Always Another Country

by Sisonke Msimang

  Mummy gets into her car and drives away. She drives steadily and slowly but she drives away, knowing she will never return. The day is bright and the winter is over. She goes to school and fetches her girls. She is there when we come out of the building. She stands there and smiles as though she is a Canadian mom with time on her hands and cookies in the oven at home and we are surprised as she encircles us with her arms and then we are surprised again when she says, ‘Let’s go camping,’ and we giggle in the back seat all the way there.

  Once we are in the camping grounds we shout instructions to each other, trying to pitch the tent and when the heavens open up and the rain pours down on us we laugh and are happier still when she says, ‘Let’s go home, girls.’

  The following week the office calls and she says, ‘No, I will not consider it. I am not coming back.’

  She looks for another job and in the interview the head of HR is surprised when she says in her soft and tired voice, ‘I left because my dignity is not for sale,’ and something about the way she says it makes that company offer her the job.

  * * *

  When the story is over Mummy and I sit with the television light flickering on our faces. I wish I knew this about Mummy when I was in college and heartbroken and looking for answers about racism and fortitude. I think about how often I turned to the words of poets and writers and great thinkers; of the times I ran to the library with its heaving shelves full of books in Minnesota, when all along Mummy has been here.

  I see clearly for the first time how much I have taken her for granted, how much I have focused on Baba because he was the freedom fighter and she has always just been our mother – strong and determined but, in my mind at least, apolitical. I see what a mistake it has been to think that, just because she doesn’t talk about racism, she has not felt its lash and its sting. I regret this immediately and recognise it as a function of my adoration of Baba. I have loved her, but it has never occurred to me that she ought to be an object of my admiration – a hero just like Gogo Lindi.

  I am embarrassed suddenly, even as my chest swells with pride. Like most children, I have only seen my mother as I needed to see her, not as she has always been. I am lucky, though – she has had the grace to wait, to find the perfect moment in which to turn my face towards her, and then to take the time to whisper, ‘Listen, my girl, and look at me: this is who I really am.’

  New blacks, old whites

  I have not lived in the same house as my parents for almost six years so it is difficult to get used to them again. Mummy and Baba are awfully busy – more than they ever were when we were growing up. Like everyone else of their age and social class, they are hard at work at nation building. Their skills are in demand and now that they are home they want to make up for lost time.

  Baba is busy being a First Black CEO and First Black Director General and Mummy is busy making her mark in the community of returnees who are reshaping the business and cultural life of the new South Africa. She is the First Black Woman to Open an African Restaurant, then she becomes the First Black Woman Table Grape Farmer, then she is named Woman of the Year in this Category and Runner-Up in Entrepreneurship in that Section.

  Our house is just a stone’s throw away from Africa’s largest mall. We have no black neighbours. It is only us – these curious black people who seemed unafraid and aloof. When we host braais or social events we are careful not to make too much noise. We presume our neighbours are racist, and that they think black people don’t know how to behave in the suburbs. Mummy’s strategy is to give them as little opportunity to gossip or complain as possible. She always sends Baba around to each of their houses with a note for their letterbox: ‘Dear Neighbour, we are having a small gathering on Saturday. We hope we do not disturb you.’ Mummy and Baba are steeped in respectability. My sojourn in America has taught me not to care less – I roll my eyes at their manners.

  ‘Seriously Mummy, are we going to go out of our way to show them how civilised we are? Have they ever given you a note like that? No, they just have their things and they don’t even worry about us.’

  She always responds calmly. Mummy knows not to get her blood pressure up over her radical daughter’s politics.

  ‘You and your militant politics. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You can be as rude as you like when you own a house. Until then, this is my house, my girl.’

  Zeng and I smirk obnoxiously and saunter off because we have our own ways of dealing with the old whites in the new South Africa.

  Zeng is another sort of first black. Her generation is an experiment. Her friends reflect the changing face of the country. There is one set who – like us – grew up in exile in Lesotho and Zambia and Uganda and Sweden and Russia and the UK and Canada and America and all sorts of other places. They returned as teenagers in the early 1990s and tried to integrate into South African schools.

  All of them were South African in their hearts but they had not encountered South Africa until after some pretty fundamental parts of their identities had been formed. So, they became an instant community, made of teenagers we’d known as kids in Lusaka or whose family names we had heard all our lives, whose experiences mirrored ours, but whom we had never met.

  She has another set of friends who grew up inside the country and whose parents are doctors and lawyers and professionals who managed to become part of the middle class as the Group Areas Act that kept blacks and whites apart started to be relaxed in certain places. Some of them are the children of activists who never left the country. Their parents were involved in the United Democratic Front. These ones have crazy stories; stories of police raids and political uncertainty.

  Their parents had spent months in detention or weeks running from police. These children had attended too many vigils and stood by too many corpses. They knew all the freedom songs and could speak five African languages and the Queen’s English so, while they are different from Zeng, they understand what it is like to belong to a movement that is also a family. The liberation struggle is as much in their blood as it is in ours.

  Then there are others: the friends Zeng never really made, the ones whose parents aren’t anyone special. These are the black kids who are bussed in to the suburbs from Atteridgeville township or Mamelodi to attend the high school down the street from our house where Zeng is initially enrolled in school. These kids can’t relate to Zeng and she can’t relate to them. They think she is stuck up because her English is perfect and her isiZulu is faltering and her seSotho is non-existent. They think she is stuck up because she lives in a house down the street and doesn’t need to wake up at the crack of dawn to catch a bus to be around white children who scorn them and laugh at their hair and their noses and the way they speak.

  Like Zeng, they also grew up in the dying days of apartheid. Unlike Zeng, they do not live in middle-class comfort. Stray dogs roam the streets and there are shacks and overcrowded schools in their communities. Nelson Mandela may be sleeping on fine sheets and soft pillows in Pretoria, but life has not changed much for them yet. They know enough about discrimination to have grown thick skins. They are tough kids – they seem like they know how to survive.

  So in spite of her big mouth sometimes Zeng doesn’t have any comebacks for their barbs at school when they start to call her a coconut. She shrugs and acts like she doesn’t care. She sticks to herself and for the first time at school she doesn’t really know where she fits in. The white kids can’t relate to or claim her and the black ones regard her with scepticism.

  Mummy and Baba eventually pull her out of the school down the road when she is so unhappy she doesn’t want to go to school any more. In addition to the friction with other students, there is constant harassment by teachers who are not happy with how the black girls dress, with the way they wear their hair, with their ‘hygiene’. It’s like low-grade warfare.

  Before I came back from America Zeng was often alone in the house. Mummy was as organised as ever so there was food in the house
, but there was little else in terms of structure or attention. When I come back, I notice that, even when they are home, Mummy and Baba are often preoccupied – not even with each other’s lives any more but with their individual pursuits.

  I don’t begrudge Mummy this: she supported Baba her whole adult life and was busy raising us so it’s about time she turns inwards to focus on herself. It means, though, that Zeng has been spending weeknights virtually alone because Mummy and Baba are always out. There is this state dinner or that meeting, or this person who has just returned from overseas.

  She is only fifteen so she is old enough to seem fairly self-­sufficient. Mummy and Baba assume she can take care of herself. She is the baby of the family, though, and she can’t. They let go of her too quickly.

  Mandla and I had already done our growing up by the time we came home. Zeng was still incomplete, only an adolescent. She bore the brunt of their busy-ness.

  In those early months when I am still at home, living under the same roof with them again, I can see it is hard for her to navigate that line between the freedom that comes with their preoccupation with the transition and their reconnecting with life in the new South Africa, and the quiet neglect it has wrought.

  We become close. Given the five-year gap between us she has always been a baby. She was only eleven when I left the house at sixteen and, although she was older and funnier every time I came home for holidays, I didn’t know her as well as I knew Mandla.

  Now, though, we spend a lot of time together. Mandla is still in the States, finishing her degree. Before I start my job, we borrow Mummy’s car and cruise around a lot, tooling around the suburbs. We often get thumbs-up signs from black people who have never seen black girls our age driving around in an almost-­new Toyota Corolla.

  One day we arrive at a small shopping centre near home and when we return to the parked car we find a small group of men in overalls gathered around the vehicle. They pepper us with questions. Where are you from, you children? They ask. We tell them. Our parents have just returned from exile, we say. They want to shake our hands. It is embarrassing to be celebrated for our good luck. We aren’t quite sure what to do with their kindness, with their blessings and best wishes for us. We have done nothing to earn it, except to hop into our mother’s car. We can’t say this, though. To those uncles and fathers gathered around the car with their blessings and their good wishes, our success is a reflection of the future they imagine for their children. We represent progress.

  Afterwards, Zeng and I drive in silence. We see, with our eyes wide open, how much we have taken for granted about our lives.

  There is a certain kind of innocence among black people – an innocence that will quickly be lost. In those early days, black people are bound together by a pride and a solidarity that underscores everything we have collectively been through. I don’t know it yet, but this feeling will eventually fade. A decade later it will all but disappear.

  In the future, a new and arrogant black will emerge. This new black will not be interested in the stories of the poor. This new black will see the uncles around my car as a shame and a stain, rather than as part of herself. And the uncles themselves will not trust the new black, so they will no longer look upon her with pride.

  But all of this is still some distance away. In these early years of innocence, older people still look at Zeng and me driving around Pretoria with a shine in their eyes and with their hearts bursting with pride and you can practically hear them say, ‘If you can win, my child, then I too have won.’

  I still think about Jason every day. I have gone from being broke in Oakland – not being able to afford bus fare – to being part of a new elite. I miss him. We speak on the phone a lot. I cry a lot still. But I know I am not going back. There is a new South Africa to build. Jason sidetracked me for a while but now I am back home and I can see the complexity of the task on hand. There is the politics, of course, and there is the economic reality. There is also something social, a rebuilding of the fabric of the society, that I find fascinating.

  Among whites, our middle-class status provokes a different set of responses. Unlike the black people who greet us with pride, whites are angry and resentful. We are the enemy. We represent everything whites in Pretoria fear they will lose with the end of apartheid.

  By the time Mandela died they all professed to love him, but, in these early years, immediately after the elections, they do not love him at all nor do all of them accept him as their president. They curse him. They throw his name in our faces and hurl him at us like a swear word in traffic.

  Once, as I am overtaking a white woman in my car on the road, she turns and spits his name at me in rage: ‘MANDELA!’ I have no idea what I have done to make her angry – but that doesn’t matter. I cackle in my car, alone, relishing her frustration, understanding that she is not angry with me – she is unhappy with the world that has changed without much warning right before her eyes.

  Zeng and I often find ourselves clashing with angry men in bakkies or embroiled in screaming matches with tight-faced women wearing shiny tracksuits. Often, the battles are fought in suburban sanctuaries – in malls close to home.

  More often than not, the drama takes place at our local supermarket. Zeng starts to call our weekly skirmishes the Pick n Pay Wars.

  The battles typically begin in the parking lot. Invariably, one of our white foes swoops in and steals a parking spot for which I have been patiently waiting. It happens so many times it stops being annoying and becomes a running joke. Even if there are plenty of free spaces, somehow the exact bay I want attracts the attention of the owner of a weathered yellow or blue bakkie. If I beat the driver to the spot there is fist-shaking and anger, sometimes a slammed door and a tantrum.

  If the other party wins, they shoot us a look of smouldering triumph and get out of their car in a way that demonstrates that their life has new purpose and meaning now. The scenes play themselves out endlessly. It is exhausting and sometimes, because the white righteousness is so powerfully exhibited, it is easy to forget apartheid was a crime against black people. You might find yourself thinking whites were the historical victims of a system of injustice.

  * * *

  On the day the permed blonde woman bumps into me in Pick n Pay, I am ready for war. She is talking to her daughter and not paying attention. She bumps into my trolley by mistake. No big deal. I look at her, waiting for an apology though I know none will be forthcoming. That day, knowing that she is not sorry – and is unlikely to say sorry – makes me angrier than usual.

  If this were a normal society she would simply have said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and moved on. But we are not living in a normal society. So, instead of saying sorry, she sneers and huffs and tells me to get out of her way. Rudely.

  I am livid and, of course, amply prepared to fight this fight. I am tired of the endless entitlements and the petty racism that seem designed to make me feel apologetic for taking up any space at all, that make me feel as though I am trespassing when I simply want to get on with the mundane chores to which all members of society are entitled. Something springs loose.

  Instead of manoeuvring around her, I stand my ground. I say, ‘I will get out of your way when you apologise. You bumped into me.’

  It seems she has also been waiting for this moment, for this opportunity to tell off one of these new blacks.

  She responds in Afrikaans – a language of which I have absolutely no knowledge and which I have been politically educated to despise. Growing up, Afrikaans was a symbol of apartheid and its place in my consciousness has been cemented by the stories of all the uncles and aunties from the 1976 uprisings who left South Africa in the wake of attempts to force Afrikaans to be the official medium of instruction for black children.

  I cut her off. ‘Speak in English! I don’t understand you.’

  My voice is too loud – because her tone had been unacceptable. I am not Mandela.

  She is startled by the intensity of my response.
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  ‘What?’ she says.

  I repeat myself and, for good measure, I add, ‘This is our country now. You must leave if you don’t like black people!’

  She rams her trolley into mine, only this time she does it on purpose. This time I am also ready so I ram mine into hers. She rams back and I ram again and so it goes back and forth. We are like lunatics attacking one another with suburban weaponry.

  Finally Zeng shouts, ‘Sonke! Stop.’

  It breaks the spell and I back off. I stand there heaving and glaring at my opponent, unsure of what to do next. Then Zeng – in her succinct and sarcastic voice – says, ‘She’s just nonsense babes, not even worth it.’

  The Permed One is outraged. What sort of a black person spoke like this? ‘That is enough!’ She starts looking around because she wants to call for the manager. Zeng will have none of it.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Zeng says, unhurriedly. ‘This is ridiculous.’

  ‘Stay right there,’ she shouts. ‘You wait. I’m going to complain on you.’

  Zeng can’t resist. She stops and turns.

  ‘What you mean to say, is that you want to file a complaint against her. A-G-A-I-N-S-T.’ She spells it out. ‘Learn to speak English, lady. Seriously.’

  We leave then. The two of us walk through the shop in blazing insolence, performing our discontent. Our slow pace signals our superiority. We are not afraid. We refuse to run. We will not be chased in our own country – not in a free South Africa.