Always Another Country. Sisonke Msimang

      WHEN I WAS LITTLE, we stayed in a series of flats. First it was Burley Court, then some apartments near the University Teaching Hospital and then a small complex in a neighbourhood called Woodlands. The one imprinted on my mind is Burley Court – perhaps because it was the biggest, perhaps because it was the one Mummy spoke of the most. Burley Court was just off Church Road, which was a busy street close to the centre of Lusaka. The residents of Burley Court were part of a new generation of urban Africans who were not concerned with what whites thought of them. Each block smelled like kapenta fish and frying meat. As you walked past open doors and windows you could hear the tinny sounds of Thomas Mapfumo’s ‘Matiregerera Mambo’ or the elegant chords of Letta Mbulu’s ‘There’s Music in the Air’.

      Like most kids in newly independent Zambia, I was born free and so carried myself like a child who had every reason to believe she was at the centre of the universe. Our parents also conducted themselves with an unmistakable air of self-assurance. They behaved as though the ground beneath their feet was theirs and the sun in the sky had risen purely for their benefit; as though the trees were green simply to please them. They laboured under the merry illusion that the Copperbelt three hundred kilometres north of Lusaka would power their gleaming futures forever more. They believed they would have the kind of wealth that generations before them had been unable to attain, shackled as they had been to a colonial yoke. They thought – naively, with hindsight – that their own children might become doctors and lawyers and mining magnates. They were innocents, you see. Though they were grown men and women at Independence, their liberation had come in the heady times before the price of copper plummeted, before the plunging currency brought them to their knees and made them beg for reprieve. When I was little the adults in my life were still buoyed by the idea that they had found their place in the sun.

      Each morning the men who were breadwinners in our flats left for their government jobs. Their wives waved them off because they were almost middle class and had been persuaded to believe in the curious colonial set-up in which women stayed home and took care of the children and behaved as though this precluded them from other forms of economic labour. Housebound – but assisted by poorly paid housegirls – they turned to idle gossip and raucous laughter. They shelled peanuts and tightened their chitenges and prepared meals fit for their husbands, who were little kings in their own homes. The men for whom these women preened and clucked returned at dusk, striding with great purpose towards their families, making their way to tables laden with nsima and meat stews, to smiling wives whose middles were slowly broadening as they settled into city living, and children brimming with book learning and shiny with achievement.

      Mummy talked about Burley Court with such rich memories – about how, every afternoon, once their homework was done, the Burley Court children ran up and down the polished concrete stairwells of Building One or Building Three. In her recollection, we were a rowdy crew of polyglots who screamed in Nyanja and Bemba and saved English for the best insults. Terrence, a beanpole of a kid with a Zambianised British accent, was the most eloquent of us all. He would fire off jokes veiled as insults that were halfway threats to whomever happened to catch his eye.

      ‘You! Your legs are so thin. Eh! Please eat so that I can beat you nicely and not worry about breaking you! Isn’t it that every night when your mother calls you upstairs for food she just pretending? How can you be eating and still staying so thin-thin like this?’ Terrence himself was long and bony with skin that looked as though it had never been near a jar of Vaseline, let alone lotion, yet somehow he had the market cornered on skinny jokes.

      I was not as brave as Terrence. I understood perfectly well that I was an easy target. I spoke Nyanja – though not as fluently as the rest because I was not Zambian. This meant that, although I had all the hallmarks and memories of an insider, I wasn’t one. I could not afford to make the same kinds of jokes. I tended towards the middle of the pack because I knew I was vulnerable. The wrong joke about the wrong child, and the pack could turn against me. Laughter can dry up quickly when you are a child: one minute you are making the gang howl, and the next you are in tears because someone has called you a refugee.

      I had to choose how I would distinguish myself and I knew that it had to be safe.

      So, I never joined Terrence in his attacks and I never laughed too heartily. I was simply one of the pack – playing hopscotch on the bumpy pavement in front of the steps of Building One in the evenings as twilight settled on the city and cars whizzed past. No one would have thought to look twice at me, nor at my little toddling sisters. We were children like all others; our skinny arms flew and our brown legs kicked high into the air. It was the same, evening after evening: we jumped and landed, threw the stones further and faster, desperate to get in one last skip before we were called inside.

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      There were three of us. I was the first. Then came Mandlesilo, born in 1977 when I was already three, and then Zengeziwe, who followed in 1979. As a child, Mandla was stubborn in the way that middle children must be if they are to survive childhood emotionally intact. She was quiet in a manner more thoughtful than it was shy. She also cried easily – a trait that has followed her into adulthood and which has a great deal to do with the fact that she is the kindest and most sensitive among us. Wedged between an overbearing older sister and a younger sibling who never met a show she couldn’t steal, Mandla was our conscience, the moral ballast that kept us out of trouble simply by virtue of her own principles. Zeng and I would happily have hidden our crimes from our parents, but Mandla wouldn’t let us. She preferred that we not sin in the first place.

      Zeng was a crowd-pleaser and remains one today. She was the kind of baby who woke up singing and then gurgled her way through the day, a sweet manipulator whose every sin you forgave because she was too brazen and too gorgeous to resist. This has been her enduring trait. She makes you laugh until your belly aches, even as you know you ought to be weeping with the knowledge that she is not as