Sisonke Msimang on her life in exile
ANC activist’s daughter conveys the pain in painterly prose, writes Orielle Berry
SISONKE Msimang has spent more than half her life in exile and out of the country she calls her home. This evocative memoir of her formative years poignantly demonstrates that a sense of belonging is is not a right but a privilege when you move from one place to another.
The daughter of an ANC activist, she was born in Zambia, where her father met her mother. Together with her two sisters, the family moved to Kenya and then to Canada before Msimang went to Malacaster College in Minneapolis to study for her degree.
Msimang returned to South Africa in its fledgling years as a democracy. Today Msimang, 43, divides her time between Australia and South Africa. When we meet, her accent is hard to place – part American, part South African with a slight Australian drawl. She’s a person of the world.
In the book, it comes across clearly that hers was a privileged childhood. Her upbringing as the child not only of revolutionaries, but of parents who bestowed the best education possible on their children, created an innate sense of curiosity from the books she devoured.
Everything she read exposed her to the power and beauty of the written word, and the book is by and large masterfully penned – her words dancing effortlessly on the page, rarely stumbling.
Her recollections are incredibly astute – her earliest memories, vividly painted in many layers.
The book opens with her toddler years in Burley Court, flats where the family lived in the centre of Lusaka.
One can almost sense the old-fashionedness of the mid-70s – in the curiosity and gossip of the neighbours; almost hear those old vinyls belting out the rich sounds of Letta Mbulu’s songs; almost smell the dust of Africa’s roads. It’s here that Msimang tells the reader she was born free in a country that, unlike South Africa, was independent, and how her parents also conducted themselves with “an unmistakable sense of self-assurance”.
Msimang also describes her early sense of self-preservation that carried her through her life: “I had to choose how I would distinguish myself and knew it had to be safe.”
In an incident she describes in Canada, it’s difficult not to shed tears as she writes of the watershed moment at school where she was called an “African monkey”.
“Even now, as I watch my own children make their own way towards resilience, I sometimes run my fingers over the puncture wounds left by racism’s sharp little teeth… I was still young and couldn’t recognise malevolence as it walked towards me,” she says.
Years after it happened, her late mother tells Msimang the story of why she took her girls on a camping trip which rained on them. Castigated publicly by her boss, she left her job and tells her future employers in an interview, “My dignity is not for sale”.
An abiding influence is also her auntie Gogi Lindi, who “taught me, above all else, to belong to myself first before I let myself belong to someone else. This is a lesson that is never fully learnt”.
Defining moments in her life are many and well-described. Her first but misguided love, Jason; her return to the country; the euphoria as she casts her first vote as a student at a South African consulate in America; and the excitement of sharing the experience thousands of kilometres away with her parents over the phone.
Meeting her future husband, Simon, her skills as a writer are again illustrated in her description of what love is about.
“His love and patience have taught me that love is a grappling, and ours is like every other love on the planet: often too hard and sometimes too bitter but always available in abundance.”
Msimang’s sense of failure at understanding her situation comes when she moves to suburbia and experiences living in a crime-besieged enclave, and what it feels to be a “white madam” as a black-conscientised woman.
While it may easily beg the question initially how, given her privileged position, she can actually comment, as you read on you can understand her sense of dismay at her lack of perception.
When we chat she lets on that it took her three years to write the book. “The people I write about in the book – they were aunties and uncles; friends. The idea of South Africa and who we were – some of it was very romantic and special or it made us feel that.
“But when we returned, the extraordinary things that made them special were no longer so,” she says.
“My book is about a little girl growing up and the idea of returning. I first came home in 1990 and my parents came home in 1997.
“People know me and know my writing and expected me to write a book of essays about politics. But this is on a personal level where I focus on the micro stuff.
“In America there’s as sense of despondency about Trump and you listen to this when you hear about Zuma. But this is not about the person but the bigger issue. In the book, I try to look at South Africa with humour and compassion.
“I was born in 1974 and on another level this is about how so many ANC families were destroyed by the struggle. My mother chose us and this is kind of a love letter to my parents.”
A love letter to her parents; a deeply personal account of a life and one’s own love/hate relationship with a country and what it stands for. A story of self-empowerment and the rocky road to coming of age. This multi-faceted book is engaging, frequently filled with delightful bouts of wit and wry humour, and also weighty soul-searching.
It can be read on many levels, but whichever way you choose, it is a brave book and recommended.