ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Some years ago, I read Gillian Slovo’s memoir Every Secret Thing and gained a glimpse into the sacrifices families make when parents are engaged in a cause greater than themselves.  Gillian Slovo’s parents were the exiled anti-Apartheid activists Ruth First – who was assassinated with a parcel bomb delivered by the South African security services, and Joe Slovo who after a lifetime in the ANC struggle became a minister in Nelson Mandela’s government.   Every Secret Thing shows that when parents sacrifice all in pursuit of a noble cause, the sacrifice affects their families, especially their children.

Born in exile from South Africa but now Perth-based, Sisonke Msimang’s memoir Always Another Country explores similar territory, but from a different angle.  She is acutely conscious of her privilege as a middle-class Black African: she was well-cared for, she had an excellent education and when she ‘returned’ from exile to live in the ‘new’ South Africa, she arrived with a good job, a comfortable income and a sense of mission to be part of the exciting reforms that were taking place.  The memoir traces her yearnings to belong, her excitement about the end of exile, and her disillusionment.

For Msimang, life in South Africa meant a sense of coming home, even though she had never been there, but she writes with disarming honesty about the unexpected travails.  In Canada – just one of many places she lived as a child, but the first in a predominantly white society – she had learned that the key to survival is blending in, in learning how to be just like everyone else as a first step to freedom.  The immigrant child must master the art of being normal so that she can stand out. But in South Africa, where she expected to belong, because multiracial, free South Africa was the dream her parents had worked for, she is like a love letter that has been torn up and put back together again.  Her experience of racial and feminist politics at university in America together with her broken heart after a failed relationship have fractured her sense of self and alienated her from her parents, especially her father who is behaving like a misogynist patriarch.  She is angry with her middle-class mother for being middle-class polite with the middle-class Whites who used to oppress them, but she is starting to realise that there are divisions within the newly-minted society into which she is blundering unprepared.

Her parents are busy becoming First Blacks.

Like everyone else of their age and social class, they are hard at work at nation building.  Their skills are in demand, and now that they are home they want to make up for lost time.

Baba is busy being a First Black CEO and First Black Director General and Mummy is busy making her mark in the community of returnees who are reshaping the business and cultural life of the new South Africa.  She is the First Black Woman to Open an African Restaurant, then she becomes the First Black Woman Table Grape Farmer, then she is named Woman of the Year in this Category and Runner-Up in Entrepreneurship in that Section. (p. 205)

But Msimang’s sister Zeng is a different kind of first black, an experimental kind, from the generation whose friends reflect the changing face of the country.  There are those like her…

who grew up in exile in Lesotho and Zambia and Uganda and Sweden and Russia and the UK and Canada and America and all sorts of other places. They returned as teenagers in the 1990s and tried to integrate into South African schools.  All of them were South African in their hearts but they had not encountered South Africa until after some pretty fundamental parts of their identities had been formed. (p.206)

And there are those who grew up in South Africa as the children of professionals who became middle-class as the Group Areas Act was relaxed a little.  Some are the children of activists who never went into exile, so they know what it’s like to be under constant threat but also to belong to a movement that is also a family.

And then there are the others whose parents aren’t anyone special.

These are the black kids bussed in to the suburbs from Atteridgeville township or Mamelodi to attend the high school down the street from our house where Zeng is initially enrolled at school. These kids can’t relate to Zeng and she can’t relate to them.  They think she is stuck-up because her English is perfect and her isiZulu is faltering and her Sesotho is non-existent. They think she is stuck-up because she lives in a house down the street and doesn’t need to wake up at the crack of dawn to catch a bus to be around white children who scorn them and laugh at their hair and their noses and the way they speak.  (p.207)

Msimang doesn’t mince words, not even when referencing a secular saint.

Like Zeng, they also grew up in the dying days of apartheid.  Unlike, Zeng, they do not live in middle-class comfort.  Stray dogs roam the streets and there are shacks and overcrowded schools in their communities. Nelson Mandela may be sleeping on fine sheets and soft pillows in Pretoria, but life has not changed much for them yet.  (p.207)

Language is a minefield.  Some friends speak five African languages and English.  Msimang struggles just as Zeng does with fluency in the everyday languages around her now.  She and her family regard Afrikaans as a pariah language and refused to learn it, which adds additional strain to communication with Afrikaners.

Those of us who watched South Africa’s transformation from afar will find this a fascinating memoir.  Sisonke shares not only our dismay at recent developments since Mandela’s death, but she also feels a passionate anger about the government’s failure to deal with the political, economic and social complexities of a nation in transition.  She mourns the loss of innocence:

There is a certain kind of innocence among black people—an innocence that will quickly be lost. In those early days, black people are bound together by a pride and a solidarity that underscores everything that we have collectively been through.  I don’t know it yet, but it will quickly fade.  A decade later it will all but disappear. (p.209)

Just one thing: Msimang couldn’t have known it when she wrote it but it seems singularly inappropriate in Melbourne where scurrilous politicians have been fomenting race hatred that she makes rather patronising remarks about polite white folks smiling at her in Perth because they seem pleased to see this tall, dark-skinned woman in their neighbourhood.  It adds a bit of chic to their suburb. She recognises these benevolent and inquisitive looks as kind, but also part of being defined by the superficial and yet all-important matters of the colour of my skin and the texture of my hair.  Fair point, but we here in Australia have been through successive waves of people who, yes, we at first notice as ‘different’ – from the postwar Europeans to the Asian refugees to those from the Middle East and now Africans… and some of us go out of our way to smile and be friendly because we want them to know that (whatever they may hear from a shameless media) the reality is that all nationalities are welcome here and that given a bit of time, they will no longer seem different at all.  Just part of our successful multicultural and multiracial society.

(And I hope you noticed that I said ‘we here in Australia’, even though I’m an import myself, with a Pommy accent that I still get teased about!)

PS Do watch Msimang’s TED talk!

Author: Sisonke Msimang
Title: Always Another Country, a memoir of exile and home
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2018
ISBN: 9781925603798
Review copy courtesy of Text Publishing