No promised land for exile kids

South Africa wasn't the utopia the children of exiles hoped for on their return , writes Beauregard Tromp

There's a two-year-old boy ambling about the Lubango street. The block of flats behind him has smoke billowing out of a second-floor window. Up the stairs, which are scattered with debris, through the opening where there was once a door, and into the kitchen, are the remains of Jeannette Schoon and her six-year-old daughter, Katryn.

"I don't really remember much of it. To me it's like a snapshot," said Fritz Schoon, who is now 33.

Nondescript in a Killarney, Johannesburg, coffee shop, Schoon is one of the thousands of people who grew up in exile; those who are still trying to straddle the divide between imagination and reality.

It is estimated that, after the banning of the ANC and PAC in 1960, up to 60000 people fled into exile, many of them children who spent much of their formative years thousands of kilometres from South Africa.

For them, home was a construct of their parents' greatest ambitions for the healing of a deeply fractured country.

Among those "dreamers" was Fritz's father, Marius, a "volksverraaier" (traitor) who was banned in the '60s for attempting to blow up a police station. The Schoon family fled to Zambia, then to Lubango in Angola to escape the reach of the apartheid forces.

They were found anyway and, after the murder of his wife, Jeannette, and daughter, Katryn, Marius (pictured above) and his son moved to Tanzania and later Ireland.

Having already suffered the trauma of losing his mother and sister, Fritz was all too familiar with the need to be vigilant in Tanzania. "Watch out for the white people. That's what I remember," he said.

Fritz spent the next seven years in Dublin, Ireland, where his father got married again, this time to anti-apartheid activist Sherry McLean, the person who would become the constant in the boy's life. Marius died of cancer in 1999.

Fritz treasures memories of his time in Ireland and credits it for allowing him to develop critical, independent thinking instead of the rote learning he encountered in South Africa.

Having lived in Angola, Tanzania, Zambia and Ireland before eventually "returning" to South Africa, he still feels a sense of displacement.

"I don't actually fit in anywhere. My father has been out of my life for as long as he's been in it. I've always felt I was starting from scratch and never really developed more than fleeting relationships."

Best Years

Mlungisi Galawe counts his years in exile as the best of his life. With politically active parents Steven and Granny Galawe, home life meant constant disruptions by security police. Then seven, Galawe doesn't remember much about fleeing the country, except the physical pain of the razor wire cutting at his flesh at the border with Botswana. For many of his formative years, Galawe was at the ANC compound in Morogoro, Tanzania, where all his needs were attended to by the party and the benevolent government of Julius Nyerere.

"We had a preschool, primary school, high school, university, hospital, farms, factories. There was everything there except a church," he said.

The factories would produce clothes, shoes and other needs for the community and the farms produced enough to feed everyone. Over and above this, all adults were given a stipend for additional needs.

The day would typically start with the singing of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, the reciting of the Freedom Charter, a history of South Africa and the history of the ANC.

Apart from Tanzanians and some South Africans, teachers came from as far as Norway and Sweden and pupils who performed well were taken on fundraisers to these Nordic countries, where they would sing and do gumboot dancing.

The lingua franca throughout this experience was Swahili and, when it was time to return home to Kagiso outside Johannesburg, Galawe struggled to speak Zulu, much to the amusement of other kids in the township. "Kids would bring their friends to hear what I sound like. I was an oddity."

Galawe was enrolled at a newly opened multiracial school in Alberton and, like nearly all exile kids, pushed back against the imposition of Afrikaans as a compulsory subject.

"The time I spent in exile was the best of my life. From when we were kids, dad was in the struggle. When we went to Tanzania, for once we had a kind of family life."

Hierarchy At Play

A study by Dr Zosa De Sas Kropiwnicki of the University of Johannesburg on the experience of children who grew up in exile indicates a hierarchy at play for those in the exile community. All interviewees in her study have their identities protected.

Families in the leadership of the organisation could afford nannies, private schools and new clothing. "You know, in exile there was a thing of families who were just better than the rest; the big names. That's how the ANC worked, so you knew that they deserved more than the rest of us."

These "big names" meant their children had access to virtually anything they wanted.

"My mom would make a real effort to get books for me; comrades used to jump the fence with a Famous Five book for me, in the face of all that danger," related one ashamed respondent.

Another told of his anger when his mother refused to buy him a pair of Air Jordan sneakers, instead giving the money to a poor South African family passing through.

"It was probably the most heartsore moment for me.

"How could this woman do this to me? As a child you just don't understand."

Sexual Violence

Several of the 47 respondents in De Sas Kropiwnicki's study reported that sexual and gender-based violence was rife in the insular exile communities. "I was raped five or six times. It was not disguised. For us kids it was normal."

Girls and women who spoke out about rape or other forms of sexual abuse say the needs of the organisation were placed above their personal welfare, a state of affairs that still leaves feelings of resentment.

"Our parents sacrificed everything for this country, including me," said one respondent.

Having spent most of their lives abroad, each exile kid struggled on their return to South Africa.

In one case, an exile child in Denmark contacted a social worker there to try to find alternate familial placement to avoid returning to South Africa.

One respondent recalled: "There was a sense of things having changed, like a 'freedom will reign supreme' kind of atmosphere. So it was a very hopeful time.

"We believed that home was paradise, but when we got to South Africa, we got the shock of our lives."

Siblings who did not make the journey out of the country sometimes treated their returning brothers and sisters with contempt, angry because of the love they were denied in South Africa.

"Instead of being 'Wow, your father died for us', it was more like 'Who do you think you are? You weren't even here.'

"We were taught that we would be heroes, and all the stuff we were giving up was for this greater good, and it would be appreciated one day, and it never was."

Shock to the System

For children who had largely grown up in nonracial, cosmopolitan societies, the racial hierarchy of South Africa was a shock to the system.

White exile kids went to the suburbs; many of the black kids they grew up with in exile went to the townships.

Nokukhanya Jele's father, Josiah (above), went into exile on ANC leader Oliver Tambo's advice after being detained between 1964 and 1965. After serving the ANC in several capacities in various countries in Africa and Europe, Josiah was appointed to the demanding post of ANC director of international affairs from 1978 to 1983, based in Lusaka, Zambia.

Soon after the Jeles returned to a newly liberated South Africa, Nokukhanya wanted to leave. With a white French-Hungarian mother, Catherine, and a black father, as the family were treated "like a zoo", she said.

With her father referred to as a "boy" and people persistently questioning the race dynamic of the family, Nokukhanya swayed between disbelief and anger. From the disbelieving black Cape Town doorman who would shout to anyone within earshot "Her name is Nokukhanya", to the encounter with a coloured woman on a train who asked how she and her mother could be related.

As soon as she completed high school, Jele bolted for France, where she studied law. After her father was posted to New York as South African ambassador to the UN in 1995, she joined her parents there before coming home to South Africa.

Her first job was as a local government researcher, visiting families in Khayelitsha, Langa and other townships in the Western Cape. "That's where I fell in love with South Africa. It was the people. Their resilience, warmth and sense of humour."

Inspired byTambo, Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela, Jele had a different idea of being a lawyer than her peers in Europe. "I had a sense that there was work to be done."

Even though the expectations of many exile kids had been dashed, many had embraced activist roles "precisely because of the manner in which their childhoods were constructed in exile, with emphasis placed on obligations and responsibilities ", said De Sas Kropiwnicki.

Today, Fritz works at a think-tank that advises the government on strategies to deal with poverty and inequality. Galawe has a transport and construction business. Nokukhanya is the special legal adviser to Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa.

As one exile kid told De Sas Kropiwnicki: "We grew up with a vision for utopia for South Africa and we were allowed to experience some of that utopia in our childhood, but we didn't know it at the time. But now our job in society is to create that vision from within."