Dancing to the Beat of the Drum

Young and Restless

Chapter 1

1994. South Africa is voting. In the famous words of Dr Martin Luther King Jr: Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last.

Those words rang in my ears as the whole world awaited the much anticipated first free elections held in South Africa. Naturally, having watched my parents dedicate their whole lives to this day, I was on a plane in April 1994 to Johannesburg, so I could vote. This was my parents’ vision made manifest. With the liberation of South Africa came the liberation of the African continent.

My father, Bax Dale Nomvete, a brilliant young South African, son of a priest, Fletcher Nomvete, was one of the first black South Africans to be accepted at Cape Town University in the early 1950s. He married Corah Sibongile Kumalo, the daughter of Chief Walter Kumalo of Ladysmith, Natal. Excelling in his studies, he was offered a scholarship at Manchester University. At the time, my eldest sister had just been born.

My maternal grandmother suggested my mother leave for Manchester with my father and prepare a home for the baby. My sister would follow when the time was right. After much painful deliberation, this plan was agreed upon by the three of them. Pretty straightforward and feasible in an ideal world.

Whilst at the university, my father gave many talks on the situation in South Africa, and to the horror of both my parents, the apartheid government declared my parents exiled. The government threatened them, telling them that if they continued to tell the truth about South Africa they would never see their child again. The apartheid government destroyed my sister’s birth certificate, and my parents fought for five years to get their child out of apartheid hell and to safety in their arms in the United Kingdom.

The irony in all of this was that a Conservative government was in power in the UK at the time and some Quaker friends of my parents encouraged them to petition the government to order the release of my sister on humanitarian grounds. So they did, and the Conservative government of Great Britain so ordered.

Let us just think about that for a second. To bring my sister out of the land of her birth and into exile my parents appealed to a government filled with individuals who really were not that interested in having more rejected Africans populating their small island. And this guaranteed her safety.

You can imagine the kind of trauma this caused in my family. I am not sure how many wounds have had to be healed because of it, but having lived the life I have led, having been given the opportunities I have had, I am proud of my parents and my sister for overcoming what could have destroyed my family forever. And I mean forever because this kind of trauma tends to bleed into generation after generation after generation. Someone has to stop that flow of contaminated blood, and in my family, in my opinion, they did.

Where did this leave me? As a child born in exile, with no real relationship with South Africa, negative or positive. I grew up calling myself a South African because my parents managed to help me understand that I had every right to claim my heritage. But the question still remained: Was I a South African?

I know I am an African, even though I grew up in an international community. Let me explain.

I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Africa Hall, in Addis Ababa, was my father’s workplace.

Africa Hall was the place that housed the economic commission for the Africa division of the United Nations, and my father was the director.

I saw the whole continent roll in and out of there. Somehow, under that majestic umbrella of Africa Hall, African unity seemed possible.

Hell, people were speaking Amharic, Yoruba, Swahili, Xhosa, Zulu and on and on.

The downside of this multiculturalism was that it was just easier for my sister, Sheila—who had also been born in Ethiopia—and me to speak English. Yes, you guessed it; we never learned any of our home languages. Out of the four children born of Bax and Corah Nomvete, the eldest, Quezi, was the only one of us born in South Africa, and she left at the age of five when, as you have learned, the British government of the time ordered her release on ‘humanitarian’ grounds. But not knowing my home tongue was never a hindrance in this idyllic world of African unity, where it was understood that English was the language we all spoke.

Idyllic. That is definitely how I would describe my childhood. Idyllic.

Here we were witness to energetic, colourful gatherings my parents hosted over and over again. We would creep out of our bedrooms in our pyjamas and find a spot where we were hidden so we could watch the dynamic individuals sweep in and out of our house.

Some were future leaders of countries, some were to lead and die for justice, some were to become recognised as world-class artists—the likes of Chris Hani, Kofi Anan and Miriam Makeba—and all the time my mother and father chanted, Unity, unity, unity. Unity meant the emancipation of the individual that would lead to the emancipation of communities, countries and, eventually, the continent.

These were high-powered individuals that were working to build the richest continent in the world, but our parents never stopped being our parents.

Every year, one of the gatherings was, of course, to celebrate New Year. At five to midnight, my dad would come and find us, open the car doors in the garage, and, on the dot of midnight, would tell us to honk that car horn. We did it loudly and with such abandon. I loved that moment and as a result, New Year’s Eve is still my favourite time of year.

All these colourful folks were just ‘uncle’ and ‘auntie’ to us. Our parents’ dream. The most natural thing in the world.

Idyllic. That is how I would describe my childhood.

Life, as we all know, is never static. We happily travelled from country to country with our parents. One of the countries we lived in was Zambia. Still, the African heroes graced our home, even more frequently, in fact, as we were so very close to ‘home’ and in the heart of the African countries that had pledged to shelter South African freedom fighters who’d had to flee the land of their birth.

It was here I met Chris Hani. Legend. News of his death is something that marred my young life and still leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth.

I wonder what freedom in South Africa would have looked like had he lived.

Freedom fighters frequented our house time and time again to hear my father share his economic vision for Africa. A united Africa. Long before the European Union was being constructed, my father had written document after document detailing how an African Union could work. He had written those documents in the 1960s, and now in the 1970s, he was attempting to bring his dream to fruition. He created an organisation called the Preferential Trade Area that succeeded in creating the first southern African traveller’s cheques. We could, for the first time, travel from Zambia to Zimbabwe in one currency.

This brought a great deal of pressure on my father, who was ostracised over and over again as Western powers systematically turned African leaders against his plan. There were always threats on his life, and I remember this as being one of the most painful times in our family’s history.

Living in Zambia meant that we were within touching distance of ‘home’, and yet we couldn’t actually set foot there. In a strange way, this added to my parents’ frustrations. On a practical level, it meant that my dad had to find alternative routes when flying to African countries that you would usually get to via Johannesburg. On a deeper level, being so close to home and family without being able to see either was torture.

I was fortunate to meet my maternal grandmother before she died—they managed, after much discussion, to get her out to Botswana. Not long after that, she left this world. I remember feeling so grateful, as I watched my mother collapse with grief, that she had been able to reconnect with her mother one last time.

Finally, the powers that be, helped along by greedy, short-sighted African leaders, thwarted my father’s African Union plan. Everything was frozen, and as a result, Nomvete’s dream of economic emancipation was hidden from the African people. It was locked away in some cupboard, no doubt, in some African court, or has been destroyed.

Here is a little gem to end this chapter. A young man by the name of Uncle Thabo frequented our house and would often babysit my sister and me when my parents were invited out to state dinners and other high-profile events.

We loved Uncle Thabo. He was fun and always gave us his undivided attention.

In 1999, he became president of South Africa.

Funny, I never called him ‘uncle’ when he was president. Never saw him.

The last time I ever spoke to Uncle Thabo was when he babysat me when we lived in Lusaka, Zambia, in the 1970s.

Chapter 2

There was a strange period when I was in preschool that I would like to include. My dad was asked to lecture on economics at Harvard University in the late 1960s; I was about three years old. We lived in Boston, Massachusetts, in this really neat apartment, compliments of the university. My sister, Sheila, was in Grade One, and I was still in preschool, so most of my time was spent at home with my mother. I remember teaching myself magic tricks while I watched the Beverly Hillbillies on American television.

The extraordinary thing about this period in our family’s history is that it being 1968, Dr Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were shot during our time in the USA. I remember the shock and distress my parents experienced when these events happened. Especially after Dr King’s assassination. It felt as if the entire African-American community had gone into mourning, even people who did not necessarily support Dr King’s cause.

I saw the scene that is played over and over from the archive footage of that time, the one where thousands of people walk with Dr King’s coffin—I saw it broadcast live on American television. I remember my mother taking my sister and me to a church that had a memorial service for Dr King in which they played a recording of his famous I Have a Dream speech.

The second year came round pretty quickly, and it soon came time for us to leave. The most vivid image I have of that time is that I was allowed to have my first and last day in Grade One, which began with pledging allegiance to the American flag.

The nature of my father’s job meant that as a child I experienced one culture after another.

When I turned fourteen, my parents were called back to Ethiopia from Zambia. This recall coincided with the overthrow of Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian revolution had come to pass. The contrast between the Addis Ababa of my youth, under the rule of the emperor, and Addis Ababa under the rule of the new, young, communist leader Mengistu Haile Miriam was mind-blowing.

As a youngster, living my idyllic life, Ethiopia has fond memories for me. But even at the age of four, I remember feeling uncomfortable when the emperor would make his appearances in the streets of Addis Ababa with his huge entourage, followed by a truck with the Lion of Judah in a cage on the back, roaring fiercely at the expectant crowd. Those of us in cars were forced off the road and had to wait for this spectacle to pass before moving on to our various destinations. If you had to be somewhere, tough.

Addis Ababa was a typical African city in that the rich and the poor lived side by side; nothing was hidden. Addis housed a multitude of beggars who would freely roam the streets, urging people to hand over some of their wealth. However, on special state visits Haile Selassie would send the army out to clean up the streets, removing the beggars to goodness knows where. Wherever it was, it couldn’t have been far from the city because when the special state visitor left the beggars were right back on the streets again, ready for business.

When Mengistu took over, we were witness to throngs of working-class people walking the streets, heading to various stations that had been set up to educate the people. They were armed with exercise books and pencils and practically marched forward under the harsh gaze of soldiers with AK-47s, who had been ordered to escort them.

The people would file past this huge square in the centre of the city that boasted two gigantic pictures—one of Stalin and one of Lenin. Yes, Addis Ababa had its very own Red Square.

The outsiders looked on with mixed emotions, for, on the one hand, it was wonderful seeing people who were not able to read and write going to school and being taught how to do so. On the other, we could not help wondering if one form of dictatorship had simply been replaced with another.

While ordinary men and women were being encouraged to get an education, the schools that had existed for the privileged foreigners were being closed down. My parents did not know what to do—at this stage, we were approaching our O level years—and in 1976, they reluctantly decided to send my sister, Sheila, and me to boarding school. The only place they felt confident would guarantee us a solid education was the UK, and so we found ourselves on a plane with my mother to England, to Cheltenham.

Chapter 3

All I really knew of England came from the wonderful holidays we had spent there as a family—all meeting up from different parts of the world. My sister, Quezi, and my brother, Lewis, had by now left home and were living their own lives, carving out their own history, and these reunions in Europe during the European summer were a great reminder that our family had become our country. We knew no other base.

It was heart-wrenching when we finally had to separate from our mother after she delivered us safely to our boarding house. Sheila and I sat looking out of one of the windows of our new home and waved goodbye to her, her tear-stained face a reflection of our own. We watched her till she became a tiny dot in the distance and finally disappeared.

Cheltenham Ladies College. That was where I went to school for the next four years of my life. There we were thrown into the heart of the British establishment. We came from Africa to this school where there were maybe four black students out of nine hundred girls and where the students’ parents would pick them up in Bentleys and Rolls-Royces. By the way, an important point. The United Nations paid a large percentage of the school fees of its directors, which is how my parents were able to afford to send us to that school.

We only saw our parents once a year in Ethiopia. For the other two holidays during the course of the year, we caught the train to dear friends of our parents, the Burgesses, who acted as our guardians. Our story is typical of the African experience: parents because of impossible situations ‘back home’, having to send their children to Europe for a good education. In some cases, having to foster their children to people so that they could have a roof over their heads while they studied. This situation is so often misunderstood and is almost always viewed as ‘abandonment’. In truth, it’s one of the many consequences of colonisation, that families are forced into making such painful and unnatural decisions, the pressures of which have in so many cases caused those families to splinter.

We spent Christmas and Easter holidays with our guardians in Aberdeen, Scotland. Strangely, during the four years, we did this I almost never uttered a word in front of them. I pretty much never spoke. Hard to believe, I know. They were wonderful people. They took good care of us, and while concerned that I didn’t speak, they never held it against me.

This was a period of adjustment. England was so different from the Africa we grew up in.

A good example of this was the food.

The Burgesses were great cooks and their meals were always delicious. I mean, the food wasn’t awful at school, it couldn’t be for the kinds of fees they charged, but it was unbearably plain. Admittedly, we had come from Ethiopia, where the food is as colourful in flavour as it is in appearance. The Burgesses, though, were amazing chefs, and they made up for it.

The only problem was that their helpings were ‘English’ helpings. Thin slices of meat, one spoon of rice or potatoes, one spoon of veg and so on. I was a teenage African girl with an African appetite. I was starving after every meal! Sheila and I would go shopping in the afternoon and buy loads of junk just to keep us going. Then one day I told Sheila I wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. I was going to do an Oliver Twist. I was going to ask for more!

The day I did there was a lot of nervous shuffling and a great deal of apologising, but from then on we got good healthy helpings.

Those dear people—I must have been such a handful. We all know teenagers are impossible at the best of times, never mind when they are somewhat traumatised.