Always Another Country. Sisonke Msimang
you will see them.’
Mama Tawona’s hands had stayed on her hips in defiance as Mummy spoke, but her face was frozen. Mummy gave her a hard and thorough look and then asked, ‘Do you understand me?’
Mama Tawona remained silent. Ashamed.
‘Heh?’ Mummy repeated, sounding rougher than I had known she could be. ‘Do you understand me?’
Mama Tawona nodded. Then she looked down. She was not the type of woman who admitted she was wrong. That would have required the kind of introspection that women like Mama Tawona studiously avoided. Observing the rules of respectability, and policing the gates, requires a kind of hard-nosed vigilance that precludes sensitivity and thoughtfulness. My mother knew this so it is unlikely that she expected an apology.
But I was still young and so I did expect it. I thought we would wait for her to say, ‘I’m sorry too.’ It was obvious that both Tawona and her mother owed me an apology. That would not come. Mama Tawona shrank in the face of Mummy’s anger, but she was not convinced she was wrong; she had just been caught.
Mummy took my hand and we walked away. We entered our flat and I imagined Mama Tawona still standing at the door – rooted and, for once, speechless.
Baba put us to bed as usual. He told us a story about a girl who found a rock that turned into a star that shot across the sky and I was very tired but I knew that he intended me to know that I was that girl and also that rock that turned into a star and maybe also that sky. He wanted me to know that I belonged in his heart and in his imagination and that I was the centre of the universe.
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S.E.X.
MY EARLIEST MEMORY of sex is bound up in pleasure and voyeurism. I was only six when I stumbled upon a man and a woman in flagrante, but I was old enough to know that she was having far too much fun. I knew this because I could hear it in the way she chuckled, which I knew she was not supposed to do because what she was doing was something only men were allowed to like. I knew it even though I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why. There was something off limits about the way men turned their heads whenever a plump-bummed woman passed them by. Women were supposed to pretend they hadn’t noticed, and other men were supposed to look as well.
I was very young when I realised men were supposed to like things to do with women’s bodies and women had to guard themselves against the things men liked. They had to not smile and pretend they didn’t notice. Men were fools over sex and women were silly about love.
The women around me must have talked about men and sex and pleasure but those discussions were never fit for children’s ears so I didn’t get to hear them in any detail. I heard only the talk about love and romance. I saw the looks exchanged, and sensed what it was they weren’t saying, but I never heard them talk about sex.
The men were different. They talked about everything in front of us: white settlers and ditched lovers and fallen women they had picked up. Often, they had drunk too much. They leered and laughed and didn’t mind their manners unless they were told by the women that there were children around and they should shush.
◆ ◆ ◆
My sisters and I spent a lot of time at Aunt Tutu’s house. Aunt Tutu was one of Mummy’s best friends. She had married a Zambian man, Uncle Ted, and they had three kids, the same ages as my sisters and me. We were a crew, a less raucous group than the Burley Court group, but only because we were fewer in number.
At seven, Masuzyo (Suzie) was a rotund dispenser of wisdom, a slit-eyed know-it-all whose spectacles made her seem far older than her meagre years. Wongani was five, only a year younger than me but she, too, seemed far older: she was her mother’s child. Tapelwa was only four, an age so inconsequential that he was relegated to shuffling around on his own, not small enough to be with the babies and not old enough to be with us big girls.
Mandla and Zeng were always toddling around in the background, oblivious to the ways in which they were being excluded, while Wongani, Suzie and I spent most of our time discussing the latest news, gossiping and arguing about episodes of Wonder Woman. Aunt Tutu was rarely home. She spent her days driving around town, visiting people so that she could remark upon the state of their houses, the quality of their biscuits and the cleanliness of their servants.
Despite its downsides, one of the best things about Suzie and Wongani’s house was the guest bedroom, which was just big enough to accommodate a beige couch and king-sized four-poster bedroom suite. As we played, we would listen out for the crunch of Aunt Tutu’s car coming down the driveway. We knew that if she caught us in there with our dusty feet, and our grimy nails, the consequences would be dire. Invariably, we would get carried away and the person assigned to keep their ears pricked would forget and it would be too late – she would be standing right there behind you. One minute you would be mid-jump, giggling and about to land on the plump mattress, and the next your arm would be pinned behind your back and Aunt Tutu’s voice would be an edgy vibrato, oddly sing-songy and menacing and urgent and hot in your ear:
‘Didn’t I tell you not to play in this room?’
During the school holidays before I turned seven, our enjoyment of the guest room was interrupted for two weeks. Aunt Tutu’s brother and his German girlfriend visited from Berlin. When they were in town, our de facto playroom was off limits. This meant our relationship with them was initially antagonistic. Long before they arrived at the gate, crammed into a rickety metered taxi in a dishevelled, cigarette-stained heap, we decided we didn’t like them. They weren’t our visitors. They weren’t in town to keep us company and make us laugh. No. They were just a two-week-long inconvenience. The Uncle and the Girlfriend turned out to be more than that, of course, mainly because they were nothing like the adults we were used to. They lit incense, which reminded me vaguely of the Indian restaurant in the centre of town we sometimes went to when there was something to celebrate.
Also, they dressed very strangely – the Girlfriend especially. Whereas Mummy and Aunt Tutu poured their still-trim figures into tight polyester trousers and white knee-high boots, the Girlfriend wore long, flowing skirts and gypsy-like tops. A sliver of her hollowed-out belly was almost always showing, which we found somewhat disgusting and alluring all at the same time. The women we knew would never have bared the flesh on their stomachs. Legs and arms were one thing, but among African women, even those who defied stereotypes, tummy skin was an altogether different story.
As for him, unlike our fathers, the Uncle looked dirty. Baba’s scraggly beard and afro had a certain air about them: a cultivated unkemptness that nodded to forethought and therefore to some form of guerrilla stylishness. Not the Uncle. The Uncle looked positively downtrodden. His hair was beginning to mat in some places like the madman who used to dance lewdly in town right next to the Playhouse, the one who cackled at any woman with a big bum who happened to walk past and who picked up newspapers as though he would be able to divine the future if he just collected enough of them.
In addition to their shaggy appearance, the Uncle and the Girlfriend spent much of their time engaged in what they called ‘jousting’. When an exhausted adult wished to end a heated debate with the Girlfriend, she would retort, in her guttural German accent, ‘You caaan’t be afraid of jousting. That fear of questions and questioning, it represents the death of curiosity, which is the beginning of the end of any society yearning to be free.’ The Uncle also liked the word. He would say things like, ‘What will Africa become if those entrusted with its empowerment aren’t capable of intellectual jousting?’ He shook his head and sighed a lot.
Suzie and Wongani’s father was Uncle Ted and he was very important because he worked for Zambia Airways. Instead of letting him rest when he got back from work, the Uncle and the Girlfriend insisted on talking to him about the Anti-Colonial Project. We all knew that once Uncle came home we were supposed to go outside and let him rest. The visitors did not know this. So, they badgered him with questions and ignored our wide-eyed looks. Uncle Ted would take on the baffled and exhausted countenance of a man who had been working too hard to have to worry about thinking after he had