Always Another Country

by Sisonke Msimang

  In 2008 South Africa returns to its roots – reminding Alain and JP and Willie and their families that they will never really be South African. Home will always be another country.

  Congo Road

  A small covered walkway leads directly to the kitchen door from the front entrance on the street. The walkway – which smells like jasmine – is flanked on one side by a small garden and on the other by a mirror that reflects the garden back to the visitor coming in from the street. Ivy creepers and white roses and a few slender olive trees are planted delicately along the side of the house. Water burbles somewhere in the back. A small brown canary hops about on the immaculately placed pavers that plot a path around the house.

  We enter through the kitchen door, which is painted a subtle green. There is a lovely soft grey marble on the floors and the walls of the kitchen and beyond it lies a large living area filled with casual but expensive furniture. In the distance, through the living room windows, a generous veranda runs the length of the house. I catch my breath. This is it. This is the house we will grow old in. But before that, it is the house in which my children will be born. I imagine a baby crawling through the sliding doors. Then I picture another little one steadying himself in the archway that leads into bedrooms.

  I smile at Simon across the long passage that connects the front of the house to its hindquarters, where the bedrooms are. We see a future for ourselves here. The year before was difficult, and we are delicate but mending. The house will be yet another step in our process of reconnecting. We make an offer. We are acting impulsively but we don’t mind. We trust our instincts. Within hours, the owner has accepted and we are the proud owners of a new house.

  In some ways, this house represents the new South African dream. Set in a gorgeous neighbourhood, close to public amenities and a public school that is walking distance away, it had once been off limits and now we have just bought it. Where once we would have been locked up for breaking the immorality laws, now we simply signed on the dotted line. Where the neighbourhood would never have allowed black residents – other than the women who lived in the servants’ quarters to enable the lifestyles of the occupants of the beautiful and large homes on the street – now we have neighbours of all races.

  We say goodbye to the Melville house with its ultra-cool cement floors and its steep stairs. We will miss the glass doors and watching the electrical storms from our bedroom. Still, I am pregnant and if there were ever a time to nest, this seems to be it.

  The February day we set for the move is sunny and warm. I have just passed the seven-month mark. The baby inside my belly feels as though she is filling up every available inch. She moves frequently and I wince a lot but I am active and strong. I have never been healthier or happier.

  While Simon organises the movers in Melville, I drive myself to the new house early in the morning and survey it one last time before it is filled with our things. I take a short walk down the street to figure out which entrance the truck will need to use. The house stands on a large corner block, set a street away from a busy road. Large jacarandas line either side of the road. Their branches meet overhead, vine-covered and lovely against the Johannesburg summer sky. I decide we should use the main gate at the back of the house – close to the veranda. I push it open and it is heavier than I had estimated. I walk back to the veranda and sit on the stone step. The baby gives me a swift kick as if to say, ‘Take it easy, mama,’ and I smile. We’ve made a great decision.

  * * *

  Until we moved into Congo Road, we were living in Johannesburg but our life in Melville had not been typical. We had travelled so much – both inside the country and outside it for work – that we had only been skimming the surface. The purchase of the Congo Road house, which is surrounded by properties whose manicured lawns and immaculately painted facades are clearly a point of pride and identity for their owners, forces us to reckon with a part of South Africa we have not yet encountered in any meaningful way. It is not until we move into this neighbourhood that I begin to understand that suburban South Africa is more than a geography. It is a place as haunting as it is manicured; a place lacking in soul and propelled by fear even as it is splashed in sunlight by day and bathed in streetlights by night.

  * * *

  The Monday morning after the move we lie in bed and listen to traffic stream by. The road that runs past the house on one side is a shortcut, used by cars and taxis avoiding the main road. We might have discovered this had we waited a few weeks before making the offer. We would have known it had we driven past the house on a weekday, rather than allowing ourselves to be fooled by the Sunday afternoon peace. Simon counts over five hundred cars in an hour.

  An hour later, I get up to go to the office. The traffic has not slowed. I wait at the corner for fifteen minutes – unable to turn into the road that will eventually take me to work. I am fuming. That afternoon at five I sit in a long queue of cars, stuck in traffic only a few metres from our front gate. I feel myself stiffen with rage. We have moved into the right house on the wrong street, which means, actually, that we have moved into the wrong house. This is a big problem. Having fallen in love with the house because it promised a calm and peaceful life, one in which there was no traffic, only canaries and sunshine, I feel as though I’ve been duped. By the end of the first week I am no longer prepared to give it a chance. I am unequivocal about it: I hate the house.

  I dream up ways in which the previous owner has lied. I despise the agent. It is baseless, of course, but I can’t shake the sense of betrayal.

  Within months of our moving in, the housing bubble bursts. Not only have we bought a house that didn’t live up to our expectations, we have massively overpaid for it. It seems we are doomed to stay in the house, no matter how we feel about it.

  Simon is less disappointed than I am. He hasn’t fallen for it quite as hard. For him, it’s just a house. For me, of course, the house on Congo Road is supposed to be the final stop in a life spent wandering. The house where the children are born, where they will grow up, leave to go to university and come back for holidays. It’s supposed to be the nest my sisters and I never had.

  For middle-class black families like mine, the transition to democracy has proceeded in the most orderly way possible. There have been few hitches for our kind of new South African. The children of the elite families who were prepared for the transition have landed firmly on their feet. I don’t want to admit it but I am used to things falling into place for me. I grew up in a warm and loving family. I was educated at elite schools. I attended a well-respected university in America. I married a great guy and I’ve had a successful career.

  Finding the ‘perfect’ house and then discovering it is flawed – albeit in ways that only matter to people who are privileged enough to worry about issues like traffic and noise – is a First World problem. I should be able to get over it but I can’t. I find myself stuck – spiralling into worry and anxiety about the fact that this house is not going to work for us.

  In the weeks before the baby is born, the feeling of being trapped deepens.

  In the lush green suburbs the obviousness of our privilege begins to eat at us. The daily chores required to ensure that our home is well maintained put us in treacherous terrain. The system we have bought into is set up to convince us we can’t do it on our own. Living in this house, and on this street, smacks of domination. It requires hedges clipped like so, and roofing tiled to a certain standard. It forces us to ask Baba Petros – the man who gardens and fixes – to redo his work. I am ashamed of the narcissism involved in maintaining the facade of the house. I had not realised that, in falling in love with the aesthetic and in buying the house, I was also pledging to oversee the labour that would be necessary to maintain it.

  In exile we only thought about the Boers. We never imagined the houses – what they were like inside and how it felt to live in one. We lived in nice houses ourselves. We had maids and my sisters and I were little madams. Mummy and Baba had alwa
ys explained that we should respect the aunties who worked in our houses. The difference, of course, was that now I was my own madam. I was no longer an innocent.

  The house makes me complicit. Suddenly I hold shares in South Africa Inc., and my participation in a firm whose business I loathe makes me anxious. It takes me a long time to figure out that this is the core of all the troubles we experience in the house on Congo Road: it places us firmly in the heart of whiteness.

  * * *

  While my discomfort feels all-consuming, there isn’t anything that can be done about it. The baby is due in April and we have much to sort out. Our domestic arrangement has been loose until now. An older woman named Eunice comes in to clean the house twice a week. Simon and I are pretty self-sufficient and we both travel a lot for work so she is seldom busy. We call her Aunty, in the respectful manner that all younger black people call older black women in South Africa, regardless of employer–employee status.

  We decide that when the baby arrives Aunty will continue to do the ironing and laundry but she is too old to task with looking after a small baby who will quickly become a toddler.

  Simon and I regard Aunty with some degree of awe. Throughout the 1980s she lived – as she tells it – the life of a gangster. By her own account, she is a former drug dealer.

  She boasts about wearing a floor-length mink coat on a South African Airways flight from Joburg to Durban in the 1980s before black people were even allowed to travel on planes. Then, she says, in the early 1990s she was arrested and, after her release (she doesn’t say how long she was in for but Simon and I suspect it was no more than a few nights), she had a stroke and found Jesus. She got herself straightened out and she has been cleaning houses since then.

  Aunty splits her time between Mandla’s townhouse and our place. She’s a skollie old aunty – enlisting the help of her extensive network of church mates and township pals to clean the houses of other people and taking a cut from each introduction to a new madam who agrees to employ one of her friends.

  To supplement her income, she often sells Tupperware and cheap cutlery sets and faux-fancy watches. I am a regular, reluctant and captive customer. My cupboards are overflowing with low-cost Eetrite knives and forks because I can’t say no to Aunty.

  Beneath her hilarious stories and behind her quirkiness Aunty has her own stories of sadness. She lives with her sister Julia and they have raised Julia’s child, Lizzie, together. Lizzie has given them a grandson – a handsome boy named Moeketsi, who is two when we first meet Aunty. Aunty doesn’t have any biological children. She has told me that, before she became an independent woman who dealt drugs in order to have her own nice things and support Julia and Lizzy, she was married. He was a handsome Zulu man. He courted her with sweet words and warm smiles.

  Soon they were married and, once he had her, he began to beat her. ‘Zo,’ she would say, with her creased lips twisted in anger, ‘that man was cruel. So, so mean.’ Things got worse when she failed to produce children. ‘He never think to himself, why I never have kids even before this Eunice,’ she would say, reasoning it out so many years later. ‘For a man it is always the lady’s fault.’

  After eleven harrowing years, she called it quits.

  When I tell her we need someone to help with the new baby, Aunty starts suggesting various friends. On this issue, however, my deference to her age and her street smarts retreats. I am an anxious mother-to-be and nothing feels more important than the decision about who will help to care for our child while we are working.

  I even ignore Mummy who, like Aunty, has all sorts of ideas about which distant Swazi relative is best placed to move to Joburg to help raise this long-awaited first grandchild.

  At my office, a colleague tells me about a young woman who had cared for twins with a disability for five years. Her name is Nikki and she’s currently doing a bit of office admin for his wife in her home office. There isn’t enough for her to do there, he says: ‘She’s lovely and needs work.’

  When she arrives I am struck by how thin she is. She is dressed conservatively, in a loose brown skirt and a white button-down top that is tucked in at the waist. Her hands are rough and dry and when I shake them I am surprised. Her grip is strong, though. Her straightened hair is pulled back severely off her face. Simon and I both say hello and she smiles and says hello back. Her smile changes everything; it is as wide as her cheekbones are high. Her teeth are perfect and, when we tease her in an attempt to ease her obvious nerves, her laugh is rich and genuine. She is both eager to please and open to spontaneity.

  She tells us about her last job. She worked for an American lawyer, a single mother who had twins. The girls were premature. There were three of them but one died at birth. The other two lived but had some difficulties in the early months. Nikki started working for the lawyer when the girls were just eight weeks old. She changed the feeding tubes that were attached to their shrivelled navels, helped them stretch their tiny legs in the daily physiotherapy that the doctors recommended and helped nurse their mother back to health.

  She says she has dreams of becoming either a nursery school teacher or a psychologist one day. Simon and I don’t need much convincing. She is the answer to our prayers.

  Whereas Nikki clearly needs the job, she has one non-negotiable, which is that she can only live in if we allow her sister to move in. Of course, we defer.

  We set up a time for Nikki and her sister Dipuo to come see the accommodation we have prepared for them. It’s a pretty and spacious apartment above the garage of our new house. It has a large bedroom big enough for two queen-sized beds. It has a television seating area and a small kitchen and bathroom. The sun is lovely in the daytime and we turn on an electric heater and it warms up quickly at night.

  Dipuo is tall and striking. She is a bright yellow-brown colour with ample breasts, an even more ample bum and long lean legs. She is wearing a tank top, a pair of jeans and All Stars. She is an absolute stunner.

  We soon discover that Dipuo is as distracted as she is distracting. Her head is always in the clouds, and her earphones are always plugged in. She is a typical teenager. At seventeen, she is finishing her last year of high school. Twelve years younger than Nikki, she could be my child. I am starting this motherhood business late.

  The sisters are close but Dipuo is typical of much younger siblings. She seems not to notice the sacrifices Nikki is making for her. But she is sweet. Dipuo is less talkative than her sister, who, once she has settled in and become used to us, turns out to be quite a chatterbox. Dipuo, on the other hand, looks down frequently when she addresses me. She hardly looks at Simon at all. But I like her. And, most importantly, I can see how much the two of them love each other.

  It takes a while, but eventually Simon and I will learn just what this bond will do to us.

  Mummy insists on meeting the two girls before we hire Nikki. When she sees Dipuo for the first time her eyes first widen, then narrow in suspicion. I know what she is thinking before she has a chance to say a word.

  Afterwards, when they are gone and Mummy is giving me her feedback, she says slowly and in that especially low voice she reserved for important conversations, ‘This is South Africa. Don’t think that any of these girls will leave your husband alone just because you are paying her salary. Be careful my girl. Be very, very careful.’

  I tell her Simon only has eyes for me. She laughs a little bit and looks pointedly at my heavily pregnant belly. I smile but she returns quickly to the seriousness of the conversation.

  In terms of Nikki herself, ‘She seems okay,’ she sniffs. No one will ever be good enough for her children. She raised us, but seems forever surprised by how trusting we are. She often says we’re not cut out for this society. Mandla and I especially. ‘Too soft,’ she says when I tell her a work story or recount an anecdote about a friend who I think may be taking advantage of me.

  Mummy’s view is that Mandla and I inherited from Baba a sort of idealism about how the world should be, and how
people should behave. We are often surprised when people show us who they are, whereas she is never surprised when people turn out to be awful. Mummy is always ready to be let down. ‘Zeng is lucky,’ she often says. ‘She knows people, just like me. She won’t be fooled. But you two – just like your father.’

  I don’t know if it was exile that toughened her or whether growing up in Mbuluzi in Swaziland and being the child of a schoolteacher and a pastor had simply instilled in her the practical and hard-nosed sensibility required to survive. Regardless of where it comes from, Mummy knows we need her to protect us from our inherent optimism. But there is also the reality that the South African project requires a toughness we simply haven’t been required to demonstrate in our lives thus far.

  So Mummy says yes, Nikki seems like a fine choice given that we are ignoring her list of willing Swazi relatives. We offer Nikki the job; she and Dipuo move in two weeks before the baby arrives.

  * * *

  Over the next two years violence clucks around us like a restless chicken sensing a fox in the bushes. We discover that violence is the organising principle of the community in which we now live – that it structures our daily schedule and those of our neighbours, that it pervades our every action. Bruises show up everywhere: dark marks mocking the naivety of my long-held aspiration of living in a peaceful South Africa and getting old on a rocking chair on a wide, polished veranda. Congo Road reveals itself to be a typical white suburban neighbourhood. We are not just proximate to the mundane inequality that made apartheid successful; we are complicit. Worse, we are unprepared to see and accept our complicity. We are multiracial and fair and kind. We are on the right side of history.