South African's memoir details a life of not belonging

A South African woman who spent her entire childhood in exile will be in the Twin Cities this week to read from her new memoir. That's because a formative part of that exile occurred in St Paul.

The book, "Always Another Country," is an uncompromising examination of a life focused on a place far away. Sisonke Msimang writes of the games she played with her friends as a girl:

"On the playground, we cradle imaginary AK47s 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!'"

Msimang's father was a member of the African National Congress. In the early 1960s, like many ANC activists opposing the Apartheid regime in South Africa, he left the country to agitate and prepare for change from outside his homeland. He kept moving.

First, he trained in the Soviet Union. Then he moved among ANC activist groups dotted around Africa. Along the way he met and married the woman who became the mother of Msimang and her two younger sisters. Her parents always assumed they'd return to South Africa.

"I find their hope remarkable," she said with a laugh. "Given how long it had been. By the time my father returned to South Africa, it had been 31 years. So he was 53 when he returned. He was 21 when he left."

"They always said we would go back, and my sisters and I certainly did not believe them," she continued. "Because it just seemed like a fairy tale: There's this guy on Robbin Island and one day he'll be free."

That guy was ANC leader and future South African President Nelson Mandela. Msimang's parents said when he was free they could return, but in the meantime, as exiles, they had to keep moving. They ended up in Canada, and it was there, many years later, that the fairy tale came true. In 1990 Mandela was released, beginning the transition to black majority rule in South Africa.

Msimang and her family returned to meet relatives for the first time, and see the places she'd heard about her whole life. But there was a problem.

"It was weird, because life continued, right? So this amazing wonderful thing happened, but I am in high school. So I have to finish" — in Canada, she said.

She was a good student. She won a scholarship to Macalester College in St. Paul and moved to Minnesota. She remembers being struck by how beautiful it was — and how manicured.

She went from being politically aware to being politically active, working on racial equality issues. While there were other African students on campus, she identified and worked with African-Americans.

"As a kid who has grown up in exile, you don't belong anywhere," she said. "And African-Americans are this really interesting group of people who are citizens/not citizens in America. Who have always not belonged even as they are fundamentally from that place."

But South Africa kept calling. After graduating she moved back and got caught up in the excitement.

"We were rebuilding a nation. We were tearing down things that ought never to have existed in the first place," she said. "There was this sense that the future really lay ahead of us and it was wonderful."

However, as Msimang relates in "Always Another Country," as the fairytale became reality the reality got complicated. Now she's married to an Australian and lives in Perth.

Sisonke Msimang will talk about that and why she still regularly visits South Africa when she reads at St. Paul's East Side Freedom Library at 7 p.m. Friday.

"So South Africa, I refuse to accept this idea that it's a tragedy," she said. "It's a story that is very much unfolding and a people who have been through so much and yet demonstrate such a capacity to keep coming back and to keep challenging and to keep pushing and to keep talking to one another."

She hopes readers will see the strength of an African family in her book, and also, at a time when there are so many refugees in the world, the importance of other countries offering them a home.