Always Another Country. Sisonke Msimang

      LINDIWE MABUZA ARRIVED in Lusaka the year I turned five. She was the kind of woman who made people nervous. She had been living in America where she had mastered the art of not caring what anyone thought – of being a thoroughly independent woman. She had always possessed this trait; no doubt it had carried her to Lesotho and then to the US and back again. But living in America in the 1960s must have honed it.

      She was surly sometimes and unconcerned about what it meant to be a bad-tempered woman. She did what she wanted and argued as vehemently as she saw fit. She disagreed with people and didn’t care if they got offended. Men especially. She didn’t talk about feminism. She just stuck her nose in the air and looked down on men who were not as clever as her. She didn’t care what her intellect did to their egos.

      When I met her, she was almost forty, divorced and highly educated. Because Baba was technically her nephew, she insisted that I call her Gogo, despite the fact that she was far too young to actually be my granny. She was odd sometimes. Obstinate, even on minor points like this, but people learnt to back down and let her have her way. They said she was ‘difficult’ and she was.

      There were all sorts of problems with being almost forty, highly educated and divorced in those times, but I didn’t know about any of those problems. I just knew that she came along at exactly the point when I needed someone who would be all mine, someone I would not have to share with the big-headed toddler and the milksmelling baby who seemed intent on ruining my life. When it all seemed too much, Gogo Lindi arrived with the express purpose of adoring me.

      Before moving to Lusaka in 1979, Gogo had earned a master’s degree in America; then, she had gone to Minnesota to teach. In Minnesota she had fallen in love with a man but when that ended she picked up the pieces and stayed revolutionary. So, when she met me, I suspect she was still a little bit heartbroken and trying to find pieces of herself that she had left on the other side of the ocean, miles away. She was also searching for somewhere new to belong and for someone to belong to.

      She had a daughter, Thembi. Their relationship was complicated and by then Thembi was already a teenager – a big sister to me. What Gogo needed was a little one, someone who would simply adore her and not ask complicated questions about where she had been and why she had left her. And so, on the cool evening when Lindiwe Mabuza arrived in Lusaka, she found me, the little girl who had been waiting for someone just like her.

      Gogo looked straight through my little ribcage into my full-full heart and realised that I was a precocious and lavishly jealous little girl who could not get over the arrival of not one, but two, baby sisters. She recognised in me a fellow traveller, a little soul who could be tough if she wanted but also needed more than she was getting from the adults around her. She could see I was unsettled by all the faces and the voices and the comings and goings in my revolutionary house sometimes – as any child would be. She could see, too, that I dared not give voice to my worries: I had already worked out that there would be entirely no point in complaining. This was life.

      Gogo Lindi saw all this and set about doing what aunts have been doing for girls for centuries: standing in. She stood in for the attention Mummy could no longer afford to give, and for the ideas I could not yet shape about what it meant to be a girl. And, later, when I was old enough to decide for myself what sort of woman I would be, Gogo Lindi gave shape and colour and contours to my ideas about how to be strong. She was one of the first women I ever loved who didn’t give a damn about the rules. She taught me above all else how to belong to myself first before I let myself belong to someone else. This is a lesson that is never fully learnt; wherever I have failed to use it as a guide, I blame only myself.

      No one quite seemed to know what to do with Gogo. She didn’t fit into any of the pre-assigned boxes. This didn’t matter to me, of course. I had no idea at the time how important the boxes were. I only knew what I thought, which was that she was the most beautiful and prettiest-smelling person I had ever met. With the innocence of the child who believes in the kindness of grown-ups and the fairness of the world, I thought she had arrived solely to give me love and affection.

      Our favourite game was called Olympics. In this game Gogo Lindi was the coach and I was the athlete. Each time we played the game we were catapulted into the future. In the imaginary world we constructed, it was 1992 and I was eighteen years old. I was the World Champion of gymnastics, representing a free South Africa. The games were hosted in Addis Ababa, the headquarters of the Organization of African Unity, because – well, because nothing else would have made sense. Even our games were pan-African.

      Gogo would stand at one end of the Sangwenis’ yard and I would stand at the other. The Sangwenis were extended family. Aunty Angela and Uncle Stan were like parents to us and Lindiwe and Dumi were the big sister and big brother we didn’t need to imagine because we had them in the flesh. I spent most days at their house when I was a toddler and, of course, a weekend would never go by without us going to their house. Gogo Lindi was Uncle Stan’s younger sister. So, when she arrived in Lusaka, naturally she stayed at Aunty and Uncle’s house and naturally she insisted that Baba call her Aunty in spite of the small gap in their ages. So it was here – at the house on Kalungu Road – that we began our lifelong adoration of one another.

      ‘On your marks!’ she would shout. ‘Get set. Go!’ And I’d be off, running as fast as I could. It was me against the clock. ‘Good time,’ Gogo would say. ‘You beat your previous record by about five seconds.’ Then I would begin my tumbling routine. I would cartwheel and handstand and roll for a few minutes in some order I had decided made sense. ‘Beautiful,’ she would say. ‘Absolutely stunning. Even better than Nadia Comăneci.’

      We were a conspiracy – a secret shared in hot breath and stifled giggles. She knew I was smarting from the pain of having new siblings, so she gave me whatever I wanted. Others could get sidetracked by the antics of Baby Zeng or the cleverness of genius Mandla, but she remained unmoved. Gogo kept her eyes fixed firmly on me, never once even vaguely interested in the other two. They didn’t notice, so they never harboured a grudge. But I knew and it meant the world.

      Most nights Gogo was in the studio broadcasting stories into South Africa. She was in charge of Radio Freedom and was the head of culture and arts for the ANC in exile.

      Lindiwe Mabuza had earned her master’s degree in American Studies in Ohio. I only realised later what a feat this was. For a black South African woman, born in 1935, to have made her way out of Natal, to the Transvaal, to Lesotho and then on to America, was pretty remarkable. In the 1960s she had become a professor and married a man there, a black American.

      She talked a lot about these people who were risen from slaves, about the parallels between us and them, about how our struggle was intertwined with those ‘brothers and sisters from across the pond’.

      Whenever she said this I imagined a lost tribe of jive-talking afro-wearing urban negroes (as we called them) wandering the plains of America bumping into Indians. What I knew of America was incongruously derived from a combination of old Western films full of Apaches and Navajos on empty expanses of land… and sitcoms like The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son and Good Times.

      For many years, the brothers and sisters from across the pond would occupy this curious place in my mind. I would dream about them speaking a version of English that I struggled to understand and humming ‘Kumbaya’. Perhaps this was the reason why, when I finally made it to America, I embraced them like long-lost cousins. Gogo Lindi’s ex-husband had carried a white man’s name – Brown or White or Brody or something like that – but he was black as midnight. Years later, when I became a teenager, I would stumble across his pictures in a trunk of things she had left with Aunty Angela for safekeeping. I felt that I had looked at something I wasn’t meant to see, so I carefully put them back, even though she was miles away by that time.