Always Another Country

by Sisonke Msimang

  We begin to wear T-shirts that proclaim ‘HIV Positive’. We are all HIV-positive as an act of solidarity, as a statement about justice.

  Finally, when the nation is on its knees, when the ANC has been torn apart by the obstinacy of a president who is increasingly aloof and disdainful; after our rulers have spent far too long squabbling among themselves, and the trust they once had is beginning to fray; when Mbeki has been begged and begged to stop; after there have been marches and sit-ins and die-ins; after South Africa has become a virtual pariah and media around the world have puzzled about the land of Mandela and its strange new president – it is only after all this, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of black people, when the government itself has been sued for people living with the virus to be given the medicines that will ease their suffering, the government begins to supply ARVs.

  The activists win. The media wins. The state is forced to pay for drugs to prevent HIV transmission in pregnancy and to purchase ARVs to prevent deaths among those already infected. The victory is significant.

  Mbeki never fully backs down – but the state is compelled to deliver and so it does. He remains a glowering presence in our politics.

  The ANC government concedes that it was reckless – that it should have acted earlier. But it is too late. By this time, I have stopped believing that the leaders of the ANC are somehow special. I should never have believed it in the first place; that sort of thinking is dangerous. But I did because I grew up in a magical bubble, in a time and place in which the worst excesses of the liberation struggle were invisible to me and the best of what we could be had been laid out in front of me, painted like a picture with words of strength and struggle and dangled before me by the uncles and aunties who danced in our living room.

  It has taken some time to see the truth, which is that the leaders of the ANC are no better and no worse than anyone else. It has taken the loss of needless lives for me finally to understand this. I find it hard to believe that the authors of the wretchedness that ruined a generation were the same magical comrades who made Lusaka feel like home, but I have little choice. Denial is a privilege we can’t afford.

  During that long and painful season of denial and paranoia, I begin to see that the pride of the ANC – the very thing that kept us strong in the long years before freedom – will be this country’s undoing.

  I know, as I watch this scene play out, that Mbeki and his acolytes are drunk on pride. And I know, too, from having watched President Kaunda on television in Zambia and having chased President Moi’s motorcade in Kenya, that it was the combination of power and pride that made these men so callous.

  The pain of ordinary people is less important than Mbeki’s need to be right. Mbeki is willing to sacrifice the country over his ego. In the end it is this, more than anything else, that makes me lose my religion.

  As a child I had adored them. I had soaked in their pride and basked in it and grown strong in it. As a young woman, finally home and trying to be something new and without burdens, I had discovered that they were not simply proud – they were excessively opinionated. I saw that what had felt like dignity in the dark days was actually haughtiness. They reeked of grandeur and it made me nauseous.

  It has been tempting, sometimes, for me to want to read into all this a sense of inevitability; a feeling that, no matter how courageous Africans have been, once they are in charge they succumb to corruption and paranoia. The truth is, of course, that Frederick Douglass was right:

  Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

  Our leaders do what they do because we allow it and we allow it because we remember the sins of the past and that past was awful. So we find ourselves trapped – the callousness of the present is excused by the horror of the past. Some people in South Africa want us to accept this. In the early years of our new dispensation – when democracy is still new and we are still naive and young – we refuse to accept this. We learn the most important rules for a healthy democracy. First you fight. Then you win. Repeat.

  Amakwerekwere

  Our friend Alain confesses that, until he met us, he had never been invited to a meal at the homes of any of his South African friends. We are sitting outside in the little grassy area set aside for Mandla’s use in the small townhouse complex where she lives. She bought the place when she got her first job, working for a parastatal in Sandton. Her neighbours are all young professionals – mainly white. None of them bother us. Even when there is a small get-together like this one, they are unperturbed.

  Until now, we have been relaxed and laughing. It is a perfect summer afternoon. Alain is an integral part of a group of friends we all loosely call The Guys. The Guys are from Congo and they have been regaling us with stories about their early days in South Africa; the talk has revolved around the ‘liberated’ women of South Africa, and their jealous boyfriends. We love these stories. Their descriptions of South Africa are like a Zouk version of Sting’s ‘Englishman in New York’. You could not find two more different groups of Africans than South Africans and Congolese.

  South Africans are totally uninterested in chic. The township aesthetic that is in fashion in the late 1990s and early 2000s includes wide-leg shortened pants, shiny Carvela shoes and striped casual shirts for men. The Guys can’t get their heads around the look. They wear linen shirts of the finest French fabric, and pressed jeans or Lacoste shirts and Italian moccasins.

  Like so many of the Congolese men I know, Alain – who has just devastated me with his statement – is lean and well groomed. He is also outrageously funny, and incredibly gracious. You want Alain in the room when you are having a party because he will talk to everyone and make them feel at home.

  I immediately understand the reason why no one has invited The Guys to their homes. I am hit by a wave of shame. I stand up and take my plate inside, pretending I want more food. I stand over the sink – out of sight for a moment – and brush away tears.

  The Guys are a brotherhood to match our sisterhood. It is impossible to be friends with only one of The Guys, just as it is impossible to be friends with only one of the Msimang sisters. We are all a package deal.

  Alain is in marketing. He works at Cadbury but his dreams are bigger than advertising accounts and marketing budgets. He is a genius – as he is fond of telling anyone who will listen. He manages to be a ladies’ man and a sweetheart all at once. When we first met I often wondered how he broke their hearts – if he just went quiet, or if they knew from the minute they met him how it would end.

  Willie is Alain’s brother. He is married to Simone and they have two beautiful daughters, Ntita and Taifa. Willie’s personality is so large we don’t need to see him a lot to feel that he is with us. He fills up any room. He’s a rooster – compact and self-assured. He specialises in a bit of this and a bit of that. He makes us all laugh, often until we are crying, with his stories about ending up in places he should not have been and surviving by the skin of his teeth.

  Paul is quiet and brooding. He rarely smiles but he has a big heart and Jean-Pierre (whom everyone calls JP) is a talented architect whose smile is beatific and who can moonwalk like Michael Jackson.

  The Guys arrived in South Africa just as the Mobutu regime was falling, in 1990. In those days they wore turned-up pink shirts and sharp shoes and expensive linen trousers. They have the flair of the famously flamboyant Les Sapeurs, but are too level-headed to plunge headlong into an obsession that has eaten at the pockets of so many of their country folk.

  They came to South Africa because the schools in Lubumbashi were closed. Zaire was on the verge of obsolescence, a relic of a bygone era that was replaced by a new country with old borders and habi
ts that would not die: Congo. The Guys made it out just in time. As they left, the country was becoming nothing more than a series of territories no longer connected by Mobutu’s strong hand. They came to South Africa in search of a future and found a country that seemed calm and ordinary, even as it was in the throes of political turmoil and uncertainty. South Africa was conflicted but stable.

  When they arrived, everything about the country was on the verge of being new. The Guys would marvel at the buildings and the roads and the sheer weight of South Africa’s history – the imprint white people and black labour have left here. Johannesburg was not just old, it had been built to last. It was there to stay.

  The boys enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand. Their parents were middle class and Congo was not yet in flames so they could afford the tuition. It was easier here than in Belgium or France – where so many Congolese men their age were going. The ones who went to Europe often never returned. They got lost there in suburbs where they were despised, in a country that would refuse to let them forget they were the children of King Leopold’s chattel. So, they chose South Africa where at least, they thought, they may have the protection of Nelson Mandela. It was a country where their dreams could be as large as their healthy egos, where the limits of their grandeur would not be prescribed by stereotypes about the continent on which they were born. Or so they thought.

  They met girls and flirted. They got part-time jobs, supplementing the small allowances their parents sent by cutting hair and modelling. The modelling was possible because of the emergence of a new market of black people with access to credit. With freedom came an increasing number of Africans with accounts at Joshua Doore and Truworths. They had grown up with a francophone aesthetic. They were happy to make a bit of extra cash just by being who they were.

  The Guys settled well. By the time we met them, they knew the city far better than we did. This included the most fun parts of Hillbrow, where the other Congolese gathered. They knew the drug dealers and the businessmen, the politicians and their children. The Guys always moved around together – not in a group that was too big, but seldom alone. They smiled and made the right jokes and were careful not to make enemies. They knew all the spots: nightclubs and wine bars, rooftop hangouts and salsa parties.

  I got to know them through Mandla. They met at a house party. She was quiet and kind and one of them took a liking to her. And so they became her friends and soon Zeng and Simon and I were in the mix, too, spending almost every weekend with them. They fitted well into our broader social network: Gael and Richard, who were French and South African; Micheline, who was Ugandan via America; Lauren, an African-American woman who had come to work and never gone back. There was Nana from Rwanda, who had grown up with The Guys in Lubumbashi, and her husband Craig, a white boy from Johannesburg’s northern suburbs.

  We explored South Africa together – the lot of us. The Guys were at our wedding in 2003. We booked weekends away. We went to Dullstroom and Warmbaths and Cape Town and Durban. We hiked Thaba Nchu and swam in freezing-cold springs and lay in the sun to warm up again. We ate well – uphutu and yams and cassava and the finest terrines and hot crusty bread. We were everything the new South Africa was supposed to be – cosmopolitan and successful and free.

  Except the ugly truth was that our friends from Europe and America had a far easier time of it in South Africa than The Guys. Although they were upwardly mobile and had good jobs and a wide circle of friends, The Guys had a harder time with work permits and visas than our European friends. They also struggled more with black South Africans, who were hostile when they encountered black people who did not speak local African languages. The Guys knew from too many angry or dismissive interactions that, in the eyes of many, they were merely amakwerekwere, people ‘from Africa’.

  Alain’s admission reminds me of how often I had flinched when I had come home, when I was still adjusting to life in South Africa. I was often struck by the odd way in which the term ‘Africa’ was deployed by South Africans – irrespective of race. People would ask me where I was from because I speak with an American/British/Kenyan accent – the result of our family’s wanderings. I would explain that I was born to South African parents outside the country and that I had lived in Zambia and Kenya and Canada and that my family also lived in Ethiopia. Invariably, the listener would nod sympathetically until the meaning of what I was saying sank in.

  The conversation always followed the same lines, like a dance people had been taught in school. ‘So you grew up in Africa.’ The word ‘Africa’ was enunciated carefully, the last syllable drawn out and slightly raised as though the statement were actually a question. Then the inevitable, softly sighed, ‘Shame.’ Sympathy and muted horror playing at their lips.

  It took me some time to figure out how to respond to the idea that Africa began beyond South Africa’s borders but did not include our very own country, which sits firmly on the African continent. I was surprised to learn that the countries where I had lived – the ones that had nurtured my soul in the long years of exile – were actually no places at all in the minds of some of my compatriots.

  They weren’t geographies with their own histories and cultures and complexities. Instead, they were dark landscapes, Conradian and densely forested. Zambia and Kenya might as well have been Venus and Jupiter. They were undefined and not easily defined. They were snake-filled thickets, impenetrable brush and war and famine and ever-present tribal danger.

  Although they thought themselves to be very different, whites and blacks in South Africa were disappointingly similar when it came to their views on ‘Africa’. At first I blamed apartheid: South Africa had been both isolated and insular. Its very survival had depended on scare tactics.

  I thought that, over time, with exposure and the new openness that followed the fall of apartheid, South Africans would stop fearing the continent and begin to understand that their place in the world was bound in their place on the continent.

  I couldn’t see that this flattened and stereotypical view of Africa was at the very heart of the idea of South Africa itself. Just as whiteness means nothing until it is contrasted with blackness as savagery, South Africanness relies heavily on the construction of Africa as a place of dysfunction, chaos and violence to define itself as functional, orderly, efficient and civilised.

  The apartheid state kept its borders firmly closed to ensure that the African savages at its doorstep would not get in. ‘Africa’ was a bogeyman, of course, used to set up the paranoia that would keep the National Party in power. But whites were not the only targets of the bogeyman. Black people were told that the Africans beyond South Africa’s borders lived like animals; they were ruled by despots and governed by black magic. In a society that taught black people to hate themselves, the message was easily assimilated.

  There have been periodic outbreaks of violence aimed at foreigners since I returned. These are the vicious evidence of the non-­invitations The Guys talk about when we first meet. They flare up then die down. The government is reactive but it seems that, in the times between flare-ups, little is done to address the economic competition and isolation that lie at the heart of the conflicts.

  Then quite quickly a new season of violence is upon us. For two weeks in May 2008, South Africa burns with rage as community after community attacks foreigners from the rest of the African continent. The violence begins on the edge of Johannesburg, in Alexandra township, and spreads through the province. Within a few weeks, parts of Durban and Cape Town are also in flames as are townships in places like Limpopo.

  People from Mozambique and Zimbabwe bear the brunt of the 2008 attacks but a number of South Africans who are assumed to be ‘illegals’ are also killed. Nationalist rage is often imprecise. Over three hundred shops are looted and over two hundred burned down. Hundreds of people are injured, thousands forced to flee. At the end of it all there are sixty-two dead bodies.

  During those horrifying weeks, Ernesto Nhamuave is attacked and set al
ight in an informal settlement on the eastern flank of Johannesburg. A crowd watches as he burns to death. His dying moments are immortalised when a photographer captures them. In spite of the media attention, Nhamuave’s family never receives justice. The case is closed in 2010 after police conclude that the suspects are unknown and there are no witnesses. Yet the murder happened in public, in front of cameras. Everyone knows who the killers are but no one is prepared to speak up.

  In a newspaper article I read at the time, the following lines hit me in the solar plexus: ‘The woman sees the killers at least once a week. Her recounting of details surrounding Nhamuave’s death has remained consistent for nearly seven years, when she first revealed details of the murder. At the time she was willing to speak to police. “But the police never came here. Now, I don’t trust the police here,” she said.’

  None of the attacks on foreigners involves Europeans or Americans. White foreigners are never the targets of mass mobilisations of outrage. In daily life whites may fall victim to crime but they are seldom deliberately targeted for the sorts of political and economic anger that inspires xenophobia. It is black foreigners – deemed to be taking jobs and women from locals and bringing crime and drugs and filthy habits here – who are the problem in the minds of many South Africans in 2008.

  * * *

  When the violence sweeps through Johannesburg’s inner-city areas in 2008 The Guys are never at risk. In addition, by this time they have been living and working in South Africa for many years, and have little to fear from police or immigration officials other than the arbitrary cruelty of personnel in uniform. Still, the violence has a chilling effect. It is intended to remind all African ‘foreigners’ that they are not welcome. The message to The Guys is that they will forever be from Congo and will always be strangers, no matter how many houses JP designs and builds and how many advertising campaigns Alain manages. Their citizenship is only a technicality.