Going Home by Hilda Bernstein

EXILE Going Home by Hilda Bernstein D uring the past year I have been interviewing South African exiles to collect a record of their that sent so many South Africans into exile during the experiences, as part of our contemporary past thirty years. political history. Exiles leave behind them familiar social patterns that I first began interviewing in July 1989, before the enabled them to cope with life. They leave families, possibilities that were opened up in February 1990. often afraid to tell them they were leaving, especially in ’Going home’ was a dream deferred over the years, all the case of the many young men and women who left the more sweet because of its remoteness. with the aim of joining Umkhonto we Sizwe, to get Euphoria burst out when the organisations were military training Leaving in this way haunts them unbanned. For a short, ecstatic period all that my exiles wherever they are. They recall their parents, their could talk about was the possibility of going bacle sisters and brothers, whose absence remains a bitter Then reality crept in, and with it, ambivalence. The presence wherever they go. They leave behind personal doubts, the anxieties, arose from changes that had not belongings that gave substance and structure to their been forseen, from what the years in exile had imposed. lives. They have to find, to build, substitutes for what Emotional and practical problems cast great shadows they have lost. Because of this loss, their sense of over the prospect of going home. expectation is kept alive - the belief in their return. The largest single group of exiles must be the young women and men who left their homes to join the army, Where do they belong, where is home? Umkhonto we Sizwe. And for these, and many more young people who came out in recent years, the Uprooting is typical of our world today, with its problems are logistic rather than emotional. In camps in refugees from wars, famines and disasters, its "guest- various countries in Africa, working at the ANC base or workers” contracted into strange lands, its emigres farm in Lusaka, or at the school and farms in Mazimbu seeking a better life, its exiles escaping repression and and Dakawa in Tanzania, they remain a community of death. South Africans, unassimilated into the host countries, But the South African experience is reinforced by a ready and anxious to return as soon as the problems of double uprooting; internally, three and a half million transport, location and jobs can be worked out. This, of people have experienced the same bitterness of loss of course, is not easy and will be costly both in financial home, community, stability, friends; and been forced and human terms. But these young exiles are not into internal exile. And this reverberates on the external burdened with problems of identity. They have been exiles now that so many of them will be returning. uprooted, but not transplanted. For those who left their How many of them came from places that apartheid homes many years ago, who are dispersed world-wide, has wiped out, from communities that have been who have too often been isolated, not part of a cohesive irrevocably destroyed, from homes that no longer exist? community, the problems of return take on a different Where do they belong, where is home - Winterveld? hue. Crossroads? Dimbaza? Kwandebele? Since I started I have interviewed about 200 people. How This is more than a mere question of place. Home was do I define an exile? For my purposes, it is anyone who the place from which the world could be founded. "In left South Africa because of apartheid, whether they traditional societies,” writes John Berger, ”everything were politically involved or not; and had the intention that made sense of the world was real; the surrounding when they left of returning, even if subsequently they chaos existed and was threatening, but it was so because may have decided to remain in the host country. And it was unreal. Without a home at the centre o f the real, thi; includes as exiles people who were not born in one was not only shelterless, but also lost in non-being South Africa, like Father Lapsley who was hideously in unreality. Without a home, everything was injured by a terrorist bomb in Harare earlier this year. fragmentation.” He was born in New Zealand, but was deported from Contributing to this fragmentation is the fact that so South Africa and feels he belongs to the South African many exiles left as individuals. In this there is a sharp struggle. contrast with Palestinian refugees who were often "An exile is a person who is compelled to leave his uprooted and forced into exile as whole villages, homeland " writes Paul Tabori in The Anatomy of Exile, localities, communities; which has given their exile ”though the forces that send him on his way may be experience a cohesiveness which South Africans lack. political, or economic, or purely psychological. It does So we have had to reassemble the fragments of our not make an essential difference whether he is expelled lives, to compensate for the loss of home and by physical force or whether he makes the decision to community; and for many, the ANC has become the leave without such an immediate pressure." substitute. ”The ANC is my family now ” I have been Even without the "immediate pressure”, the choice told by a number of exiles, female and male. Closeness arises because of apartheid. It is apartheid, not a desire to the ANC mitigates the loss. And this has in turn 2 EXILE given strength and cohesiveness to the ANC. It fulfils Yes, our exiles learned a great deal. Large numbers more than a political home to exiles. received education that is world’s away from the crippling Bantu Education from which they escaped. Strangers in a strange land Many have specialised. At one time, in the ANC complex at Mazimbu, there were more black architects This need for closeness also explains the sometimes than in the whole of South Africa. Many women exiles incestuous nature of exiles’ lives, for they are seeking feel themselves to have achieved a sense of self- the face of the familiar from their compatriots. It is importance and independence that they know they more than a political commitment; it is an emotional could never have got ”at home.” The cultures of necessity. You are a stranger among strangers in a different countries have enriched our understanding of strange land - but not when you meet together with your our own culture, and the talents of exile South Africans own people. have revealed what is possible when apartheid is a thing So a new generation grows up in exile, those who came of the past. when they were very young with their parents, or who Our host countries have given generously in many were born in exile. They go to British or German, to different ways. Now the most difficult task of all Zambian or Canadian schools. They play with the begins. children of their host country. They assimilate different cultures, learn to speak different languages. Perhaps they have always been aware that they didn’t quite fit in; but they strove to be accepted, so they adjusted Then they grow up, get jobs - marry, and have their own children. Barto la Guma and Eric Singh have German wives. Nandi’s father is Swedish. Serina is married to a Dane. Husbands, wives - they are Zambian, French, American, Norwegian - wherever the exiles went to live, they began putting down new roots. Paul Tabori writes: wThose of my exile friends who would listen I tried to advise by stressing the simple truth that it was very difficult to lead a suitcase life - that after a while they had to unpack, literally and symbolically...” More than anything else, time works on the status of the exile, and so on their own emotional ties. Now we are all faced with the same questions, and for many of those questions we cannot find the answers. When are you going home? people ask. But where is home? And, as though echoing Tabori’s phrase, ”a suitcase life”, a woman whose husband had died in exile and who has been teaching in England for the past twenty-five years, said to me sadly "You can’t just pack a suitcase.” ”1 will go back with the ANC,” another longtime exile Hilda Bernstein is presently researching a book on told me, ”but I know that I’ll be going to a foreign the South Africans experience of exile. She has country.” interviewed South African exiles in many countries Once more, those who have managed to build a family of the world with the intention of chronicling their life in exile are faced with the necessity to decimate that experiences as told in their own words. It is to be a family And in their hearts, those who have lived outside 'human interest' book, exploring the many aspects South Africa for many years, know that they will never of exile such as culture, the experience of children return completely. Yes, physically it will be possible to and women and the politics of exile. In October, return, but it is not possible to cast out those changes she will be coming to The Netherlands to conduct deep within that have come through immersion in a interviews with South Africans who live here. If different country. ”You can't dip your foot in the same you are interested in being interviewed and would river twice,” said one exile.

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