Always Another Country. Sisonke Msimang
As children we were moon-faced and medium brown with plaited hair and ashy knees. We were observant and thus preternaturally sarcastic. We wisecracked our way through breakfast and joked through lunch and told hilarious stories as we played in the dimming light. And because the world was not yet cruel we were innocent in a way that softened our repartee.
Bath time was special. In the tub, Mummy often teased us about our dirty fingernails and scraped knees, about our blistered palms and our chapped feet. She would run a wet cloth over our torsos and soap our backs wondering aloud how we got so filthy. ‘And this cut?’ she would ask in an exaggerated voice. ‘Where did this one come from?’ She would wag a finger playfully and smile. Her staged anger made us laugh and her delighted voice was like honey in warm water. We knew that other mothers hated it when their kids came home with torn dungarees and bloody knees, so Mummy’s revelling in our constant state of raggedness was a novelty of which we never tired.
Mummy loved the small casualties of childhood that marked our bodies. She was riveted by our stories – playground triumphs and the physical indignities of falling and getting scratched – because she knew that the little dings and nicks on our bodies would forge our personalities. We were wriggly and outsized because she encouraged us to exaggerate and amplify. In our retelling, every cut was actually a gash, every scrape a laceration. At home, we were brave, even if outside we navigated with a little more caution.
We were little black girls born into an era in which talk of women’s rights swirled around in the air, but in which those rights were still far from tangible. The first ten years of my life coincided with the UN Decade for Women, so there were always speeches and conferences bringing people together to talk about the urgency of equality. Africans took the UN seriously back then; so, perhaps sensing the imminence of women’s liberation, Mummy set about raising us to be ready for the tipping point – the moment when assertions of female independence would be met with praise rather than admonition. She did this deftly. Somehow she knew that the key would lie in the cuts and the bruises and the shared laughter of our baths.
◆ ◆ ◆
Although most of the Burley Court mothers didn’t work, in our house Mummy earned the money and Baba – being a botany and entomology student at the University of Zambia (UNZA) – went to school to learn about plants and insects. Baba’s other job was being a freedom fighter, but the income from that line of work was negligible. Before he met her, he had been wedded to the Movement for the Emancipation of his People. But then he had seen her one day and liked her smile and liked her legs. They had talked and he had discovered that she played tennis and there was something about that he liked, too. Soon he began to think about her all the time: the Swazi girl with a killer backhand who pretended not to notice him when he and the other guerrillas stood at the courts, watching.
For her part, Mummy liked the tall handsome man whose corduroy pants fitted him just so. She liked his sense of moderation. He drank, but seldom to the point of forgetting. He spent time with the others, but was often on his own. He smiled often, but wasn’t the type of man who laughed gratuitously. In her experience, those types of men always had something to hide.
She qualified as an accountant the year after they met and soon after that he borrowed a tie and she wore a pair of white knee-high boots and a cream-coloured minidress that barely covered her swelling belly and they got married at Lusaka City Hall.
The women of Burley Court gossiped about all manner of apartment business but nothing occupied their time and energies quite like a good discussion about the Guerrilla who refused to work and the Swazi who was so in love with him that she allowed it. Whenever the subject of my parents and their relationship came up – which was often – the women would speculate about the peculiar madness that besets some women when it comes to matters of the heart.
Because their area of specialisation was rumour-mongering, Mummy and her friends referred to them as the Rungarers. Mama Tawona was the lead Rungarer. She couldn’t accept the unchristian relationship that was unfolding before her eyes: Zambia was then, as it is now, a deeply conservative society. Women and men had separate domains and never the twain should meet except where it was sanctioned by God.
Mummy was casually pretty and had nice fit legs, which she was always showing off in miniskirts and dresses that stopped far too high above her knees. She knew how to drive a car and generally lived her life as she wanted. Yet in the eyes of the Rungarers Mummy possessed a number of traits that would doom her to a failed marriage. For one thing, she worked too much, sometimes only arriving home after six, while her Guerrilla came and went whenever he pleased, collecting insects that were ostensibly related to his ‘studying’ and dragging the children along with him in dungarees and denim. They always came back muddy and sticky. It was obvious that he wanted to turn those three poor little things into boys – their hair was cut short and they did not have pierced ears, among other notable offences. Worse, they never went to church. There just didn’t seem to be any order in the lives of the Swazi and the Guerrilla and their children. It was not clear what the organising principle was that kept their household together: it was not God, nor was it family or tradition.
The Rungarers often huddled together in the hallway next to Mama Tawona’s house, bent towards one another in conversation. When they were not laughing loudly, they spoke in hushed tones. They cackled with their mouths behind their hands and then smiled and said hello and imitated politeness when someone walked by. Mummy couldn’t stand them. She smiled broadly whenever she passed them in her smart work suits, but never slowed down to have a conversation. She did nothing to cause them to twist their faces and turn their lips upside down at her but they did it anyway, rolling their eyes as she passed, staring at her new shoes or eyeing her old handbag. She couldn’t win and knew it. She was either a show-off for having too many nice things, or a pitiable mess for having too many items requiring mending.
She gave them as little attention as possible. Her apparent lack of interest in them only fed their envy, though. It stoked the fires of their outrage. On Saturday mornings Mummy would leave early for her French class and as she passed they would harden their eyes. Heh! Maybe this is how people behaved in her country, but in Zambia, she would lose her man if she kept leaving the house for unnecessary things like French classes and tennis matches.
For the most part, the contagion of the Rungarers did not spread beyond their small group. Adult business was largely adult business and kid business stayed among us kids. But there were moments of crossover, when the mutters moved out of the shadows and the hurts that grown-ups inflicted on one another writhed before us like the grass snakes we would occasionally catch and kill when they strayed onto the playground.
◆ ◆ ◆
One day, we were playing a game of hide-and-seek and Terrence was ‘it’. I hid in a stairwell. I knew he wouldn’t think to look for me in that particular area because it was in Building One and Mama Tawona lived in Building One, which meant we rarely played in Building One. I took the chance, though, because I had seen her and two of the Rungarers standing at the bus stop waiting to go to town earlier. I thought I was safe.
I was wrong. Just as I settled into my spot, Mama Tawona and the Rungarers trundled down the hall, loud and out of breath. Perhaps the bus had not come and they were complaining about how unreliable public transport was becoming; perhaps they had been to the market and were back for lunch. I don’t remember precisely but I remember feeling the way they always made me feel – on edge. It was a hot day and they talked freely and easily – the way women do when they are not in the presence of their husbands or their children.
They stopped in front of Tawona’s house and their minds turned to gossip. Soon, they were talking about Mummy. Mama Tawona wondered aloud how stupid that woman could be taking care of that man. She suggested that Baba was not a real man in any case – just a boy chasing childish dreams, playing with guns and travelling all over the place using the Zambian government’s money. And all those parties and all that coming and going by the other guerrillas at all hours of the night! Always someone new sleeping in the house – men and women, men and women, sometimes children also there, inside. What about their own children? Some of those people were criminals. The Rungarers were convinced that a lot of the exiles coming from South Africa