gave them as little attention as possible. Her apparent lack of interest in them only fed their envy, though. It stoked the fires of their outrage. On Saturday mornings Mummy would leave early for her French class and as she passed they would harden their eyes. Heh! Maybe this is how people behaved in her country, but in Zambia, she would lose her man if she kept leaving the house for unnecessary things like French classes and tennis matches.
For the most part, the contagion of the Rungarers did not spread beyond their small group. Adult business was largely adult business and kid business stayed among us kids. But there were moments of crossover, when the mutters moved out of the shadows and the hurts that grown-ups inflicted on one another writhed before us like the grass snakes we would occasionally catch and kill when they strayed onto the playground.
◆ ◆ ◆
One day, we were playing a game of hide-and-seek and Terrence was ‘it’. I hid in a stairwell. I knew he wouldn’t think to look for me in that particular area because it was in Building One and Mama Tawona lived in Building One, which meant we rarely played in Building One. I took the chance, though, because I had seen her and two of the Rungarers standing at the bus stop waiting to go to town earlier. I thought I was safe.
I was wrong. Just as I settled into my spot, Mama Tawona and the Rungarers trundled down the hall, loud and out of breath. Perhaps the bus had not come and they were complaining about how unreliable public transport was becoming; perhaps they had been to the market and were back for lunch. I don’t remember precisely but I remember feeling the way they always made me feel – on edge. It was a hot day and they talked freely and easily – the way women do when they are not in the presence of their husbands or their children.
They stopped in front of Tawona’s house and their minds turned to gossip. Soon, they were talking about Mummy. Mama Tawona wondered aloud how stupid that woman could be taking care of that man. She suggested that Baba was not a real man in any case – just a boy chasing childish dreams, playing with guns and travelling all over the place using the Zambian government’s money. And all those parties and all that coming and going by the other guerrillas at all hours of the night! Always someone new sleeping in the house – men and women, men and women, sometimes children also there, inside. What about their own children? Some of those people were criminals. The Rungarers were convinced that a lot of the exiles coming from South Africa were actually just common folk, ordinary people who had concocted elaborate stories to escape punishment for being thieves and muggers. It was so easy to pretend to be a hero – meanwhile, they were just common criminals! Eh. Most of those ANC people were just crooks.
It had never occurred to me to think about my parents as dreamers nor had I thought about our family as being all that different from others in Burley Court. The aunties and uncles and the students who slept in our beds for weeks on end and then disappeared were just a fact of life. This was precisely why I would never make the jokes Terrence made – my difference made me vulnerable to derision.
Until I ran into Mama Tawona’s outrage and consternation, I hadn’t thought about the fact that there were other ways to live. Mama Tawona and the Rungarers represented the moral police. They were arbiters of who would get into the Kingdom of Righteousness and who would not. It was they – and not the landlord – who decided whether you belonged in Burley Court or not.
Mama Tawona was nothing like the other women who populated my life when I was a girl. The rest of them were like my mother. They were members of the ANC or they were students with strong ties to the liberation movement. Many of them were members of MK, a paramilitary wing of the ANC, which meant they were training to become soldiers.
These women were the ones I loved the most. They were sharp of tongue and hungry of gaze and they belonged together in the way of a pack. They were glorious in the multi-toned way of African women – long and lean with upturned buttocks, or sturdy and wide-hipped with slender ankles and wrists tapering neatly into broad feet and slim fingers. They were richly dark with closely shorn hair, or they had pitch-black just-so afros haloing their walnut skin.
They smoked and drank and laughed out loud; free in one sense, you see, but not free at all in the ways that mattered the most. They wore minidresses and long boots and jeans that allowed them to move quickly and jump effortlessly, to run the way women weren’t supposed to. They had arms strong enough to carry AK-47s and their braided hair was pulled magnificently tight; brows always plucked to perfection. They radiated a strange sort of lawlessness. It was as though their half-smiling, half-sneering lips had been moulded to defy the rules. Their ease with words, their comfort with the art of flinging barbs at one another, at women who happened to be passing by – at rival and friend alike – made my heart jump, pump, barapapumpum, barapapapum. I was in love with them.
Plump bums, bony haunches, spread thighs; they sat on our kitchen counters, calves swinging, shoulder to shoulder in sisterly solidarity. When someone put on a Boney M record, they would crowd into the centre of the living room, laughing into each other’s eyes. ‘Haiwena, sukuma!’ they would shout, urging anyone who still thought they might sit down while the music was playing to stand up. ‘Sana, ngiyayithana le ngoma.’ And there they would be, doing the Pata Pata to ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’.
I realise, now, these were new girls, stepping out of old skins. They roared, these young lionesses. They snapped gum and talked about how long they would wait before they were called to the camps. They laughed at their elegantly shabby men. They smiled sideways and sucked their teeth when a beautiful man they could see themselves loving happened to pass by. They breathed fire and revolution and I longed to be them.
The men were just as glamorous. The men who came to drink and laugh late into the night with my parents, the ones we called Uncle, and whose laps we climbed into and who tickled us and gave us sweets, these men were all ‘firsts’. The first African accepted at such and such university, the first black man to live in such and such a place, the first black to lecture at so and so university. Because of this, they had an air of invincibility and supreme confidence about them – even when they were falling-down drunk.
We were mesmerised by the poetry of their intellect. Every weekend there was a debate about when Africa was going to put a man on the moon. And because they didn’t snicker or seem to think this was absurd, neither did we. In the Lusaka of my childhood it was perfectly plausible that we could go to outer space under our own steam. I had no idea that a man had already been sent to the moon and that his name was Neil Armstrong. When I was little we only compared ourselves with the West in ways that favoured us.
In escaping apartheid, the men who crowded into our flat were part of a new breed of Africans who had left South Africa and Zimbabwe and Mozambique determined that they would shine and shine and shine. They were possessed of the secret of freedom, a sort of inner spirit that propelled them forward and made them look – to my wide eyes at least – as though they were soaring.
They were heartbreakingly handsome, these men. They lounged loose and long-limbed across our couches. They had guerrilla beards and unkempt hair, and sinewy thighs and bell-bottom jeans. They drove beat-up falling-apart cars, laughed as though their hearts were not burning and drank as though their nightmares would never stop.
They were idealists and gangsters and hustlers and bright-eyed students who had left girlfriends and mothers and wives and babies who would never know the circumference of their fathers’ arms – little ones who would grow into girls who would grow into women who would hate the men who loved them for not being their fathers. But in our house, they were heroes. My sisters and I knew nothing of the lives they had left behind and so to us they were new men, unmarred by responsibilities and ties to painful pasts and mundane yesterdays. In exile, they created themselves as though from mud and ochre.
Upon leaving South Africa, they had shed their old skins and become the men they had been born to be. Their backs straightened
