Always Another Country

by Sisonke Msimang

  Mkhulu’s story continues, taking turns here and there. Remembering how miserable the weather seemed that first winter that his son was gone. He speaks about how his first wife – my father’s mother – was so distressed that she came all the way from her village to suggest that they go to Johannesburg to find him. She was convinced that her son had been waylaid by a gang and abducted. ‘It was a fanciful theory,’ he says now in his polished English. Something about the way he speaks answers questions about my father that I did not know I had.

  He continues, getting comfortable on the couch as he lists the milestones that marked the years; the times when they despaired and moments in which they were certain he would soon be home. Then after a decade had passed – the first of three – Du Toit showed up for his weekly visit with a file full of photos. He spread them in front of Mkhulu and said, ‘We’ve found him and it is confirmed. Your son is a terrorist. There he is.’

  Mkhulu looked at the photos and indeed there he was, all six foot five of him getting out of the back of a plane. Another picture shows him walking on a crude runway next to Denis Goldberg. He was thin and young. I cannot imagine this because I have never seen a photo of my father in his childhood or in his youth. Growing up in exile, you have to imagine what your parents looked like. There is no space for mementos when you are running. It is as though he did not exist until he became my father. While there are lots of pictures of Mama in high school, Baba only appears in our family photo albums when we are born, and even then, he is usually behind the camera.

  Mkhulu was ecstatic: this was the first sign of life he’d had since his son’s disappearance. But he knew better than to confirm his son’s identity. So he held his joy in and he shook his head. Slowly, and without a hint of recognition, he said, ‘I have no idea who that person is.’

  His heart was pounding and his mind was bursting with questions. Finally he had news that his boy was alive. But he stayed ramrod straight. His face betrayed nothing.

  I cry now because Mkhulu has motioned for my baby uncle to get the photo. There he is, looking out at me from the past. It never crossed my mind that they took out his pictures and looked at them. That they cried when they thought about him and prayed for him to be safe. I was too busy wondering about them and mourning their absence in my life.

  Mkhulu pats my hand, just as a grandfather should, and he gives me a bit of time to recover. He passes the photo around – hands it over to Dumi who is sitting on the couch. And Dumi passes it over to Lindi and they both exclaim excitedly and there is much talk about how different he looks now, about how young he was then. I am profoundly sad but Mkhulu is moving on. He has another story to tell and his eyes are twinkling and his cheeks are rounding out into a smile and he is already launching into it.

  After three hours, the old man’s energy is flagging. He needs to rest but he has made arrangements for me to sleep in Edendale, with some relatives. I freeze. The afternoon has been wonderful but they are all strangers. I will not be parted from Uncle Stan and Aunty Angie and from Lindi and Dumi. They are my family – more so than the kind-faced strangers I am told are my aunt and uncle.

  I look at Aunty Angela with desperation. I will cry soon if this situation is not resolved. What will I say to them in their house tonight over dinner? How will I make sense of it all without Lindi and Dumi? Without Aunty Angela to make the connections for me – to remind me that this is Mkhulu’s third wife – that he divorced Gogo Sonke and then married Mam’ So and So and then after that they also separated, then there was an illicit child no one knew about and so after that matter was resolved then he married again. This one – the wife who buzzed around us sweetly – is the latest and it seems she is good for him.

  Aunty intervenes on my behalf. She says sweetly, in her quiet voice, ‘We have a long drive tomorrow and Sonke needs to stay with us, otherwise we will be disorganised in the morning.’ I nod appreciatively and exhale. I blink back my tears, disappointed in myself for not being able to just immerse myself, but so grateful to have avoided being among strangers I am supposed to love.

  We file out of the living room and stand on the veranda looking back out onto the street. Mkhulu is behind me, looking over my shoulder at the hills. They are purplish and orange in the fading light. I want to lean back as I might if it were Baba standing behind me, but I don’t. I am not sure if he is strong enough to bear my weight, and I am still unsure of how to be with him. I do not yet understand the ways of my country and when to move closer and when to stand back. I am still awkward, the daughter who has been too long estranged.

  We are all still and quiet. We are full of the events of the afternoon. Then Mkhulu breaks the silence.

  ‘The last time I saw your father,’ he says, ‘he was on that veranda, with his back to me. He was standing there, exactly as you are now and he was about your age.’

  The tears are back and I don’t know what I am feeling. I experience a moment of panic and imagine something awful happening to Baba. He has been waiting for clearance and to be sure that he will not be arrested when he arrives in the country. He plans on coming in May – five long months from now. What if he never makes it home?

  Mkhulu consoles me. He is gentle and elegant in a way that is distinct to his generation and his era. He puts his hand on my shoulder and whispers in my ear.

  ‘Don’t cry for me mtanam’. In the final analysis it has all turned out rather well.’

  It is generous of him to think that I am crying for him. In fact, with the self-indulgence of the young, I am crying mostly for myself. I am mourning my ignorance and my losses. I am grieving the grandparents and uncles and aunts I never got to know. I am crying because I am overwhelmed by all that has been lost and grateful that all has not been lost. I am frightened that we will never have enough time to make it right and that if we are given the time we need we still might squander it. I am crying, I suppose, because finally, I am home.

  * * *

  The trip lasts three weeks. We go to the rural homestead where Baba and Uncle Stan were raised, to Jobstown, outside Newcastle. We are greeted like royalty. We eat plenty of sheep and a great many plates of tripe. We are stuffed with mqushu and dombolo and amasi. We hear stories about the two of them growing up – about how Uncle Stan memorised the dictionary and how Baba’s grandfather owned the dipping station for the cattle. I see, for the first time, where Baba was formed, where he gets his sense of pride and his confidence. The struggle wasn’t the crucible in which he was formed. Baba’s self-belief was forged among these people who have never doubted their own abilities, never questioned their fortitude and intelligence, nor their determination and ability to plant and grow vegetables, and to rear animals and fence land and water it. I find myself among rural folk – which is new because I have been raised as a distinctly urban child – and I realise how much I have not known about what it means to be from the places on our continent that are wide open and large. It has never fully occurred to me that there are lives unfolding in villages that are pulsing with ambition and energy and passion, just like those in cities. I giggle with my cousins and listen to my aunties and chastise myself for believing for even a minute that I might be bored; that I might be too worldly to find connections here. My cousins are not worldly at all, but they are funny and observant and smart. They are also far more grounded, comfortable in who they are and where they are from, because it is all they have ever known and it has been – in spite of the world outside – a good place to them. My family is not wealthy but it is comfortable. The comfort derives from the fact that, like a few other local families, we never lost our land. This – I will find out in the decades to come – has made all the difference to who we are and what we are able to become.

  At the end of the trip we fly away – back to school in America for Dumi and Lindi and back to Nairobi for Aunty Angela and me. We leave Uncle Stan in Natal. Over the next while, as I finish high school, Aunty will begin to pack up life in Kenya, and then she will join him for a new
start back in South Africa. Years of exile are finally ending for them. Similarly, Lindi and Dumi are now beginning to make plans for moving home after their degrees are finished – to a South Africa they have only just visited for the first time. The rest of my family are all in Addis Ababa. Mummy and Baba haven’t committed to moving back. Baba hasn’t even gone to visit yet. They are waiting to see whether the transition is reversible.

  * * *

  I have a few months left of high school and then I will be off to university and so for me the decision is about whether I apply to study in South Africa, or whether I set my sights on America or Canada where I have citizenship and may, therefore, be able to access better financial aid packages.

  I am a good student. I excel in English and History and Social Studies. I love French. I take accelerated classes. I navigate the International Baccalaureate programme without involving my parents or asking their advice on this or that; and they expect the same when it comes to university. They don’t know the ins and outs of applying to university – they simply expect I will be admitted to a good one.

  I sit with the guidance counsellor at school. We talk about the costs and financial aid and scholarships. While South Africa is finally within reach for me, it is also a big unknown. I look at Rhodes University’s journalism programme and I am tempted to apply. I phone South Africa and speak to someone in an office somewhere in Grahamstown. She is neither helpful nor nice. She finds my story confusing. Are you Kenyan? she asks. No, I explain, I am an exile, I just live in Kenya. So your high school exam will be Kenyan? she asks. No, I explain, I have done the International Baccalaureate. She doesn’t know how to deal with me. We go around in circles. I am transferred to someone else. The questions begin again.

  I give up. The American universities to which I have applied are all so much easier. They have either accepted or declined and they have indicated whether they have scholarships available. One of them has offered me a particularly good deal: Macalester College.

  I call Mummy in Addis. What should I do? ‘You are going to America,’ she says firmly and quietly. ‘There is no option. South Africa will be waiting for you when you finish.’

  While no one is surprised at the achievement, there is great excitement. Macalester is in St Paul, which is next to Minneapolis. Together the two cities are called the Twin Cities. When Gogo Lindi hears that I have been accepted at a college in the Twin Cities, she picks up the phone and rings me, all the way from Washington DC. It’s a few weeks before my high school graduation, and about two months before my departure.

  Gogo calls early, before school, so that she can be sure to catch me. Aunt Angela passes me the phone with a hurried smile. ‘It’s your Gogo Lindi,’ she says. ‘Don’t stay on the phone too long or you’ll miss the bus.’

  Gogo is calling to congratulate me on my university acceptance. The adults in the family expect us to be high achievers and when our hard work pays off appropriate amounts of praise are lavished upon us. It is my turn now but before me there was Lindi who attended a prestigious hotel school and Dumi who left for Florida two years ago where he is learning how to be a pilot in a place called Boca Raton. A year after me, Mandla will crack the Ivy League and attend Cornell and she too will get a call from Gogo, confirming her pride and pleasure.

  Over the years Gogo has only become more like herself so that now her every word is predictable, her every tone and inflection mimic-worthy. She has matured into a genuine all-star diva. Nothing she said lacks accent or ceremony. Her turbans have grown more immense and complex by the year and the machinations required to produce each outfit have become more labyrinthine. Her commitment to the continent as a whole and her exposure to its many splendours allow her to order the finest Ankara fabric from Nigeria, and use the most intricate lace to overlay her dresses. Her boubous are made of the best Senegalese cotton, stitched with elaborate brocades by a tailor who lives in Maryland, or sent from friends in Dakar and Cotonou.

  Gogo’s yellow skin glows radiantly and her eyebrows are always arched to perfection. I can’t see her but I am picturing her as I hear her voice on the line, purring her pride. She cannot believe, she says, that I am following in her footsteps. She insists that I must acquaint myself with the University of Minnesota campus and says that I must reach out to dear friends who have been comrades in arms: Vusimusi and Nothando Zulu.

  There are black South Africans in Minnesota? I exclaim. No. She clarifies: ‘They had different names when I met them, but they needed proper African names and it was the era to do that sort of thing so we did. We abandoned those slave names and created something new.’

  I am half-smiling at my madcap revolutionary Gogo. Since our time in Lusaka she has moved from country to country for the ANC. She is now the Chief Representative of the African National Congress in America – one of our most important diplomats. Her weeks are a blur of speaking engagements and appointments. She meets with people like Charlayne Hunter-Gault and lunches with Maya Angelou and she holds court with Jesse Jackson and Randall Jackson who she says are not related although both are dashing men of a certain age. She dines with senators from states with names that are not English and which remind me that America itself is older than the four hundred years it pretends to be. South Africa is not quite free yet but we are close and Gogo behaves accordingly. She does all her coordinating and delegating and cajoling and impressing from a well-appointed townhouse just off 16th Street and U Street.

  In a few years’ time she will be conferred with the official status of ambassador by our first president, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. He will dispatch her to Malaysia to serve as the High Commissioner for the Republic of South Africa in 1994. But that is still to come and neither of us knows this so today on the phone she is still a freedom fighter of a sort. She is also a gracefully ageing woman who is calling to congratulate her favourite grandchild and tell her to look up old friends when she gets to America.

  She mentions Mahmoud El-Kati whom she worked with in her black and proud days. She thinks he is still living in Minnesota. ‘He will take you under his wing. You will find that he is a man of great wisdom, and a man who cares deeply, so very deeply, about his people.’

  Aunt Angela begins to flit around me now, worrying about the cost of the call, and wanting to say a few words to Gogo before we hang up. I am getting restless and really do need to go if I am going to catch the bus that picks me up at the top of the hill. At eighteen I have begun to endure her stories and recollections rather than revel in them the way I used to as a child and so I say, as delicately as I can, ‘Gogo, I’m going to be late to school.’

  ‘Okay dearest,’ she continues slowly as though my rush and her pace of speech have nothing to do with each other.

  ‘Now in terms of Mahmoud, I am not sure where he is based these days. I haven’t spoken to him in a long time, so I will need to try to trace him. I think he is attached to the university. I will find him. It’s wonderful to know that you will be in his keep and under his wing. And you will soar my darling Sisonke, you will soar as you always have.’

  This is classic Gogo, always the drama and the poetic flourish and always at her own speed. I smile and hand the phone over to Aunty with a glint in my eye. We will have a good giggle afterwards and I will tell her about Gogo’s parting flourish: ‘Sooooaaarr!’ I will intone and we will sip our afternoon tea and cackle about Gogo Lindi whom Uncle Stan refers to as The Eighth Wonder of the World.

  Soon enough it is time to leave. College awaits. I fly to Addis to spend a few weeks with Mummy and Baba and Mandla and Zeng then I head off to America. Another country.

  College Girl

  My studies begin in what they call the fall semester of 1992. It is late summer when I arrive, just before autumn splashes her reds and yellows and oranges across the trees and sends in the wind to blow the leaves so they fall in delicate pirouettes and lie in drying heaps. Everything is green – the freshly mowed lawns and the trees along the sides of the streets have an unnatura
l look to them, a Technicolor movie rather than real life.

  The airport in Minnesota is clean and new and expensive – nothing like the yellowing-brown Jomo Kenyatta International Airport with its grey floors and stale air. At the carousel I am met by a young man holding a sign with my name on it. He is a chipper American student not unlike many I will meet in the next few years. Once my luggage arrives he pulls my bag behind him and begins to talk. He keeps talking until we reach a grey minivan that has the college logo on the side. He keeps at it, talking the whole drive into the city. The sheer friendliness of him overwhelms me. I feel like an allergy-prone child who has been accosted by a friendly Labrador.

  He speaks to me in a slightly loud and slow way and after a few attempts to engage him in a way that demonstrates my fluency in English, I stop trying because it is apparent that his idea of me isn’t contingent on the reality of who I am. Still, he is well-meaning in a way that makes me feel sympathetic towards him, in spite of my irritation.

  I look out of the window and occasionally, when his tone demands it, I feign interest. I have been brought up to keep my thoughts to myself until I can trust that the person to whom I am speaking is interested in what I have to say. Mummy views saying too much too soon as uncouth: the product of bad upbringing. My silence is no deterrent, however. My guide talks about everything from the weather to sports. He points out landmarks and tells me uninteresting ‘facts’ about the Twin Cities. I try to keep my eyes open, fighting sleep.

  After about twenty minutes in the air-conditioned stillness of the car we pull up to a sidewalk a few metres behind the dormitory where I will live for my first American year. He issues a set of carefully worded instructions about campus security, the laundry room and places to ‘grab a coffee’, and gives me a ‘coupla tips’ on taking the bus, but it is all too much information to process. I’m tired.