Msimang’s memoir is a series of biographical essays starting with her parents exile from South Africa. As a member of the outlawed African National Congress military branch her father is considered a terrorist by the White Supremacist government of South Africa. Born in 1974 in Zambia along with her two younger sisters, where the ANC headquarters in exile were located, her earliest memories, including one of sexual assault, are set in Zambia. From there ger family moves to Kenya, and then Canada. Countries where she encounters formative incidents of class privilege and then racism. She attends college in the United States, where she embraces Black identity, love and romance and their occasionally painful difficulties. She come to South Africa after the institution of majority rule in the 1990s, and eventually moves with her husband to Western Australia.

Both political and personal, Msimang’s reminiscences insights are clear, honest, and powerful. Most interesting to me was her observation that South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, after the end of apartheid left, for members of her generation, a feeling that justice had not been done and this was a hurt that remains unreconciled. ( )

Some years ago, I read Gillian Slovo’s memoir Every Secret Thing and gained a glimpse into the sacrifices families make when parents are engaged in a cause greater than themselves. Gillian Slovo’s parents were the exiled anti-Apartheid activists Ruth First – who was assassinated with a parcel bomb delivered by the South African security services, and Joe Slovo who after a lifetime in the ANC struggle became a minister in Nelson Mandela’s government. Every Secret Thing shows that when parents sacrifice all in pursuit of a noble cause, the sacrifice affects their families, especially their children.

Born in exile from South Africa but now Perth-based, Sisonke Msimang’s memoir Always Another Country explores similar territory, but from a different angle. She is acutely conscious of her privilege as a middle-class Black African: she was well-cared for, she had an excellent education and when she ‘returned’ from exile to live in the ‘new’ South Africa, she arrived with a good job, a comfortable income and a sense of mission to be part of the exciting reforms that were taking place. The memoir traces her yearnings to belong, her excitement about the end of exile, and her disillusionment.

For Msimang, life in South Africa meant a sense of coming home, even though she had never been there, but she writes with disarming honesty about the unexpected travails. In Canada – just one of many places she lived as a child, but the first in a predominantly white society – she had learned that the key to survival is blending in, in learning how to be just like everyone else as a first step to freedom. The immigrant child must master the art of being normal so that she can stand out. But in South Africa, where she expected to belong, because multiracial, free South Africa was the dream her parents had worked for, she is like a love letter that has been torn up and put back together again. Her experience of racial and feminist politics at university in America together with her broken heart after a failed relationship have fractured her sense of self and alienated her from her parents, especially her father who is behaving like a misogynist patriarch. She is angry with her middle-class mother for being middle-class polite with the middle-class Whites who used to oppress them, but she is starting to realise that there are divisions within the newly-minted society into which she is blundering unprepared.
Her parents are busy becoming First Blacks.

Like everyone else of their age and social class, they are hard at work at nation building. Their skills are in demand, and now that they are home they want to make up for lost time.

Baba is busy being a First Black CEO and First Black Director General and Mummy is busy making her mark in the community of returnees who are reshaping the business and cultural life of the new South Africa. She is the First Black Woman to Open an African Restaurant, then she becomes the First Black Woman Table Grape Farmer, then she is named Woman of the Year in this Category and Runner-Up in Entrepreneurship in that Section. (p. 205)

But Msimang’s sister Zeng is a different kind of first black, an experimental kind, from the generation whose friends reflect the changing face of the country.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/09/07/always-another-country-by-sisonke-msimang-bo... ( )