Always Another Country. Sisonke Msimang
stories to escape punishment for being thieves and muggers. It was so easy to pretend to be a hero – meanwhile, they were just common criminals! Eh. Most of those ANC people were just crooks.
It had never occurred to me to think about my parents as dreamers nor had I thought about our family as being all that different from others in Burley Court. The aunties and uncles and the students who slept in our beds for weeks on end and then disappeared were just a fact of life. This was precisely why I would never make the jokes Terrence made – my difference made me vulnerable to derision.
Until I ran into Mama Tawona’s outrage and consternation, I hadn’t thought about the fact that there were other ways to live. Mama Tawona and the Rungarers represented the moral police. They were arbiters of who would get into the Kingdom of Righteousness and who would not. It was they – and not the landlord – who decided whether you belonged in Burley Court or not.
Mama Tawona was nothing like the other women who populated my life when I was a girl. The rest of them were like my mother. They were members of the ANC or they were students with strong ties to the liberation movement. Many of them were members of MK, a paramilitary wing of the ANC, which meant they were training to become soldiers.
These women were the ones I loved the most. They were sharp of tongue and hungry of gaze and they belonged together in the way of a pack. They were glorious in the multi-toned way of African women – long and lean with upturned buttocks, or sturdy and wide-hipped with slender ankles and wrists tapering neatly into broad feet and slim fingers. They were richly dark with closely shorn hair, or they had pitch-black just-so afros haloing their walnut skin.
They smoked and drank and laughed out loud; free in one sense, you see, but not free at all in the ways that mattered the most. They wore minidresses and long boots and jeans that allowed them to move quickly and jump effortlessly, to run the way women weren’t supposed to. They had arms strong enough to carry AK-47s and their braided hair was pulled magnificently tight; brows always plucked to perfection. They radiated a strange sort of lawlessness. It was as though their half-smiling, half-sneering lips had been moulded to defy the rules. Their ease with words, their comfort with the art of flinging barbs at one another, at women who happened to be passing by – at rival and friend alike – made my heart jump, pump, barapapumpum, barapapapum. I was in love with them.
Plump bums, bony haunches, spread thighs; they sat on our kitchen counters, calves swinging, shoulder to shoulder in sisterly solidarity. When someone put on a Boney M record, they would crowd into the centre of the living room, laughing into each other’s eyes. ‘Haiwena, sukuma!’ they would shout, urging anyone who still thought they might sit down while the music was playing to stand up. ‘Sana, ngiyayithana le ngoma.’ And there they would be, doing the Pata Pata to ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’.
I realise, now, these were new girls, stepping out of old skins. They roared, these young lionesses. They snapped gum and talked about how long they would wait before they were called to the camps. They laughed at their elegantly shabby men. They smiled sideways and sucked their teeth when a beautiful man they could see themselves loving happened to pass by. They breathed fire and revolution and I longed to be them.
The men were just as glamorous. The men who came to drink and laugh late into the night with my parents, the ones we called Uncle, and whose laps we climbed into and who tickled us and gave us sweets, these men were all ‘firsts’. The first African accepted at such and such university, the first black man to live in such and such a place, the first black to lecture at so and so university. Because of this, they had an air of invincibility and supreme confidence about them – even when they were falling-down drunk.
We were mesmerised by the poetry of their intellect. Every weekend there was a debate about when Africa was going to put a man on the moon. And because they didn’t snicker or seem to think this was absurd, neither did we. In the Lusaka of my childhood it was perfectly plausible that we could go to outer space under our own steam. I had no idea that a man had already been sent to the moon and that his name was Neil Armstrong. When I was little we only compared ourselves with the West in ways that favoured us.
In escaping apartheid, the men who crowded into our flat were part of a new breed of Africans who had left South Africa and Zimbabwe and Mozambique determined that they would shine and shine and shine. They were possessed of the secret of freedom, a sort of inner spirit that propelled them forward and made them look – to my wide eyes at least – as though they were soaring.
They were heartbreakingly handsome, these men. They lounged loose and long-limbed across our couches. They had guerrilla beards and unkempt hair, and sinewy thighs and bell-bottom jeans. They drove beat-up falling-apart cars, laughed as though their hearts were not burning and drank as though their nightmares would never stop.
They were idealists and gangsters and hustlers and bright-eyed students who had left girlfriends and mothers and wives and babies who would never know the circumference of their fathers’ arms – little ones who would grow into girls who would grow into women who would hate the men who loved them for not being their fathers. But in our house, they were heroes. My sisters and I knew nothing of the lives they had left behind and so to us they were new men, unmarred by responsibilities and ties to painful pasts and mundane yesterdays. In exile, they created themselves as though from mud and ochre.
Upon leaving South Africa, they had shed their old skins and become the men they had been born to be. Their backs straightened as they descended into Moscow’s frigid embrace; their muscles lengthened as they marched across bush and mosquitoinfested swamps in Angola; their spines elongated as they squelched through bog and marsh. Nonsense may have spewed from their malarial lips in Kongwa but they were free. They marched across Africa singing freedom songs until they lost their voices. They sang until they were dry-mouthed and croaking so that, by the time they arrived at the end of all their convoluted journeys in Lusaka, this place of cigarettes and laughter and hard-soft women, they were exhausted and ready to smile.
Having made it to the headquarters of their movement, which was supposed to emancipate the people, many of them simply collapsed. I see, now, that this is how we found them. We found them fathering fat brown children and loving free women. We found them sitting on red polished verandas feeling the warmth of the Lusaka rain on their brown shoulders. We found them smoking zol and singing Bob Marley’s ‘Buffalo Soldier’.
They came to Lusaka broken by many more things than the struggle for justice. But their demons did not matter here. What mattered was that they had decided to make our little city with its outsized ambitions and its orderly roundabouts their place of safety. For them, Lusaka became the place where black was equal to free, where nobody, not Queen Elizabeth or John Vorster or Richard Nixon, could tell them anything. Lusaka – in all its peaceful futuristic pan-African glory – was theirs and they meant to burrow in its peace for a while.
Some of the residents of Burley Court did not find the women and the men who visited us especially interesting. They found them loud and they resented the fact that their president – His Excellency Dr Kenneth Kaunda – had given all these revolutionaries special status in the country. Dr Kaunda was a dreamer who believed that Africa belonged to Africans. He had said that independent Africa had a responsibility towards the parts of Africa that were still in chains. And so, because Africans in South Africa and Zimbabwe and Mozambique were not free, Dr Kaunda had given us refuge in Zambia.
For ordinary Zambians, our presence was a daily reality, not just an empty political slogan. Most were gracious and embraced our cause. But for others, like Mama Tawona, we were rule-breakers and layabouts. For them, the word ‘refugee’ was a slur. The refugee women took Zambian men while the freedom-fighter men caroused and broke Zambian women’s hearts.
I crouched on the ground, waiting to be found. But the problem with Mummy and Baba was bigger than their being refugees; problem was, they were in love and that idea struck her as laughable.
Their gossip was about this strange and laughable fact. Mama Tawona threw her head back and cackled, talking about my mother as though she were a silly child. ‘Ha, mwana! That love she is feeling for that man makes her think he is wonderful. Meanwhile we all know that is just foolish. Isn’t it that when you are in love even a desert can have