Always Another Country

July 15, 2018
An Australia-based African writer and political analyst's memoir of a peripatetic life spent moving among countries and continents.During her childhood in the 1970s, Zambia-born Msimang was "schooled in radical Africanist discourse." The daughter of refugees fighting for a free South Africa, her earliest memories centered around other exiles tied to the African National Congress. Most Zambians embraced the presence of refugees, but some deemed them "rule-breakers and layabouts." In 1981, the family moved to Kenya after Msimang's father took a job working for a United Nations agency. A few years later, they moved to Canada, where they would finally have a chance to shed their status as refugees and seek "opportunities that accompan[ied] the terrain of citizenship and belonging." But in white-dominated Ottawa, the family "stuck out" in ways they had not in either Zambia or Kenya. As one of just a few African families, they became subject to cross-cultural misunderstandings and targets of both overt and covert racism. Just as the teenage Msimang began to feel comfortable in her new environment, the family returned to Nairobi, where they lived an upper-middle-class lifestyle that separated them from ordinary Kenyans. In the early 1990s and not long after Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, Msimang was accepted to Macalester College in Minnesota. There, she became steeped in black radicalism and began a painful affair with a charming but "unemployed, and unemployable" black American that ended not long after the pair moved to California. The author returned to the newly liberated South Africa, where, to her surprise, she fell in love with and married a white Australian and eventually became one of many young blacks to feel betrayed by the dream of a more just and democratic society. Eloquent and affecting, Msimang's book explores the nature of belonging as it chronicles a perpetual outsider's quest for the meaning of home.A candidly intimate tale of a journey toward self-identity.

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May 31, 2018
A coming-of-age memoir brimming with no-holds-barred honesty, Always Another Country is a story about love, survival, politics and home. Sisonke Msimang charts various stages of her life, observing her surroundings and rich inner world through a lens that is intelligent and multi-layered. The daughter of South African freedom fighters, she spends her developing years in flux: stateless and in exile as a child in Zambia, adolescence in Canada and young adulthood in the United States. She returns to South Africa for the first time when it is finally free, only to feel loss and disillusionment as a stranger in her native home. Starting afresh is a constant theme throughout the book—Msimang’s account of her movement and migration frequently explores the question of whether home is a concept or a place. With razor-sharp insight, Msimang writes in a reflective tone that contains with both heartbreak and humour, as she navigates some often-overlooked complexities surrounding race, womanhood and class. An excellent blend of both the personal and political, Always Another Country is a bold memoir not unlike Maxine Hong-Kingston’s The Woman Warrior or Daisy Hernandez’s A Cup of Water under My Bed—a tale that will sustain itself for generations.

Cher Tan is a writer in Adelaide