Always Another Country

by Sisonke Msimang

  The four of us spend a weekend together drinking too much. It does wonders for me. It is an affirmation, a reminder that work is not everything, even if I have always staked my self-esteem on it. As they leave, already I am feeling better. I am still tender yes, but gradually feel less and less raw.

  A few weeks later, Simon and I go out to dinner without the kids. It is a cool October evening and we walk hand in hand, talking about nothing in particular and everything that matters, bumping shoulders and feeling as though we are a single organism. The recent turmoil has made us closer.

  It is dark and the street is empty and someone walks up behind us. We hear the footsteps and we don’t even turn. He hurries past us and we are not afraid. We both note the ordinariness of that moment and the act of not flinching at the approach of a stranger in the dark. Simon says this is our cue. It’s time to leave South Africa. I agree with him. From a distance, far away in a safe little Ivy League town where the rough side of town never penetrates the perimeter of the campus, it feels like the right thing to do. I say yes immediately this time.

  Our decision is helped along by a set of circumstances that are particular to us: Simon’s parents getting older, Gabi and Nick soon finishing their studies and us wanting to be more flexible for them, and of course I no longer have a job that holds me down.

  Until now, the hardwiring of a childhood spent in a nomadic trek from one country to the next has kept asserting itself, stopping me from committing. I have hated the idea of giving up on South Africa. Simon scoffs at the idea.

  ‘You’re not giving up, you’re following your husband. Why does everything have to be cast as a political discussion in South Africa? Why does this have to be about some grand statement? We can try something new, in my patch of the world, without loading all this meaning onto things.’

  He is right of course. He is speaking without being shackled by history; I didn’t think I had that luxury. So, despite what he says, my heart reneges on my promise to him. In the weeks after that conversation I don’t tell him about my doubts, even as they multiply.

  I feel torn between the man I love and the country I can’t bear to leave. I know he wants to go – to be closer to Gabi and Nick and his parents, to stop the gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach every time he pulls into the driveway. I know I should feel the same. The violence that threatened to take S should have shaken me to the core, certainly enough to make me want to leave – to make me want to save her.

  And so I am stuck between the guilt of a mother whose instinct for her child’s survival seems faulty, and the pain of a child whose most prized possession is about to be snatched out of her hands.

  Finally, after weeks of acting like I am still there in the grips of that moment of clarity we hit upon as we walked home from our date, I tell him the truth. The ambivalence is back. We whisper so the kids don’t hear us argue. ‘I am not prevaricating,’ I say. ‘I’m just reconsidering.’ He smiles at my wordsmanship, but he is not amused. I can see that my love affair with South Africa is tiring. When he fell in love with me, he had not seen that I would feel the pull towards what was in essence an abstract idea, a geography that could not hold me or touch me or kiss me and yet somehow managed to fulfil me. He had not yet seen the hold it had on me, how I would cry at the idea of not living there, how I would pine for it, how I would go back even when it made no sense to do so.

  It doesn’t matter, though. He sees now. And so, with every ounce of the kindness that made me fall in love with him, he says, ‘Okay.’

  In the coming weeks I realise Simon’s okay doesn’t really signal a yes. There is a little patch of land we bought a few years ago in Mozambique and suddenly it is all he will talk about. Simon is a man of action. So, as we prepare to settle back in South Africa, he begins to put a plan in place for us to leave again. He knows that, if it is left to me, we will never leave.

  Why I write

  On 16 August 2012, in a small town called Marikana in South Africa’s dry, rusty platinum belt, the South African Police Service opened fire on a crowd of striking mineworkers. We were in America when this happened. I watched the video footage online in horror. Thirty-four mineworkers were killed and seventy-eight were wounded.

  In the aftermath, once the bodies had been counted and the relatives had been informed, the police claimed their officers had been under attack. The fact that the miners were armed only with hand-­held traditional weapons while the police had assault rifles didn’t seem to matter much.

  In the months after the massacre, the government offered no apology. The massacre represented the most serious incident of police brutality since the fall of apartheid. Still, our leaders said the police had done what was necessary. Our president had looked hapless.

  No one was fired.

  Nobody said sorry.

  Instead, the ANC leaders blamed the miners. The party even boycotted the funerals. It turned its back on the mourning widows of dead men from distant rural villages and, in so doing, turned its back on its own history and that of the most important and vulnerable of its constituents.

  The nation’s clergy prayed in earnest. They prayed for the dead but they prayed for the living as well. They asked God to forgive those who had perpetrated the crimes. It seems these intercessions were insufficient.

  The government continued to deny responsibility for its murders. A commission of inquiry, the Farlam Commission, was set up, but it was a sham. It was established to quash the questions of outraged citizens, and was never about accountability. At times, it appeared to be a satire, just like the TRC: everyone knows the truth but the only people prepared to tell it are the victims.

  The South Africa to which we return in early 2013 is different from the one we left. Marikana hangs like a spectre over our politics. It feels eerily similar to the Mbeki years. Once again, the bitterness and the meanness and the arrogance of the ANC are on full display.

  This time, the ANC doesn’t only have the blood of the sick and the dying on its hands, but also of the healthy and strong. There were the bullets and bodies, beamed across the world. There was the devastating vulnerability of the black bodies for all to see. They lay strewn – arms and legs akimbo in heartbreaking stillness – and if you didn’t see them it was because you chose to look away.

  The bond of trust between citizen and leader – what was left of it, anyway, after the brutalising Mbeki years – is broken.

  In the wake of Marikana, living in South Africa is like living in a haunted house. There are ghosts everywhere and they seem to be gathering force. They are no longer mournful either. No, this time the dead are angry and their spirits are shrieking. It is as though they are preparing to send a war party to those who authored their destruction. Those of us left standing can only wait to see what forces will be unleashed.

  It is tempting to see Julius Malema as the product of their fury. For years, the young man from Seshego has been in the public eye. A badly behaved misogynist, a tiny tyrant, his rise seems to represent everything that is rotten in the ANC: the flaunting of wealth from questionable sources, the culture of moral impunity and a growing intolerance for debate and dialogue.

  If I were more spiritually inclined, I might put forward the idea that Malema’s turning, his decision to leave the ANC and become a man of the people again, was the work of the spirits.

  In the months after Marikana, no one is as blistering and as articulate about the damage that has been done to us collectively, to the psyche of the nation and to the soul of South Africa, as Julius Malema. I watch and I listen as he channels the rage many of us feel. He says many of the things that have needed to be said about the leadership of the ANC.

  I admire Malema in spite of myself. While I am vocal at home about my disgust for the ANC, I have not yet nailed my colours to the mast. The ANC is not just a party, it is home. I have not attended an ANC meeting for years, and I stopped paying my monthly dues a long time ago, but still, I consider the ANC to be in my blood. My great-grandu
ncles Richard and Selby were founding members. My father was in MK. I was born in exile. I am ANC through and through. This is the story I have told myself about my obligation and commitment to the party. But as its politics worsens, I begin to understand that I must stop this language. The ANC is not in my blood, it is in my memory. There is a paternalism built into the way I talk about the ANC that is designed to silence me. There is no genetic code that makes me more or less ANC than others. There is nothing inheritable about ANC membership: I am not a princess.

  I realise the claim of being a child of the ANC is one that is bursting with prestige; it is a profound form of entitlement. Buying into it at any level makes the views of others less important. I am guilty of the very cronyism I abhor in the leadership of the ANC. This insight does not come to me at once. Yet in the aftermath of Marikana, as my revulsion towards the ANC grows, I begin to see that stepping away from the ‘child of’ language is allowing me to accept the truth. I am a grown woman and I am not beholden to the ANC.

  I am a citizen of a country I love – and that perhaps is a function of having been raised by people who believe in the principles of equity and justice. The fact of my citizenship, the security that comes with my legal status, which guarantees me a place in this country, obliges me to take my responsibility to democracy seriously. If Julius – who said he would kill and die for Zuma – can break ranks and leave home, then, I realise, so can I. In fact, I must.

  * * *

  Leaving – breaking ranks, saying goodbye to the ANC, moving away from my need to be in South Africa as a geographic space – is a process. It begins with writing. Leaving begins when I pick up my pen.

  A few weeks after our return from Yale, I meet up for a coffee with Branko Brkic. Branko is the editor of a start-up, upstart publication called the Daily Maverick. It’s an online newspaper that does real analysis. Too much analysis, sometimes. Still, it is on the pulse of the politics of the new South Africa. It has a small but influential readership, and is growing every day.

  Branko is a gruff-looking Serbian who has seen the ugly side of politics in the Eastern bloc. We are introduced by Richard, who insists that I write now that I no longer have the excuse of my job holding me back from sharing my opinions. Branko agrees. He has no idea whether I’ll be any good, but he is running an operation that needs content, particularly from black writers.

  Can I have your first column by Wednesday? he asks. Welcome to the family.

  And just like that, I have a gig. It doesn’t pay, but that’s okay. I’m just looking for a platform.

  I have no employer, so the only agenda I want to push is my own. I am an African feminist, a meddlesome social justice type – in spite of the ways I have fallen short in my own home. I see very few other women on the opinion pages of our major papers, and even fewer writing about civil society, about the issues that affect people’s daily lives – violence and water and sanitation. Very few writers tell stories about people rather than politics. So, I tell myself, this is why I am writing: to fill a gap. I say to myself, there aren’t enough women’s voices in the media, so I am writing, in a sense, for the sisterhood.

  This isn’t the whole truth. I am also doing it for my ego, for the thrill of seeing my name in print. I am doing it to stake out a distinct space for myself in the public arena. And yes, I want to do something with that space. I’m interested in it not for its own sake, but for the sake of elevating certain ideas, talking about issues I think matter. In the last decade I have come to believe politics is dirty. Somehow, though, the media seems less sullied – more suited to the life of the mind and to mapping out a future – than politics seemed to be.

  I make many mistakes at first – awful grammatical errors and misspellings because I don’t realise I am on my own and, short of a quick sub-edit, there will be no support team. I am not a journalist. My experience has been in the civic sector, not in the newsroom. I have this fantasy of what a newsroom looks like and the sorts of resources available to writers. The reality is far less glamorous.

  It doesn’t matter, though. The Maverick team gives me carte blanche to write what I want and they give me no pointers or tips about how to do that – it’s my business. They don’t interfere or give me orders. I write what I like.

  Neither Branko nor Styli – his trusty sidekick – ever rejects anything I submit. Indeed, when I am threatened with defamation by RW Johnson – who takes offence to a satirical piece in which I imply that he is a racist (because I believe him to be one) – Branko and Styli get their lawyers out and defend me as part of the fold.

  I write about feminism and race and the faultlines of South Africa. At first, I find this difficult to manage. The trolls upset me. After a while, getting upset seems like a waste of time. Then I figure out the game and realise the trolls help me. Their arguments are sometimes useful – they provide me with handles, with layers of discussion worth having.

  Beyond this, I begin to recognise that their venom has little to do with my ideas and everything to do with the very idea of me – with my opinionated, middle-class, persona. It becomes clear that, no matter what I write and how well I express myself, I will not be beyond reproach. I am writing in an era in which reproach is the entire point of the game – without it, the writer loses currency. So, I begin to write into the hostility and outrage of readers who don’t want me to have opinions, the ones who look at my picture and are angered by it, the ones who patronise me.

  This sort of writing is satisfying on one level, but ultimately hollow. It’s like a sugar hit. There is a rush, but the hunger pangs don’t go away. Then I begin to understand that the real well, for me, is a place of deep anger; that my best and most thoughtful columns are those that navigate the contours of betrayal. I am writing to manage my hurt.

  I have been hurt by the betrayals of the ANC. I am writing because I don’t know what to do with how I feel about myself and South Africa and the political movement I once loved. I write because the longer I live in South Africa, the more evident it is that my country is a father who can never return my love. I love this place so deeply yet I am not of it so there is always a level of superficiality in what I can know in my bones about this place. I am the observer – the outsider who can see precisely because she stands apart.

  Understanding this helps me to write my way into being stronger and clearer and kinder to myself for my distance. I write my way into forgiving myself for not being able to become the ultimate insider. I write from where I am, rather than where I want to be. So my columns become essays. I write from a place of questioning and heartbreak. Everyone says to watch the word count, but when you don’t care any more about sounding authoritative, rules like that matter less. I write the way I am. I write as a woman who has travelled and is confident and sometimes vulnerable and disappointed and often unapologetic and angry because, really, this is the stuff of life. I write into an embrace of the criticism I get every week online. I lean into the troll hate and I begin to write against being called a bitch and a cunt and I refuse to let any of it cut me down. I write because of who I am and I write in spite of everything that makes me afraid.

  When you write in this modern age for the public, when you write and you look like me and believe – as I do – that you are as good as anyone else, then you draw all the venom and all the hatred and you can either let it poison you or drink it as the goddesses drank ambrosia.

  At first I wrote for the clicks and the attention but that soon passed. I began to write for posterity. So that S might know me differently. So that E might boast to his friends one day and say about his mother, ‘She was a writer.’

  At first, I wrote to make Mummy and Baba proud so I also wrote, I guess, out of a certain sentimental yes-we-canness.

  I write, now, for slightly different reasons.

  I write because I am an African woman who is literate and there is no diminishing what this means in a context in which so many others cannot.

  I write to escape my children and t
o find my peace with them. I write, sometimes, just to hear them say, ‘Are you still writing a book? How many pages is it, Mama?’

  I write because Africans and women and humans who have been considered less than others have always had stories and imaginations to take us out of the impossibility of the situations in which we have found ourselves stranded.

  I write because Simphiwe Dana sings and because Brenda Fassie is dead. In the face of the certainty of death, what else can I do? Where else can I go but the page when I am overcome by the knowledge that yesterday’s songs were sung by women who died because they worked too much and lived in a world that was too hard and yet their melodies were so soft?

  What else can I do but write when I know life is not just breath, it is also voice? I write because I cannot paint and I cannot sing. Words are my brush and my warbled song. I have written in the margins of every book I have ever loved, so I write because I read.

  I write because I am black – that peculiar word that is more than the brown of my skin. Black is a solid mass of many shades that stand together facing the future; it is a hole. Black is an equation defying even Einstein’s brilliance, even as it is nothing, not a thing at all.

  I write for myself because women seldom have spaces for themselves and writing is space; it takes up space, it creates space, it gives me space. I write because writing is solitary and women are seldom alone with just their thoughts – their responsibilities intrude. There is this to be done and that to be paid for and those moments when it is just you and your words are rare and all the more beautiful.

  I write because South Africa was liberated and she is not yet free. I write because I have been let down and sometimes I write because I do not know the answer and I am hoping someone might search with me.