pretending to be him in another car right in front of him or right behind him or, who knows, perhaps sitting right next to him prepared to be sacrificed in the event of an assassination attempt. I am trying to say that I am in this new place where I can breathe again. I am in this new place where, this time, I will know better than to trust a man who whistles like a bird and whispers like a friend.

  I fold away the stink of his fingers and the odour of his tobacco-­stained teeth. In time I will force myself to forget his face; its contours will shadow. His body will not be so easy to displace but I will teach myself that I was strong and I will remind myself of all the ways I fought him and made myself live. And my memories will be rich and they will be bigger than him. They will click in my head like a showreel and make me everything that I am. They will tell me the legacy of my childhood is so much bigger than anything one man could undo.

  Mummy puts purple iodine on my knees and kisses me before bed.

  The German Girlfriend tells me not to trust ‘The System’.

  Dr Kenneth Kaunda believes in us all.

  Copper is the colour of the mud after it rains.

  I pin a tag on which Baba has written ‘Danaus chrysippus’ onto his pinboard and the powder from the butterfly’s wing smudges on my thumb.

  Even in my frightened silence I believe in the strength of my own bones. I believe in the tough sinew that keeps my legs moving. I have faith in the muscle of my arms that pull me up and swing me over. I trust in my pumping heart and in the sturdiness of my ribcage. Through those weeks that turn into months that become years of what you might want to call silence, I speak to myself. I tell myself the truth, which is that he is wrong and everything about me is right. I believe in my bones because I have others who believe in them too.

  Today, across the yellowing decades, I remember the tobacco on his tongue and the marijuana seeds under his nails; and beneath them I can still taste his sweat. I still feel the weight of his dead dreams some days when I wake up, and this is fine. What matters most is that – like Scheherazade – I said yes so that I could live.

  Kenya

  Kenya never owned us the way Zambia did. The ANC community in Nairobi was less structured; while Lusaka had been our home because it was the headquarters of the ANC, Nairobi was our home because Baba had a job there and his job had nothing to do with the revolution.

  This one fact – that Baba now had a place of employment and was not a full-time member of the ANC – began to open up possibilities for us. We went from being refugees in Zambia – a country whose entire foreign policy was built around our protection and emancipation – to being expatriates in a city concerned with feeding its rich and distancing itself from its poor.

  On weekends we would drive across town to visit other South African families. A year after we arrived in Nairobi, Uncle Stan and Aunty Angela joined us. By now Lindi was in boarding school in Swaziland and Dumi enrolled in Nairobi Academy, where we also went. Having our old friends in Nairobi made it feel more like home, but the city itself remained a mystery.

  To get to the house where the Sangwenis lived we often took Arboretum Drive, which was flanked on one side by a micro-forest with ancient trees hung with vines. It was a lush, impossibly green daub of paint that seemed to emerge from nowhere, just past the busy shopping area of Westlands. Once we were past Arboretum Drive, we were in a proper suburb – on our way into Kileleshwa. I would look out of the window, catching glimpses of colonial villas behind high walls covered in Bougainvillea vines. The flowers – purple and peach and red – bounced across the tops of wrought-iron gates and tumbled onto the dark green of hedges that made me want to jump out of the car and smell them. That would have been impossible, of course; a wall bordered every house and every gate was guarded by an askari – a man whose only job was to keep strangers out.

  Like Lusaka, Nairobi had many roundabouts. These intersections were still elegant, in spite of the increasing traffic. They were beautiful places of near-lawlessness. On weekends, Baba sped through the city’s roundabouts without slowing down. In the back, my sisters and I would slip and slide, giggling at the motion, certain that the car looked like a cartoon – on the verge of tipping over.

  During the week, the city was completely different. From Monday to Friday traffic was controlled not by lights and careful observance of the rules. No, our car moved on the basis of the instructions of white-gloved traffic police. Both hands up meant stop. A slow deliberate arm with a hand pointing told us to proceed left. The right hand would continue to signal stop to oncoming traffic. The drivers would do as they were told until the cops turned away. Then they would sneak forward, hoot and carry on without regard for decorum.

  The officers wore braided hats and crisp light-blue shirts and navy-blue shorts. Their sinewy African legs were familiar. I had seen them in Lusaka, motioning in the same way, standing in the sun yet somehow not sweating. I was in another country, but somehow things were the same.

  Except, they weren’t. Nairobi had harder edges. It was faster-­paced, noisier, and much bigger than sleepy Lusaka. Nairobi screeched and clanged and was in a hurry to go somewhere important. Kenyans were sure-footed and confident. They were brash and impatient where Zambians took life easier, moved more slowly. Perhaps it was because the recent past was so bloody in Kenya. The country preferred to look ahead, because looking back was too painful.

  I was only eight when we moved to Kenya. I did not know that, in the decade leading up to Kenyan independence in 1963, the British had behaved like violent thugs. Kenya’s colonial history is as bloody as any other in Africa, although until recently Kenyans had managed to pretend that theirs was a history that never happened.

  So, had I asked, no one in the city would have willingly told me about the Mau Mau. They would have avoided telling me stories of the hundreds of Kikuyu women who took oaths and picked up machetes to defend their land against the British. They would not have said a word about the Mau Mau men who were killed in their thousands in the 1950s in a brave uprising that dared to kill whites. Kenya was a place of secrets and Nairobi was a city whose residents knew far more than they were prepared to say.

  Daniel arap Moi was Kenya’s president. He was different from President Kaunda, who cared about Zambia to the point of tears. President Moi seemed unmoved by the slums and the potholes and the malnutrition. He wore dark suits and had red eyes. He rarely smiled on the television.

  In Lusaka Mummy and Baba used to say, ‘Say what you will about President Kaunda, he certainly loves his people.’ In Kenya, I never heard them say this about President Moi. Instead, when the evening news came on they would shush us and we would watch as the unsmiling president opened schools and addressed conferences. He did not cry when he saw the goitres and the thin legs of the children who gathered in their school uniforms to greet him. While the sight of President Kaunda had inspired excitement in us, here we watched the president with a sort of fearful awe.

  Everywhere you looked in Nairobi there were unfathomably poor people. Many of them were children. They chased us in hordes on nights when we went out to restaurants in the city. Their eyes would bore into our backs as we rushed quickly back to the car. Then they would look on in silence, staring at us through the windows as we pulled up to traffic lights.

  On the weekends they spilled onto the roads, too poor to buy anything to sell – not even food. Their hands were always cupped and their faces looked as though they had never been clean.

  I wondere
d how they didn’t get run over by the reckless matatus whose drivers sped past them with deadened eyes. They lived on the centre line of Nairobi’s busy roads, between whizzing cars, and learnt to give way to big men whose tyres drove relentlessly across lanes so dilapidated it was hard to imagine that they could take the country into a new kind of future.

  The Nairobi of my childhood refused to look up. It was interested only in the midline, in the space between the stomach and the wallet. It was intent on avoiding eye contact at all costs. That was how you managed the city – by shrinking into yourself and closing your eyes and covering your ears to block out the noise of it all.

  There were places in that city too violent or too dirty or too terrible for us to enter, places where armies of children lived and slept and which they never left. There were children in Nairobi whose particular corners of misery might as well have been another country. I was shielded from the pain of this sort of belonging. The children of Nairobi’s underclass knew their place, and the children of the upper classes expected them to stay there. Kenya’s leaders were not planning for growth. Their strategy was premised not on building the middle classes, but on empowering the elite.

  Uncle and Aunty and Mummy and Baba decided to buy a whole sheep and have it slaughtered and butchered. The idea was to share the costs of the sheep and then to divide it and put its pieces into the deep freezer. That would be cheaper than buying fresh meat every week. Baba asked the askari posted at the front gate of the small complex where we lived where he might find the place where this sort of service was offered. The guard told him he could buy a sheep at Dagoretti Corner or in Kibera – the massive slum across the road and past the golf course. He urged Baba not to go there himself. ‘I will do it for you, sir,’ he suggested. He wanted to earn some extra money, but there was something else there, something more urgent. He wanted to protect us – with our polished shoes and our pan-African aspirations. He wanted to prevent us from seeing Nairobi’s gaunt and pock-marked buttocks.