Always Another Country. Sisonke Msimang
territory. Uncle Ted was not particularly interested in social interaction. So, even at the best of times, he let Aunt Tutu do the talking, preferring to smile aimlessly into his beer.
The Uncle and the Girlfriend weren’t concerned about his baffled expression or his body language. So intent were they on making their own points that they simply couldn’t see his signals of distress. Every night they hounded him, peppering him with questions to which they already had answers, walking him through analyses to which they had subjected him already. Their favourite topic was Zambia Airways. It was a Vanity Project, a useless money-guzzling enterprise designed to appease the mighty Nationalist Ego. ‘How ironic,’ the Uncle would spit out, ‘that the great nationalist agenda has now been trampled by the forces of neocolonialism.’ They argued in forceful, spittle-inducing paragraphs, saying things like: ‘All these African presidents flying in and out of Jakarta to foster consensus amongst the non-aligned movement will do nothing to build basic infrastructure! They are just robbing the poor of the revenues that are rightfully theirs.’
Now Zambia Airways was the pride of the nation and it was well known that it only hired those who were enthusiastic about the project of African unity to work in its sales and marketing department. This meant that Uncle Ted had no idea what the Uncle and the Girlfriend were talking about with their critiques of nationalism and neocolonialism, which was lucky for everyone because it prevented hurt feelings all around. In fact, one of the best things about working for Zambia Airways was that its employees were not required to be anything other than patriotic and enthusiastic.
To most Africans in newly liberated countries, the national airline symbolised, in all the easy and trite ways, everything that was possible for a new nation. Airlines were the gleaming future. African pilots, resplendent in their uniforms, demonstrated the intellect and sobriety that colonialists had long accused Africans of lacking. However, their ground staff were something else entirely. They were sycophants, whose role was to burnish the reputations of their countries and herald the greatness that was yet to come.
Men like Uncle Ted, obsequious enough to have secured jobs with the national carrier, were elevated in society by mere association with the airline. His employment at Zambia Airways, and the fact that his office was physically at the airport, made Uncle Ted a big man in a small society. His position as a senior figure within Zambia Airways also made him singularly unqualified to critique the institution, certainly not in the way the Uncle and the Girlfriend were attempting.
In fact, it was quite the opposite. Uncle Ted’s role was dependent on his being a yes-man. Whenever President Kaunda returned from one of his whirlwind world trips, his arrival at the airport on a Zambia Airways plane would be marked with ululation and thanksgiving, but also with the awe befitting one who has just alighted from an aircraft. Uncle Ted was always there, on hand to greet him and to ensure everything functioned smoothly as the president made his way through the airport.
Since he was the president and there was no paperwork to be done, and since the chief of protocol, the minister of foreign affairs and most of Cabinet were also always present to welcome the president home, there was technically very little for a Zambia Airways manager to do on these frenetic days, but this never occurred to Uncle Ted.
As the spouse of a senior Zambia Airways manager, there was even less for Aunt Tutu to do at the airport when the president arrived, but this never occurred to her either. Indeed, sometimes, if the trip had been an especially important one – say to Moscow or Beijing – Uncle and Aunty dressed up Suzie and Wongani in their frilliest, whitest dresses, as though they were going to be christened, and they would shroud Tapelwa in a charcoal-coloured suit that was three sizes too large. Thus appointed, they would drive to the airport to stand in the VIP section on the runway in the hope that senior members of Cabinet would note their loyalty to ruler and country as they sweated in the glare of the concrete.
On those days, my sisters and I would watch on TV, hoping for a glimpse of Uncle Ted and Aunt Tutu and the kids. When he landed, the president always stood at the top of the stairs of the plane with his white hanky in his hand, waving to the crowds and officials gathered to greet him before he descended. There were always busloads of supporters dressed in UNIP colours – women wearing green for the land and orange for the copper that lies beneath the land and schoolchildren in checked uniforms sweating in the sun.
After waving and smiling, the president would make his way, in a slow-moving convoy, all the way to the stadium. There, he would shout in a voice quivering with patriotism, ‘One Zambia?’ It always sounded like a declarative statement blended into a question, the first part of a trademark call and response that all Zambians knew. In our tiny living room, my sisters and I would scream back along with the crowd, ‘One Nation!’
Having been raised in a one-party state, we understood that our role was to respond in the affirmative when the great leader called upon us to do so. Although we never saw Aunty or the children, more than once the back of Uncle Ted’s bald head was beamed into our living room in Burley Court. The fact of his having been on TV made him seem larger than life. To us, Uncle Ted seemed a little bit like Clark Kent. He appeared to be a mere mortal, an ordinary man who went to work every morning, but, in an instant, there he was, standing within spitting distance of the President of the Republic of Zambia.
Uncle Ted wasn’t someone you questioned about whether the airline could be viewed as an expensive monument to the ego of the president. Had he understood the nuance and complexity of the argument, Uncle Ted might have booted out his guests. But he didn’t get it. Uncle Ted could not have fathomed that anyone might suggest Zambia Airways was a waste of taxpayers’ money and so he simply looked at them quizzically across the dining room table and made no comment. It was as though they were speaking a different language, as though they had come from a distant planet where words were a form of nourishment rather than a set of sounds used for the purposes of communication. He simply ate his nsima and smiled in exasperation, content in the knowledge that they would soon be gone, and that in the meantime they would make their funny eating words and he would ignore them and pretend that they were making sense.
While the ANC comrades who gathered at our house every weekend may have appreciated the robustness of the arguments made by the Girlfriend and the Uncle, they were also beneficiaries of President Kaunda’s largesse and were unlikely to be so direct as to suggest that their free flights should be stopped in the interests of the common man and woman on the street. They were so deeply invested in the Zambian nationalist project that pooh-poohing the idea of a national carrier would have felt counter-revolutionary even if its logic was sound.
The hippie lovers, on the other hand, didn’t care. They weren’t tied up in Africa as an idea – they were only interested in The People as an idea and, although that had its own problems, it allowed them to be more critical than many others. When they weren’t debating the post-colonial condition, the Girlfriend and the Uncle spent a lot of time looking deeply into each other’s eyes, smoking cigarettes and holding each other’s faces: often simultaneously. They also complained that they were tired a lot and often they had to retire to their room to sleep off their fatigue.
They developed a pattern. They would get up late and join us kids for the midday meal. For lunch each day the maid fed us a steaming plate of nsima with greens and tomato relish. We gobbled it up and giggled as the two of them stared at each other dreamily over our heads. The Girlfriend struggled to eat the food but liked the fact that she was eating in the same manner as The People and so she persevered. We were amused by the awkward way she used her hands to scoop up the relish and in a way this endeared her to us. She may have had strange clothes and odd manners but she was sort of childlike in her attempts to act like she was one of us.
As we ate, the Girlfriend peppered us with questions. In these moments, we saw that she wasn’t like us at all, nor would she ever be like our parents. ‘How do you feel about the way the teacher teaches you at school? Aren’t you tired of being told what to learn?’ The Uncle chimed in, ‘Wouldn’t it be more fun if you could learn what you want to learn rather than what The System,’ (here he would grow more vehement) ‘what some strange people in a distant land, decide you should learn?’ We could understand the words, but it all sounded like gibberish.
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