Always Another Country

by Sisonke Msimang

  We pay her well to massage our guilt. We offer her medical aid. We give her a thirteenth cheque. We pay her overtime far above the minimum wage. We are good people. She seems grateful but now I am wise enough to know that unfairness is built into the system so her gratitude does not change the fact of our complicity.

  Unless one of us is prepared to resign from our job and radically alter our lifestyle – unless we are prepared to refuse any sort of domestic help and do it ourselves – we are consigned to this system and to this feeling. So, we learn to live with the guilt and keep a slight emotional distance even as we breathe one another’s air, live under the same roof, talk about Scandal and Generations, and eat together once a week.

  Congo Road is not what I had hoped, yet what I had hoped was never going to be possible. That sort of fairy tale isn’t real anywhere, and was certainly not real in the South African neighbourhoods that new blacks like me began to occupy after apartheid.

  The children I imagined when I first walked into this house were born, but biology has a different momentum from sociology. The security I had imagined, the idyllic quiet, the kind of emotional tranquillity that is implicit in the scene I sketched as I stood on the threshold the afternoon we put the offer in – that never materialised. I discovered, over five years in that beautiful haunted house, that nothing in South Africa is safe – especially not your dreams.

  And yet, the paradox of South Africa is that every morning we rose. In spite of the underlying dread, in spite of the fear, we put on our clothes and we left our children at home. We left them in the hands of black women whose presence in our homes we owed to apartheid. We trusted the women. We abhorred the system. And so, on some level – when we muttered under our breaths about the laundry or the food – it was evident that we abhorred the women too, because they were living, breathing monuments to everything we had left behind when Nelson Mandela put his hand on the Con­stitution and took his oath of office as the first president of democratic South Africa.

  So, like all our friends from exile, and those who had stayed and endured and fought, we lived in this fancy neighbourhood. We lived with the unasked questions and a churning in our guts that was worse on some days than on others. We did this because the whole system was rotten and we knew that, by moving in, and by choosing to buy beautiful old houses in Emmarentia and Sandton and Melrose, the beautiful tree-lined neighbourhoods from which people like us were barred only a decade before, we were killing certain parts of ourselves.

  We killed the questions and tried to still the noise that came when we moved into these quiet places where we were meant to find peace and evade nosy neighbours and township dramas. We silenced our own questions and pretended the alienation was simply a passing phase because we wanted to deepen and extend and preserve our new-found privileges.

  We told ourselves that this is what our parents had fought for.

  This was not true, of course. Our parents had fought for equality, but we were not occupying spaces of equality – we were simply ascending to places higher up on a ladder that we knew provided unfair leverage to a tiny group. We were now part of that group.

  This is middle-class South Africa: hoping for the best. Bringing home the bacon. Buying new cars. Planting hedges. Hoping for the best, but creating the worst. We pretend we don’t know this, and it is this pretence that is most abhorrent. Because, as James Baldwin says, ‘it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime’.

  Failure

  I am offered a fellowship at Yale University. It is an opportunity to get out of South Africa without committing to leaving South Africa. Simon has been ready to quit the country since that October day in Congo Road. In spite of it, I have not been able to contemplate a move. South Africa is the home towards which I travelled from the moment of my birth. For Simon, though, this is a test run: a chance to see whether his wife could tear herself away from the country of her heart.

  Simon and the kids join me. The fellowship is generous so we have a two-bedroom place – a townhouse that is part of a larger complex in which there are dozens of postgraduate students with their families. We are from all over the world. The playground looks like a mini United Nations.

  The office continues to pay my salary. This is a gift. I see it as a reward for the seven years I have put into the organisation. The recommendation that probably got me into the programme came from the president of the organisation himself. He is widely respected – some might say iconic. His blessing means a lot. He is not easily impressed.

  Yale gives me the space and the freedom to think: no expectations. I do not get involved with local politics. My activist self stays well hidden: resting. I stay on the perimeter: cloistered, privileged, safe.

  Suddenly I can relax.

  The last five years have been intense. Juggling the career and having children hasn’t been easy, and the looming crisis in terms of my relationship with the country has been both exhilarating and destabilising.

  By the time I decide on my sabbatical I feel confident that I can leave the office for a while. I am wrong. All hell breaks loose in a story that is long and complicated and still makes me upset, mainly because I still can’t believe I didn’t see it coming. But at the time I think I have earned the respect of colleagues. In spite of being a woman and young and a new mother, when I started, in spite of the depression and the fear, I found a way.

  I learnt to be tough but kind. I remembered that I was smart. I decided to stand up for my team and be loyal to their instincts, rather than to worry about small details. I used Mummy and Baba as sounding boards and hustled to attract resources so that, on my watch, we became bigger and brawnier than any other foundation in the network to which we belonged. We shook off the deadwood and marched forward – together. Or so I thought.

  There were some people whose ire I raised and in some instances they were right. I learnt how to be the boss lady in a way that worked and sometimes that meant making hard decisions.

  I am confident that I have done a good job as CEO. I am ready to move on and I want to use this time to prepare my successor. I am so confident that I overreach. I begin an elaborate restructuring process a few months before my departure. It is overdue and necessary but I underestimate what it means to people to have a secure job. I think the best and the brightest will take packages. I am convinced that, if we award generous cheques and put in place proper performance management systems, people will buy into the plan. I am wrong, of course. Horribly naively wrong.

  So I leave. This break affords me an opportunity to let my brilliant and funny deputy manage the office without me by his side – a test run. He is a smart and kind-hearted man – he has been a wonderful deputy.

  Then, all hell breaks loose. There is a disgruntled employee. She was there when I left. She was unreasonable so we began proceedings to get her dismissed. My deputy and I are ad idem about how to deal with her, but her case turns into a nightmare. It drags on, and as it does the office rumour mill goes wild.

  I begin to get frantic messages. ‘Come back to Joburg. Can you fly back?’

  I am resentful. I do not realise this is now officially a big deal, not something I can delegate. It does not dawn on me, until it is too late, that this is no longer simply about a disgruntled employee and her gripes. The situation has morphed into a referendum about the restructuring. We are in deep, deep trouble.

  I get a call. ‘Come to New York.’ The new boss wants to see me. I call a colleague. ‘It’s bad,’ he says. My stomach turns. I go to New York. The boss is new. He doesn’t know me. He knows nothing about what I have done, how hard I have worked, how much I have cared. I have met him before and he came across as crisp, but warm. We sit and my feeling is the same. He is crisp and warm.

  Then he suggests the crisis has become toxic. It is too big to fix. There are too many people who feel burned, who are worried about their future in the organisation. I am stunned. I thought
that people who assured me they were okay were telling the truth. I thought I could rely on the goodwill I had built up over so many years. It turns out this was a rookie mistake. It is one thing to be a good manager. It is quite another to take people through a painful and difficult process that involves the possibility of their losing their livelihoods. Even if they are highly educated and you assume they are mobile and you give them years of advance notice. There are some processes you can’t short-circuit.

  There have been complaints about me. Some members of staff say I was a bully. I know they say this. It is part of life as a woman leader – and a young one who is having babies – to be called either a pushover or a bully. Some say I tried to ram the process through without enough consultation. Maybe.

  It is clear that the new boss has made up his mind. There is no point talking about details. The fact that the words have come out of his mouth not as a question, but as a statement of fact – that there is concern about me and that it is best I leave amicably – means it is done. I have far too much pride to argue with him.

  I listen. I will myself not to cry and miraculously I do not. He is suggesting I write a letter, announcing my resignation. He will make sure it is all handled amicably. I wince and smile at the same time. This is not happening to me. There is nothing amicable about being asked to leave a place you have loved, a place where you have felt valued and respected. There is nothing amicable about a putsch.

  I leave, somehow – it is a blur. I am on the streets and so, like everyone around me, I walk. I walk for what seems like hours on end but can’t be. Eventually I call Simon and when I hear his voice, the tears begin. I cry in big gulps struggling to hold myself up. I lean against a window then I step back, afraid someone will tell me to move away – I am still a black girl on the streets of New York, conscious of how she occupies space. I look at myself in the window crying. Nobody so much as turns. This is New York – everyone just keeps walking.

  I sob into the phone. ‘I could just go to Joburg and sort this all out,’ I say. I want to fight back. To clear my name. I want to say I trusted everyone so I thought they were fine because they said they were fine. Simon tells me not to do that. He says, ‘Just come home,’ and I am grateful to hear him say these words.

  I get on the train and I go home. I ride the two hours sitting on the edge of my seat looking out of the window, lifted on my haunches like a bushbuck, ready to spring forward. I am in a strange country. Failure is new to me so the terrain is unfamiliar. I could leave tomorrow and be back in Joburg the following day. The fight in me is back. How dare they? They know I was planning on leaving. I told them I would hand over – why go for blood when I am not even there? It feels cruel and ugly in ways I can’t understand.

  I don’t take my eyes off the landscape. Disused American cities whiz past. This is a country of graffiti and broken windows. And in the wide-open spaces between cities, there are leafless trees and still water. There are bridges painted white and boats perfect against the grey sky. At each station there are scowling black men who wait in uniforms and, standing at some distance, there are perfectly turned-out white women. As we pull into station after station, I feel more and more adrift. This is America and I am a stranger. On an Amtrak train, I slice through space and time, lost but moving towards a place I know. I am going home, to Simon.

  The train pulls into New Haven and he is there, waiting.

  * * *

  For months I am raw. This is not the sort of thing that happens to people like me. Smart, likeable, fourth-generation, middle-class African women like me don’t fail. I have a plan for myself and it does not include setbacks like this.

  I have always had my way and this has bred in me a kind of confidence that may be mistaken – in an African woman – for arrogance. Indeed, in some ways the sort of confidence that I carry is a close cousin of entitlement. Having succeeded in everything by virtue of class allows for a certain blindness. I have always assumed people had my best interests at heart simply because I thought they should. I believed this because, from when I was a toddler, every teacher and principal I have encountered had had my progress as his or her mission.

  My generation of children were the main characters in the post-­colonial narrative. We embodied Africa’s positive trajectory. We were told we would drive independent Africa’s economic liberation. With our shiny skins, we were well-nourished, bright-eyed achievers who recited their times tables with ease and gained entry to the best universities on the strength of their native intelligence.

  This burden, combined with the specifics of my particular upbringing, created an entitled sort of innocence about me – a naivety born of access rather than lack of exposure to the world, and this perhaps was why I found myself blind-sided by organisational matters I had not thought were important.

  I saw myself as an exception. I believed I was above petty politics and office gutter talk. I took for granted that I had backing when I didn’t. The arrogance of class is that you can be blind to what others see because the world looks upon you kindly. I was blind-­sided because leaving – taking a package – was not frightening to me and I could not imagine that it would be to others in a similar position to me.

  No leader can make this mistake and I failed in that regard, no matter what else I did.

  * * *

  I have been fine, of course. I have gone on to forge a new career for myself – to make the pivot I was wanting to make. There was enough goodwill towards me from before those wretched few months that I am still well regarded in the institution. My networks carried me; my access and privilege kept me afloat.

  I would like to pretend that my subsequent trajectory has simply been due to my innate talents and my ability to learn and grow. The truth is far less flattering: I had options that most women and black people don’t. Those networks – that social capital – were a massive asset. There were people in positions of power who liked and trusted me and who continued to do so, in spite of my mistakes. This is as it should be for everyone. The mistake I made was assuming that my exceptionalism was the norm. It is one thing to understand feminism as a concept and it is quite another to practise it in a real and authentic manner. It doesn’t come naturally, even when you are marked by your blackness or your womanness; even when you try to be thoughtful. Sometimes it is only cold, hard experience, it is only fucking up, that opens your eyes to your own privilege.

  My mending was a function of having a supportive family. I was able to heal because my education and my crisp clean English guaranteed I would be okay in the end. My networks and the glowing words littered across my CV – Yale, World Economic Forum, America – were shiny baubles denoting access and progress.

  My pain was tempered by my potential, and my potential was infinite because I had been favoured by circumstance. I wasn’t Nikki or Aunty Pinah. I wasn’t even Mummy. I was freer.

  It sounds clichéd to say that leaving that job under a strange light-grey cloud was the best thing I ever did, but it is true. It would be nice to think the lesson was about life throwing me lemons and me making lemonade, but it was bigger than this.

  The lesson was that I needed to learn how to manage my privilege. I was born into a family that – for generations – valued education. Like all the exempted natives who had come before me, I thought of myself as special. My social status as a great-granddaughter of these Christians who had converted early and had reaped the educational benefits of selling out to the missionaries was a blessing. But I hadn’t yet learnt to manage my elitism, how to tame it and use it, and how to see in spite of it.

  Women have known how to walk the tightrope between autonomy and geniality since Mary gave birth to Jesus. Women learn early that, to protect our brilliance, sometimes we have to hide it. We learn that if we will not or cannot hide our shine, we will need some sort of strategy to deflect the attention that will come our way. Women know a quiet demeanour or an accomplished husband or a respected father are powerful tools with which to face the
world because they allow us entry into polite society.

  As a woman, you can’t always resist being made invisible. So, you learn to be legible; to be understood not simply as a woman standing on your own two feet, but as a woman whose worth derives from those who can vouch for her. The colleague who can say, ‘Oh, she’s really nice.’ The relatives who can provide assurances: ‘She’s very humble. She doesn’t use her education to act as though she’s better than others.’

  Women who have no such ties, and who refuse to kowtow to convention, are worse than dangerous: they are disposable. I had never accepted that I was playing any sort of game of legibility, so I did not know my position was precarious until I stumbled.

  Still, this is not a story about being overpowered by colleagues who may or may not have had it in for me because I was a woman and I was young. I certainly felt battered and bruised for these reasons at different points in my tenure there, and have no doubt that things may have gone down slightly differently had I been a man, but that is not the most important part of this story, if only because that is a story we all know too well. It is also a story that allows me to hide from my own errors – to point outwards without looking at myself. It is a story that says privilege is flat and black women are only ever victims – never themselves holders of power. It is a story that denies the ways in which power intersects and operates in ways that can simultaneously advantage and disadvantage all of us.

  This story is more complicated, because it reminds us that, when you have the safety net of class in a world that is largely poor, you get to lose your innocence without losing your life. You get to fall forward because there are many strong and powerful arms waiting to pick you up and set you right again.

  * * *

  We spend the rest of our time in New Haven regrouping. Simon picks up my pieces and sticks them back on where they fit. He holds me together. Our closest friends from Johannesburg come to visit: Gael with her beautiful black hair into which I cry and cry and cry as we walk around Mystic, and Richard with his sturdy arms around me in a tight hug that says he still believes in me.