Always Another Country

by Sisonke Msimang

  There are shouts among the people gathered to witness the deliverance of justice. ‘Eh! Eh. It was him!’ they affirm, even though I hadn’t seen any of them until I started screaming so it is likely that most of them didn’t actually observe the crime.

  The boy – who cannot be older than me – nods in fear. His T-shirt is torn and so threadbare it isn’t clear whether it had already been torn before or whether the holes were the consequence of the manhandling by the Prosecutor-cum-judge and others in the crowd who caught him. His wings flutter helplessly, and one looks slightly broken. He is far too thin and he is wearing a sagging pair of shorts and no shoes and his feet look as though they’ve been dirty a long time and now they are beyond the redemption of washing. I feel sorry for him but I am also still angry, and my ankle is still bleeding, which reminds me to be indignant.

  The Prosecutor continues. ‘Speak! We do not understand those useless gestures. Do you not have a mouth to speak?’

  ‘Yes bwana, I did. I took it.’ The boy’s voice is quiet and high. Hearing him I think he might be as young as eleven and I regret squealing like a spoilt little piglet. I should have left him to pedal away but it is too late now.

  I can see myself reflected in his eyes. My thighs are distorted and look larger than they should in these shorts. I am well fed and adolescent; no longer a child, but not yet a woman; not fat, but far from thin. I am standing on my hind legs looking down my snout at him. Entitled, imperious. Some animals.

  The Good Samaritan does not see me this way. He is on my side because I am the victim and the Thief is a lowly poor street urchin – a born criminal.

  ‘Do you admit that you committed this crime on a Sunday? On the day on which the Good Lord our saviour Jesus Christ in heaven tells us that man must worship and rest?’

  The Thief speaks up. ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Eh heh!’ says the Prosecutor. ‘There is no rest for thieves, even on a Sunday, eh?’

  The crowd laughs and jeers and it is kind of funny and if this teaches the silly little thing a lesson never to steal again then maybe others will be spared the same fate as me and so I find myself laughing. Then I hear myself in my own ears. I am snorting and I become ashamed and so I stop. I am still annoyed at the Thief but I am starting to wonder why he has to be so small and why his voice is so squeaky and quiet.

  The boy does not respond to the Good Samaritan’s question so the big man shoves him and he falls and once he is down something is unloosed in the crowd; a certain permission is given and they set upon him.

  The boy tries to get up and a young man pushes him down and when he tries again another pushes him back down again and then someone slaps him and I am no longer laughing and the thrill of being vindicated feels like bile pushing against the back of my throat and I bend over and try to steady myself. It would be so easy for someone to hurt him under their rubber sandals. It would be easy for them to smush him as though he were really only a meaningless mosquito and he is not that, he is a boy, a very little one. I begin to panic and say ‘Stop’ but no one is listening. I waited too long to say something and now it’s too late: they are about to tear him apart.

  I turn to look for help because the Good Samaritan seems to have lost control of the situation and I see Patience. She peers at me from under her glasses and smiles worriedly. ‘Are you okay?’ she asks and because the presence of someone who knows me in a situation of stress always makes me cry, I begin to cry.

  The Samaritan notices my distress and calls the crowd to order.

  ‘Stop,’ he says to them all, and they listen because he is a man and speaks in a manly voice. He turns to me. ‘Are you okay, Young Madam?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answer, trying to look calm and collected in the hopes that this might make things easier for the Thief. ‘Yes, but I think he has learnt his lesson. Please let him go now.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks, turning back to the boy.

  I nod.

  ‘Okay, but these guys must be punished otherwise they will never learn. You can’t be too easy. It doesn’t help – even them in their own hearts they know this.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say.

  ‘Okay, okay. Now, you boy, you must apologise to her.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says the boy, cowering and crying and looking like he wishes he had never seen my shiny black bike or my gleaming brown skin.

  He doesn’t mean it. He is saying it because he has been caught and because he has been forced to, but he hates me. It cannot have escaped his attention that the Good Samaritan called me madam. I am indeed a small madam because I am dressed like a junior madam, wearing shorts I bought at Zellers last summer and a T-shirt from Le Chateau that is not fancy but looks as though it was Made in Canada. I cannot pretend to be anything else with my well-oiled legs and my expensive but now dusty bicycle. All of this gave me away as a small madam to the Thief long before the Good Samaritan intervened.

  He stares at me with naked rage. He is sorry that I am rich and that he is poor and he is not moved by my tears or my vulnerability.

  This shocks me and then it irks me. How dare he? He stole from me! I shoot him back the hatred he has just thrown at me and the hairs on my back bristle. How dare he look at me like that when he is the one who owes me a clean apology?

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say, but I am shaken. There is nothing that can be done about his hatred because he is right. People like me own the world and it is all an accident of birth and circumstance. It is all pure dumb luck. Why shouldn’t he be outraged?

  The looks have been exchanged and the Sorry has been issued and it is time for this trial to come to an end. Patience says, in a soft voice as though she too is afraid of the Thief and his burning eyes, ‘Let’s get out of here. Take your bike, we go.’

  I am relieved to have someone telling me what to do and I wonder – without sentiment, because the reality of his life is too disturbing for crocodile tears and our exchange has forced me to snap out of my pretensions – what is going to happen to the Thief once we go. The crowd still looks intent on teaching him a lesson.

  Now that he has forced an apology, the Good Samaritan is going in for the kill, showing the court how heinous this crime really is. He asks the suspect a few pointed questions.

  ‘This is what you do to foreigners? You do this to people who are in our country as our guests? Instead of hospitality you take from her? What is she supposed to think about us?’

  He has figured out from my broken Swahili and my polished accent that I am not Kenyan so I have given him fuel to add to the fire.

  ‘It’s fine, sir,’ I say to him. ‘He has said sorry. Thank you for helping me. I need to get home now, my parents will be worried.’

  Mention of my parents seems to remind the Good Samaritan – in all his prosecutorial splendour – that there is a world beyond the temporary scene that is playing out here. It breaks the spell. We are only children after all.

  ‘Of course,’ he says, suddenly gentle, perhaps remembering that he is a father himself. ‘Do you want a lift? I can put your bike into the back and take you home. Is this your friend?’

  We thank him and climb into the cab of the truck while a few of the guys who had been shoving the boy around help us by loading my bike into the pickup. Then, as he squeezes himself behind the steering wheel, the Samaritan issues a stern and final warning to the boy. Wagging his finger in his direction and casting his eye around the crowd he says, ‘Wewe! Ebu, you must watch yourself. Take your dirty body back to Mathare where you belong. If I ever see you on this street again – if anyone here ever sees you – you will see my cane. You will see it and you will feel its fire and wish that you had never walked on the streets of Loresho.’

  The boy nods and looks at the ground, his toe boring a hole into the ground. Then the Samaritan tells him to scram. ‘Go! Are you waiting for us to leave so that you can steal again? Go!’

  With that the Thief scrambles away. I see him disappear into the bush with his cracked wing whirring
uselessly. The strong one propels him and soon he is a speck among many on the dirt path and he is gone just as quickly as he had appeared next to me in the field.

  The Good Samaritan drives us chirpily back to my house, regaling us with stories about other perps he has caught. He is an amiable sort, inquiring about where we are from and what our families are doing in Kenya. When I tell him I am South African, he smiles with recognition. ‘Ah! That Nelson Mandela is a brave man. I hope those mzungus do not kill him there in that place.’

  He tells me that he knows a South African family. He supplies paper to the University of Nairobi and the administrator in the office of the vice chancellor is a South African woman who is married to a Kenyan. ‘Beautiful lady,’ he says, ‘very, very beautiful because you people you have that brown colour. Like us Kikuyus. Not too dark like the Luos.’

  Patience prods me in the thigh and I give her a gentle push with my elbow: file under To Be Discussed.

  When we get home the Good Samaritan helps us to offload the bike. He comes in to meet Mummy and Baba. He comes in to be thanked. He accepts the Tusker and swaps jokes with Baba. They talk about Kenya’s economy. They stay away from politics. He is glowing with the satisfaction of having been of use. This has been a good day and he is a good man. He has helped somebody’s child, and he has taught a lesson to a criminal. Justice has been done.

  Mummy cleans my palms with disinfectant, picking out tiny pieces of stone. She looks at my ankle. Keep it dry, she says, otherwise it won’t heal. She clucks and coos and I feel like I am nine years old again. She is triumphant, pleased that I emerged from the battle victorious and with my bike back, happy that the criminal was given a taste of mob justice, and that I kept my wits about me.

  In the weeks that follow Mummy and Baba repeat the story to anyone who will listen. They delight in the retelling of it: the growling crowd, the Good Samaritan. It is a quintessentially African story and having just arrived from Canada they relish its contours and hold onto what its outcomes say about the choice they have made to bring us back. ‘We made the right choice,’ the story says. ‘Here there is life and joy even if it is set against a backdrop of misery. This is Africa.’

  Often, they call on me, asking me to come and tell the story properly. Families are nothing without the stories they tell.

  ‘Sonke!’ Mummy will call out. ‘Come and tell Aunty and Uncle the story of the bike.’ And I will leave my playmates and come to the sitting room to tell the story. I will add my voice and take the stage, embellishing and honing and hamming it up until each character is filled out. The biggest laughs come when I describe the Good Samaritan and his belly. There are always gleeful chuckles when I describe the tiny old lady with the big voice. In the story’s retelling it was she who called the mob, not me. I always tell them that she shouted ‘Mwizi!’ before I did. She was the one who cast the first stone.

  I say nothing about the look that passed between us. I don’t tell them that he judged me and did not ask for forgiveness because none was needed. I don’t say that in his eyes I could see that I was pathetic, and silly for blubbering when I had only fallen on my well-padded rear while he – a mere boy of twelve or so – had been chased by a car and beaten about the head and had probably endured more in the eight hours since waking than I could imagine with my Canadian accent and my Canadian bike. How could I tell them that he looked at me as if to say, ‘Maybe another time we will meet and you won’t get off so lightly’?

  None of this could be relayed in the stories I was called upon to tell. No matter how many times I stood to re-enact the stealing of the bike I could never say that he made no apologies for himself or that he blamed me for being a certain kind of girl and occupying the world with a certain kind of obliviousness that was not acceptable. I could not tell anyone he wasn’t just a thief, though I wanted him to be. He was an exploited urchin, a fully human little monster waiting to grow into something impossible to control and even harder to kill than the cockroach we insisted he was. He was Kenya’s future: desperate and poor and needlessly malnourished.

  I never include the most important part of the story, which is that he was the first person who didn’t pretend. He stole my bike and he wasn’t sorry because he understood he had just as much right to happiness as I did.

  The return to South Africa

  In February 1990, Nelson Mandela is freed. I am sixteen years old, and I am staying with Uncle Stan and Aunty Angela in Nairobi. Dumi and Lindi are studying in America, and Mummy and Baba and the girls have moved to Ethiopia because Baba has yet another job that requires us to move.

  Uncle and Aunty and I sit in front of the TV as CNN teleports South Africa into the room. Nelson and Winnie Mandela are walking hand in hand. His fist is raised in the air and she is beautiful and they seem like strangers to each other. We are crying. Aunty keeps shaking her head in disbelief. Uncle keeps standing up and pretending he is not crying. I stay still, transfixed.

  I watch the scene on a loop, combing the background for details. I am looking at the sky and the faces in the crowd and what everyone is wearing. I am imagining the smell of the place and wondering whether it is cold. I am trying to imagine myself into the moment. I watch the old man who is walking slowly and stiffly. This is not the Mandela of the T-shirts. This man is so lean; so old. He is relying on his wife more than he ought to. I watch and I watch and I watch, as though somehow the screen might suck me in.

  Baba is cagey about going back. He wants to be sure that the unbanning of all political organisations is real, that this is not a trap. But it will be safe for me: I am a child who has never been linked to any terrorist activity and I have a foreign passport. Uncle Stan is coming back as an academic and it is different for him too. He is offered a job at the University of Natal. He accepts and in December that year as the Sangweni family boards a flight to Johannesburg I am with them. We are headed home.

  * * *

  Jan Smuts Airport is bathed in a dirty fluorescent light, the kind that makes even perfect skin look pitted. The ceilings are low and there is too much brown brick. The airport is a fascist fortress, designed to withstand attack. The interlocking buildings all have small windows – air holes rather than features really. Jan Smuts is modern if you consider the 1970s modern. I do not.

  Our passports are stamped by a row of stern-looking immigration officials who ask what we are doing here. Each of them seems to have a moustache and I have an urge to giggle, but I sense this would irritate them. I say I am here to visit family and they ask no further questions. Mandela has guaranteed us safe entry into South Africa, even though apartheid is still alive. They do not smile or welcome us but they let us in.

  Outside, my cousins Slumko and Mandisa are waiting. Slumko is the glamorous big brother fifteen years older than me so already a grown man. Mandi is his excitable younger sister, only five years my senior, which is old enough to be far cooler. They grew up in neighbouring Swaziland so they are already connected to what is happening ‘inside’.

  Slumko studied in America and moved to Johannesburg a few weeks before Mandela was released. He is massive – two metres tall – and good-looking, and everywhere we go people look at him as though he is a superstar. The white women’s eyes linger the longest. When you meet their gaze and smile because you have noticed them noticing him, they seem surprised at themselves, and embarrassed.

  Mandi still lives in Swaziland but she is in Joburg a lot because that is where all the action is, and her personality is too big for sleepy Swaziland. We hear her high-pitched squealing before we see her face. She too is long and lean and, like her brother, she turns heads. She preens and purrs and dresses so that any woman within ten metres walks in her shadow. In the week-long sojourn, Lindi and I will be pale grey egrets to her peacock hues.

  But now we hug noisily and dramatically. This is our first trip home and we sense that our actions will be scrutinised. We are on a stage, unsure exactly who will be watching but knowing nonetheless that we will draw attenti
on. We want to be worthy of the surveillance.

  We don’t all fit into Slumko’s sleek German car so we split up. Lindi and Dumi and I take the shuttle to the Airport Holiday Inn while Uncle and Aunty get into Slumko’s car. We are only in Joburg for a night. In the morning we will head off to Pietermaritzburg. We are in South Africa to begin the process of settling Uncle at the University of Natal and have combined this with the business of meeting our family members for the first time.

  Uncle and Aunty go to sleep. They are tired and want to stay in, so they release us. Go and see Joburg, they say, and we do. We have only seen the city through Brenda Fassie videos smuggled out by comrades. In all her songs Brenda is glamorous in a way that makes her seem beautiful even though she is not. In the videos, her city looks big and fast and so shiny it cannot possibly be real. I have never seen an African city whose buildings are so heavily concentrated.

  Slumko says he knows exactly where to take us so we turn up the music and ease into the darkness and then hit the highway in search of trouble.

  Hillbrow is awash with neon and urine and when I roll the windows down there is the faint smell of vomit. Hillbrow is not yet seedy, though it is slouching towards disrepute; its dodginess is hidden around the corner, just out of view. Cars crawl along Kotze Street, flanked by long-limbed black girls who’ve come in search of fresh starts. Many of them are jittery. Between the police and the coke it is hard for them to stay still. Paunchy white men leer – here to satisfy a hunger apartheid’s laws cannot sate.

  We end up at a café where everyone looks chic and is sitting on Parisian-style sidewalk chairs. It is busy inside so we sit outside in the warm evening. The city of gold glitters around us like a madam’s box of jewels. Somewhere someone is smoking weed and the smell of it eases us somehow and our laughter is more pronounced, our sense of our own bodies grows, our smiles are punctuation marks, our sighs languorous and revelatory. This country is already ours and we know it so we are basking in one of those moments kissed by the gods: it sparkles and shines and so do we. We are young and freedom is in front of us and heartbreak and pain are yesterday’s heroes.