we stand in a South Africa that is free but not just. For me, this is perhaps the most difficult fact of all to accept. It is hard to say, but I am coming to understand that perhaps it is true – that heroism is impossible to sustain during ordinary times. When the guns died down and the smoke cleared we discovered we were not exceptional. All along, we had been only human. This may be a message I have been fighting my whole life. I have always been a believer and the thing that I have believed in more than anything else has been the South Africans’ ability to triumph over apartheid. I have not had much of a faith in God, but I have been guided by a belief in humanity – in the leadership of the ANC, in my parents, in the collective of South Africans of all races to be better than their circumstances dictated. I believed in all these things until apartheid ended and, if I am to be honest, even though the past two decades have been disappointing in many ways, I am grateful that my wide-eyed wonder has been tested. For what is life if we live it only in a dreamlike state, believing what we are told and not knowing what is there in plain sight for us to see? In South Africa, the past twenty years have taught me that some people are complicated, that they will disappoint you and that you will love them still. It has taught me that some people are unrepentant and will never be sorry and that there is a place for them here, too, because history tells us grace is more important than righteousness; that uneasy peace is better than war.
In spite of what it stole from me – many of the securities usually associated with home, my ability to speak my mother tongue, access to aunts and cousins and nephews and neighbours whom I may have been able to call friends – exile was my parents’ greatest gift. Still, reft of a physical place in this world I could call home, exile made me love the idea of South Africa. I was bottle-fed the dream: that South Africa was not simply about non-racialism and equality, it was about something much more profound. When you are a child who grows up in exile as I did, when you are a refugee or a migrant, or someone whose path is not straightforward, you quickly learn that belonging is conjunctive: you will only survive if you master the words ‘if,’ ‘and,’ ‘but,’ ‘either’ and ‘both’. You learn that you will be fine for as long as you believe in the collective, your tribe. Trusting them, and knowing they have your best interests at heart, is crucial for survival.
You belong and you stay close that you may live. I grew up believing in heroes, so the past decade of watching the moral decline of the political party to which I owe much of who I am has been hard. My idols have been smashed and I have been bewildered and often deeply wounded by their conduct. I have asked myself whether I was wrong to have believed in them in the first place. I have wondered whether it was all a lie. I have chastised myself. Perhaps I was simply a foolish child.
If I were given five minutes with my younger self – that little girl who cried every time it was time to leave for another country – I would hold her tight and not say a word. I would just be still and have her feel my beating heart, a thud to echo her own. I would do this in the hopes that the solidity of who I am today may serve as some sort of reassurance, a silent message that, no matter the outcome, she would survive and be stronger and happier than she might think as she stood at the threshold of each new country.
This – I think – is all she would need: a message so she may know the road is long, the answers incomplete and the truth fractured and, yes, still worth every tear and scrape, every bruise and stitch. I would hold her in her woundedness and her pretending and in her striving and her need, and hope she might learn on her own and without too much heartbreak what I know now, which is that her own instincts will be her best comfort and, time and again, her heart her will be her saviour.
This book is both personal and political – it is about how I was made by the liberation struggle and how I was broken by its protagonists and how, like all of us trying to find our way in South Africa, I am 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.
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Burley Court
WHEN I WAS LITTLE, we stayed in a series of flats. First it was Burley Court, then some apartments near the University Teaching Hospital and then a small complex in a neighbourhood called Woodlands. The one imprinted on my mind is Burley Court – perhaps because it was the biggest, perhaps because it was the one Mummy spoke of the most. Burley Court was just off Church Road, which was a busy street close to the centre of Lusaka. The residents of Burley Court were part of a new generation of urban Africans who were not concerned with what whites thought of them. Each block smelled like kapenta fish and frying meat. As you walked past open doors and windows you could hear the tinny sounds of Thomas Mapfumo’s ‘Matiregerera Mambo’ or the elegant chords of Letta Mbulu’s ‘There’s Music in the Air’.
Like most kids in newly independent Zambia, I was born free and so carried myself like a child who had every reason to believe she was at the centre of the universe. Our parents also conducted themselves with an unmistakable air of self-assurance. They behaved as though the ground beneath their feet was theirs and the sun in the sky had risen purely for their benefit; as though the trees were green simply to please them. They laboured under the merry illusion that the Copperbelt three hundred kilometres north of Lusaka would power their gleaming futures forever more. They believed they would have the kind of wealth that generations before them had been unable to attain, shackled as they had been to a colonial yoke. They thought – naively, with hindsight – that their own children might become doctors and lawyers and mining magnates. They were innocents, you see. Though they were grown men and women at Independence, their liberation had come in the heady times before the price of copper plummeted, before the plunging currency brought them to their knees and made them beg for reprieve. When I was little the adults in my life were still buoyed by the idea that they had found their place in the sun.
Each morning the men who were breadwinners in our flats left for their government jobs. Their wives waved them off because they were almost middle class and had been persuaded to believe in the curious colonial set-up in which women stayed home and took care of the children and behaved as though this precluded them from other forms of economic labour. Housebound – but assisted by poorly paid housegirls – they turned to idle gossip and raucous laughter. They shelled peanuts and tightened their chitenges and prepared meals fit for their husbands, who were little kings in their own homes. The men for whom these women preened and clucked returned at dusk, striding with great purpose towards their families, making their way to tables laden with nsima and meat stews, to smiling wives whose middles were slowly broadening as they settled into city living, and children brimming with book learning and shiny with achievement.
Mummy talked about Burley Court with such rich memories – about how, every afternoon, once their homework was done, the Burley Court children ran up and down the polished concrete stairwells of Building One or Building Three. In her recollection, we were a rowdy crew of polyglots who screamed in Nyanja and Bemba and saved English for the best insults. Terrence, a beanpole of a kid with a Zambianised British accent, was the most eloquent of us all. He would fire off jokes veiled as insults that were halfway threats to whomever happened to catch his eye.
‘You! Your legs are so thin. Eh! Please eat so that I can beat you nicely and not worry about breaking you! Isn’t it that every night when your mother calls you upstairs for food she just pretending? How can you be eating and still staying so thin-thin like this?’ Terrence himself was long and bony with skin that looked as though it had never been near a jar of Vaseline, let alone lotion, yet somehow he had the market cornered on skinny jokes.
I was not as brave as Terrence. I understood perfectly well that I was an easy target. I spoke Nyanja – though not as fluently as the rest because I was not Zambian. This meant that, although I had all the hallmarks and memories of an insider, I wasn’t one. I could not afford to make the same kinds of jokes. I tended
