AustLit

'Australia’s government tries to stop stories from being told but a new wave of authors are rallying against injustice.'

'Sisonke Msimang’s father fled South Africa and the violent repression of the African National Congress (ANC) in the early 1960s. She was born in Lusaka, Zambia and raised in a family at the centre of a revolutionary community in exile. They were forever moving to yet “another country” – Kenya and Canada were to follow. “…the dream of freedom was a sort of home for us,” she writes. They return to post-Apartheid South Africa in the early 1990s. It’s thrilling at first. But soon, Msimang realises that her absence from the country during the toughest years of struggle alienates her from the experience of other black South Africans. She discovers that it is one thing to be “of” and another to be “from” a country.' (Introduction)

'Msimang’s memoir, Always Another Country, registers her relocation from South Africa to Australia, but its overall coverage is the series of moves she made, mostly with parents and siblings, from Zambia, where she was born, to Kenya, Canada, and the United States, usually on account of her father’s political activity (as a young man he had been recruited to the armed wing of the African National Congress). These countries, she suggests, have their own varieties of racism, but the memoir also traces the stealthy shifts of power via class and gender in their intersections with race.' (Excerpt)