Back ‘home’ from a life in exile
Sisonke Msimang was born in exile but longed to come ‘home’. Yet arriving in SA as a teen wasn’t what she expected, she writes in her fascinating memoir
WHEN she was growing up, instead of cops and robbers she and her sisters would play a game they called “capitalists and cadres”. They would chase each other around cradling imaginary AK-47s in their arms. Sisonke Msimang says her upbringing was anything but ordinary. As the daughter of freedom fighters she spent her childhood in exile, drifting from one country to the next, never quite fitting in. But she knew one thing for sure: one day she’d put her foot down on South African soil, and she’d finally be home.
That big day finally arrived in 1990 shortly after Nelson Mandela walked free from prison. Sisonke, then just 17, was ecstatic as she stepped off a plane in Johannesburg and was ready to roll up her sleeves to do her bit to help build a democratic South Africa.
If it were a movie this would’ve been the climactic moment of the story – landing in SA ready for happily ever after. But for Sisonke this was real life, so what happened next was a lot more complicated as it slowly dawned on her that the home she yearned for didn’t exist.
Many writers have tried to make sense of how things have panned out in South Africa post-1994, but for Sisonke it’s personal as well as political – which is why her candid new memoir, Always Another Country, has been making major waves.
Now living in Perth, Australia, Sisonke (43) doesn’t sugarcoat it: the Rainbow Nation dream is in tatters, the government has sold out its people and many of the ideals that her parents sacrificed so much for have been betrayed.
Although it all sounds terribly depressing she thinks it’s a message that will resonate with readers who feel disappointed about the way things have turned out.
“Many South Africans are asking questions about the future and often when you’re thinking about the future it’s important to reflect on the past,” she says as she chats to us at the home of a friend in Parkhurst, Joburg.
Sisonke believes a big part of her debut book’s appeal is that it’s anchored by her own life journey, focusing on the first 20 years before the end of apartheid and the past 23 years. “In South Africa a lot of
the books we read are about big political figures – Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu. We have these giants in our history, and I thought it was important, as the country is changing, to think about smaller stories. That everyone’s story is important, even if you haven’t won the Nobel Prize. That South Africans are interesting and we all have a story to tell.”
SISONKE started writing the book in 2014, which was the year her mom, Ntombi, died of a heart attack. “She was very much an inspiration.” Both her parents taught her about courage and being willing to fight for your beliefs. Her father, Mavuso, fled SA in 1963 after joining the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). He then trained in Russia, learning to handle a gun and decipher Morse code.
While he was in Zambia he met Ntombi, who hailed from Swaziland and was studying to be an accountant. They fell in love and Sisonke, their eldest child, was born in Swaziland in 1974. She lived in Zambia until she was seven, moving to Kenya in 1981, then Canada in 1984, before returning to Kenya in 1987.
Her parents went to great lengths to explain to her and her younger sisters, Manle’silo (now 40) and Zengizwe (38), why it wasn’t possible for them to return to their father’s homeland. “It was an important part of our upbringing. We were taught that we were outside because our parents were fighting for freedom.”
They learnt many other things about the proud liberation movement their father served. “We were brought up as ANC kids so we weren’t just South Africans. We were ANC kids doing gumboot dancing and learning about communism – we were very militant.”
Although they were constantly on the move she says her childhood was happy. “My parents were very loving,” she recalls. “I had a wonderful family and even though we moved around a lot my parents protected us from a lot of the difficult things in life.”
Sisonke had high hopes when she at last arrived in South Africa. Her parents were still too scared to return so Sisonke made the trip with another family who’d been in exile. “My father still didn’t entirely trust the government but I was like, ‘ Well, I have a Canadian passport, I’m a kid. What are they are going to do?’ I was very excited.”
But she got a few nasty surprises during the two-week trip. “We went to Hillbrow and in a café we got into a fight with an old racist white lady,” she recalls.
And there were other things that rattled her as the reality of life in SA turned out to be different from what she’d been imagining.
“You’ve been given the identity as a South African, you were part of the ANC and the liberation as a child. And then Mandela is released and you come home but you’ve never set a foot in that country. It’s a very strange thing. You see these cousins – they look just like you but you’ve never seen them before so you have nothing in common.”
But she was happy to at last be able to visit her grandfather, Walter, in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal.
“He hadn’t seen his son in 30 years. My father left when he was 19 and came back when he was 53, but Walter finally got to see his son before he passed.”
The visit had such a major impact on Sisonke that in 1997 she came to live in SA, managing community projects for the Australian High Commission.
Having watched how political events have played out she says people should stop glorifying the ANC and start treating it like any other party.
Sisonke, a political analyst and writer, is on the board of amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism and the Graça Machel Trust, where she works on women’s rights and education issues. She’s also on the committee that grants Rhodes scholarships for South Africans to study at Oxford University in England.
She met her husband, Simon White, at the Australian High Commission in Pretoria, where they both worked on community projects. After spending 14 years with him in SA, they moved to his home country, Australia. She says she’s happy raising their kids, a nine-year-old daughter whom she refers to as “S” in the book, and a six-year-old son, “E”, in Perth.
Sisonke hopes her writing will make a contribution by helping people to realise there’s still hope – she believes that even though our leaders have failed us South Africans have the capacity to rise up, stronger and wiser than before.
Or as she explains in her memoir: “I’m piecing myself back together so that never again will I feel I need a hero. I’ve written this book because too few of us – women, refugees, South Africans, black people, queers – believe in our instincts enough to know that our hearts will be our saviours.”
‘My father left when he was 19 and came back when he was 53’