Always Another Country. Sisonke Msimang

      THESE STORIES BEGIN with the tale of a young man. One winter’s morning in 1962, in anger and exhausted by the condition of being black, he joins an illegal army. The following year, he slips out of the country. The year after this, his leader Nelson Mandela is captured and tried for sabotage. In that trial, Mandela faces a life sentence but his bravery does not flag. Instead he rises to the occasion and utters the famous words ‘I am the first accused,’ and the world takes note as it watches an African man stand firm in the face of almost-certain death.

      By the time Mandela appears before the judge to answer to sabotage charges in 1963 – by the time he has said he is prepared to die for the struggle against white domination – the young man who will one day be my father has fled the country and has already been in Russia for a year, learning how to shoot a gun and decipher Morse code. Like other recruits, he leaves without saying goodbye to his parents or his cousins or his best friend. He wakes up, after months of careful and near-solitary planning, and disappears into the mist. A decade later, he is in Lusaka. After leaving the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow, he goes to Tanzania where he works alongside other comrades to establish a military base. He travels to Guinea-Bissau and stands alongside Amílcar Cabral’s forces staring down the Portuguese on the frontlines. By the time he reaches Lusaka, the man is no longer so young and has seen friends die.

      He meets a pretty young Swazi woman who is pursuing her studies. That woman becomes his wife and, eventually, my mother. She loves him, although she is ambivalent about his revolution. She is smart enough to mistrust wolves in revolutionary clothing but wise enough only to air her scepticism in private.

      Together Mummy and Baba travel the world. My sisters and I are born in the 1970s, when my parents live in Zambia, where the African National Congress (ANC) has its headquarters. From there we move to Kenya, and then to Canada, then back to Kenya and after that there is a brief stint in Ethiopia. Eventually, after Nelson Mandela is released from prison in 1990, we come home.

      My sisters and I are freedom’s children, born into the ANC and nurtured within a revolutionary community whose sole purpose is to fight apartheid. We are raised on a diet of communist propaganda and schooled in radical Africanist discourse, in the shadows of our father’s hope and our mother’s practicality.

      On the playground we cradle imaginary AK-47s in our skinny arms and, instead of Cops and Robbers, we play Capitalists and Cadres. When we skip rope, we call out the names of our heroes to a staccato beat punctuated by our jumps: ‘Govan Mbeki,’ hop, skip, ‘Walter Sisulu,’ skip, hop:

      ‘One!’ Jump.

      ‘Day!’ Jump.

      ‘We!’ Jump.

      ‘Will!’ Jump.

      ‘All!’ Jump.

      ‘Be!’ Jump.

      ‘Freeeeee!’

      South Africa is now free and those of us who care about the country are coming to see that the dream of freedom was a sort of home for us. It was a castle we built in the air and inside its walls every one of us was a hero. When we first returned from exile the castle stayed firmly in our mind’s eye. We told ourselves we were special and we sought to build a Rainbow Nation. We knew South Africa was a complicated and brutal place and not just a country for dreamers, but this did not stop us from dreaming.

      Today, South Africa is politically adrift. Many of us – the ones who went into exile, the ones who were imprisoned, the ones who lost loved ones to the bullets of the white minority regime – are unsure about our place in the country, and uncertain of South Africa’s role in the world. People used to point to South Africa to demonstrate that good can triumph over evil. We used to be proud of ourselves. Today, suffering and poverty – once noble – are not only commonplace (they have always been), but acceptable. We no longer rage against them. We have come to look past the pain of black people because it is now blacks who are in charge. The wretchedness of apartheid is ostensibly over, so the suffering of blacks, under the rule of other blacks, is somehow less sinister – which does not change the fact of its horror.

      So, here we are: Nelson Mandela is dead and so are Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki. Lillian Ngoyi and Ruth First and Fatima Meer and Neville Alexander and Dennis Brutus and a whole raft of great women and men who stood for and embodied a more just humanity are all gone. In their place is a new country, one that is ordinary and disappointing even as it has its moments of startling and shiny brilliance.

      The South Africa I had imagined as a child was a place of triumph, a crucible out of which a more dignified humanity would emerge. My parents were freedom fighters, so they cast our journeys around the world as part of a necessary sacrifice. Our suffering was noble. South Africa would one day be great because the indignities meted out to us were teaching us to abhor injustice, in order to inoculate us against inequality.