Sisonke Msimang
Every refugee is an exile
This month marks 25 years since Nelson Mandela stood in front of a huge crowd and was inaugurated as our first President.
I was born and grew up in exile. My father was a freedom fighter who left South Africa when he was 21 and only returned to the country when he was 53. Our family lived in Zambia, Kenya, Canada and the United States, before finally going “home” to a country in which we had never set foot.
As I reflect on the years we spent in search of home, I am struck by how lucky we were. Although it was sometimes hard, I wouldn’t change a thing about my upbringing. In some ways we lived in an age of innocence. When I grew up there was no shame in my circumstance. I was a child who was born to parents who were unable to live in their country due to the politics of the day.
The world embraced us. We were provided with shelter in Zambia and were granted asylum in Canada. Many other countries hosted South Africans and fought for their freedom. Yet today, the children of Syria and Afghanistan and Iraq as well as those from Eritrea and Sudan and many other places, are often treated with contempt. Authorities in too many countries treat children born in the wrong place and time — as I was — as though they are to blame for the wars and violence.
Today, no one uses the term “exile” to describe people who look like me. Black and brown people are uniformly called refugees or asylum-seekers. Yet as my family travelled the world in search of stability and freedom, we were exiles.
Refugee was someone else’s word; a term used by the United Nations and by bureaucrats who needed to tick boxes. Refugee was a word hurled at us by the rare person who wanted to insult us. We never called ourselves by this name. Instead, we described ourselves as freedom
fighters. We called ourselves a government-inwaiting. Our self-definitions were grand; clothed in the language of the future. We wore exile like a crown. We were proud of the courage it had taken us to leave and so exile rolled off our tongues with pride. In our mouths the ‘i’ at the centre of the word was long and drawn out. To be an exile was to be a person who was living in a state of hope and courage. There was sadness too of course. Exile spoke of a world left behind and a new one yet to be made.
Still, long after the circumstances demanding our exile ended, my sisters and I remained convinced that we had been heroes of our story, central protagonists in the drama of a nation and a people fighting for dignity. This was the power of language our parents gifted us when they insisted on calling us exiles. They refused to accept an external definition of who we were that diminished them or reframed them as objects rather than as active agents of their own destinies.
Every refugee is an exile and every exile, a refugee. There is no distinction. And yet, exiles get named while refugees remain nameless. Refugees blend into one another. Their lives are squashed into tents, their faces framed by sadness. Refugees march in a silent line away from the places in the world that are poor and violent towards places where people have plenty. And somehow, during the last 30 years, in the time that I have moved from being a stateless child into an adult citizen, refugees have come to mean trouble. Somehow, those who are most needy are seen as harbingers of conflict rather than its victims.
My parents taught us the power of naming ourselves, and this has been my greatest inheritance.