1 

 

Race, Exile and Belonging in Life Writings of Black South 

African Women  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Phozisa Mkele  

Student number: 385967 

Department of African Literature  

Supervisor: Professor Grace A Musila 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand in 

partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. 

 

 

Johannesburg, 2021. 



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Declaration 

I declare that this research report is my unaided work. It is submitted for the degree of Master 

of Arts at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It has not been submitted before 

for any other degree or examination at any other university.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

................................. 

Phozisa Mkele  

 

26 October 2021 

 

 

 

 



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Dedication 

 

In loving memory of my late aunt Ntombentsha Mkele and  

my best friend, the late Rethabile Morake.  

…the untold stories waiting to be written.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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Contents 
 

Declaration............................................................................................................................................. 2 

Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................... 5 

Abstract .................................................................................................................................................. 6 

Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 7 

Chapter 1:  Loss, Spirituality and Belonging in Pamela Nomvete’s Dancing to the Beat of the 

Drum ..................................................................................................................................................... 24 

Chapter 2: Gendered Experiences of Nationhood in Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country

 .............................................................................................................................................................. 48 

Chapter 3:  Writing Awkwardly about Race: Auto-fictional Insights in Zinzi Clemmons’ What 

we Lose ................................................................................................................................................. 73 

Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 95 

Bibliography ...................................................................................................................................... 106 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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Acknowledgements  

I would like to start by thanking God. There were so many opportunities to quit, 

reading and writing at the height of a pandemic, constantly on guard worried about 

who is going next, but you have kept me.  

This research would not have been possible without the support, patience, guidance, 

and precision provided by Professor Grace A Musila. The words “thank you,” can 

never truly convey my gratitude for your support. You have gone above and beyond 

the call of duty. A consummate professional with a quiet authority, which is always 

felt and admired. I commit to serve in my field in the same way you have displayed is 

possible. 

To my grandmother: what a blessing it is, to have you live over ninety years to see 

this moment. You not only set the standard, you made it your life’s mission to ensure 

that I succeed in all I do. Mama, thank you for everything. If there is one person I can 

always count on, it is you. You fought to open doors so we would not have to. You 

are a true trailblazer. I hope I have made you proud.    

To my late grandfather Nimrod Mkele, the first Master’s graduate in our family: thank 

you for imparting a love for African literature in us, which will continue for 

generations to come. I am in awe of what you were able to accomplish, considering 

the odds. What you have started, we will surely finish.  

To my younger brother Bulelani Mkele: thank you for your support and I look 

forward to seeing all you are going to accomplish. I hope I have been an example 

worth emulating. Know that nothing in life comes easily. You must fight for what you 

want. The world will question your gifts, but you must never doubt yourself. You 

have been created for greatness. 

A special thank you to Abiye Opuamah for offering yourself as a sounding board and 

voice of reason during the low lows of this process. I appreciate your constant 

encouragement and advice. 

Finally, I would like to thank the late Professor Bhekizizwe Peterson, Professor 

Pamela Nichols, Ms Rehana Rossouw, and my greatest supporters and cheerleaders 

Lasi Mashaba, Lesego Motlhako and my best friend Buhle Twala.   



6 

 

Abstract  
 

Black South African women’s contributions to autobiographies and auto-fictional texts is the 

focus of this research. The study offers an exploration of representations of exile and home 

and the feelings of unbelonging, outlined across three generational timeframes. Pamela 

Nomvete’s Dancing to the Beat of the Drum (2014), Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another 

Country (2017), and Zinzi Clemmons’ auto-fictional narrative, What We Lose (2017) extend 

the conversation about race, spirituality, gender representation, nation building, the 

disillusionment complicated by a nostalgia for home and the guilt that oftentimes burdens 

second-generation returnees. 

For this analysis, textual research was conducted on the three autobiographical texts. The 

study provides insights into the narrative styles adopted by Black South African women 

autobiographers. The autobiographical writing process addresses intersectional and 

monolithic representations of Black women embedded in patriarchal norms and structural 

racisms. 

A key finding from the study is that the thread binding the life writings of Nomvete, 

Clemmons and Msimang is anchored in national solidarity, communal identity, and the 

yearning to belong. Further, the respective writers’ explorations of displacement in public and 

private spaces forms part of the larger story of home and unbelonging. Lastly, the study 

demonstrates how the use of auto-fiction to create textual identities through visual genres 

such as photography, diary entries, song lyrics and blogs furthers the textual scope for Black 

women’s autobiographical reflections.  

 

 

 

 

 

 



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Introduction  
 

This study examines the exile life writings of three South African women: Pamela Nomvete’s 

Dancing to the Beat of the Drum (2012), Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country: A 

Memoir of Home and Exile (2017) and Zinzi Clemmons’ What We Lose (2017).  The research 

evaluates how these three Black female writers use the personal to speak to the political 

within the categories of race, nation, age and gender, while assessing the comments on 

history and the political from their perspective. How do Black female writers use personal 

narratives to critique stereotypes about Black women identities? 

Are there themes that Black South African female autobiographers from exile share or desire 

to address? What are the patterns of self-writing among these writers? How do these three 

authors explore similar themes in communicating their personal narrative? What role does 

memory or retrospective accounts of the past serve in Black South African women’s life 

writing? These are some of the questions the study explores. In addition, the research study 

interrogates how Black female writers like Zinzi Clemmons blend auto-fiction into the 

autobiography. What does auto-fiction achieve in Black female self-narratives, and how does 

it differ from the conventional autobiographical frame?  

An important part of this research report is to investigate the impact of exile on experiences 

of home, belonging, and unbelonging in the narratives of Black South African women from 

three different generations.  Most Black women’s life writing can be described as generally 

reflective and meditative in nature. With that in mind, this study examines how the three  

autobiographers use their stories to normalise writing on what may be considered the 

mundane or everyday life activities, redefining what is political as a broader more inclusive 

category.  Through reflection on their own experiences, Black women autobiographers 

articulate their resistance to different manifestations of patriarchy. The analysis studies how 

this is accomplished.  

During the apartheid era, Black women were persistently minored under the law. 

Autobiographies authored by Black South African women can be read as a mechanism to 

declass stories previously wrapped under the confines of the private. The Black female 

autobiography presents the emergence of the minored as owners of their own cultural 

production, aiding the assembly of new textual identities through the deconstruction of prior  

stereotypes. The three autobiographical texts discussed here allow us to examine how 



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autobiographical writing functions as an active site and agent opposing the textual erasure 

and oppression of Black women. In the subsections that follow, I offer a review of major 

strands of scholarly debates relevant to the study. 

Scholarship on autobiography portrays women as innovators in the field. As early as the 18th 

century, women have told their stories in an expansive context, beyond the limits of the 

private space. Women overtly and through veiled language techniques, refused to defer to 

European male subjectivities and writing practices. Sidonie Smith and Julian Watson (1998) 

describe the process of autobiographical narration as a method to self-knowledge. Women 

use autobiographical writing as a method of self-exploration and self-discovery.  

The autobiography, autofiction and biography are the prototypes of female inventiveness - 

catalysts for making the private public. Contemporary autobiographical and biographical 

trends posit writing techniques that evade the forms of closure that were popularised by 

romantic plots.  New literary forms of postmodern culture are dedicated to writing beyond an 

expected conclusion, subverting historically European and male literary conventions. The 

idea of the elusive conclusion is useful in reading how the three women at the centre of this 

study craft their respective life stories as open-ended works in progress.  

The appropriation of reality is an important idea referenced in scholarly debates on women’s 

autobiographical practices. In this instance, the writer is influenced by the autobiographical 

writing process but also persuaded to shape the narrative to a point of self-creation. Bell et al 

(1990) asserts that autobiographers have a keen sense to replace painful memories with more 

pleasant and even flattering perceptions of self because the ego reconstructs its own past to 

suitable memories based on the extent autobiographer’s self-knowledge.  

At the same time, through the discourse of trauma revealed in language, the author can 

signify estrangement, violence, or injury. Exile compels Black female authors to write about 

painful memories in ways that are meaningful. This entails the balancing act of depicting self 

in ways that transcend a flattering one-dimensional tone (Eaton, 2019). I draw on this 

thinking in exploring how the three writers navigate traumatic experiences within their 

autobiographical narratives.  

According to Judith Coullie (1994), it is difficult to make a distinction between the real 

author and the writer whose name appears in the text because of the existence of some 

autobiographies that are scripted by ghost writers. The reader can identify the discrepancy 



9 

 

between the narrator and the author, as either intrusive or distant, depending on the textual 

design. The narrator decides on the nature of the relationship with the reader. The 

categorisation of the narrator, protagonist and author is read according to an expressive-

realist theoretical model. There is a vacillation between the person and the persona, which 

communicates past selves in third person narrative. Coullie’s ideas are useful in identifying 

how the three primary texts differentiate the narrators from the writers, and to what end.  

 

Smith and Watson (1998) reference autobiographical projects which consist of visual and 

performance art including video, installation, written word, visual diary, photography, song 

lyrics and film in their research. The work of the artist challenges the legitimacy of the art as 

representative of real life in autobiographical narratives while pushing the boundaries on 

gender norms and the tradition of masculine energy as a depiction of historical practice. This 

line of thinking is useful in my reading of Clemmons and Msimang’s use of pictographic 

images and family photographs, and the value produced by adding family photos to life 

writing.  

The use of photographic imagery, diary entries, and song lyrics, contributes to the visual and 

performance art of the autobiographical project necessary for self-actualization. This research 

builds on existing literature of Black woman autobiographers, showcasing Black South 

African women’s engagement with the genre. The pioneers of autobiographical literature 

within a Southern African context include Noni Jabavu, Sindiwe Mangona and Bessie Head. 

Noni Jabavu is widely recognised as the first Black South African woman to publish an 

autobiography.  

American author Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) and Noni Jabavu’s 

Drawn in Colour (1960) and The Ochre People (1963) are life writing projects belonging to 

two equally significant Black women autobiographers of African American and South 

African descent. Hurston and Neale consider the self in the past, and self in the present; the 

self in the public and the self from a subjective experience.  

Alice Deck (1990), suggests that both these autobiographers act as cultural mediators. Deck’s 

study inspires interest in the role the private self plays in creating uniquely Black female 

experiences in predominantly white spaces and ideas of self-identification. Both authors 

wrote their autobiographies when they had left the Black communities of their upbringing; 



10 

 

their life writings were partly a response to the curiosity of their white readers who wanted to 

know more about their transition.  

Jabavu’s two life writings quote Xhosa proverbs, songs and terminologies while Hurston uses 

African American idioms in her text and a collection of folk expressions. Jabavu makes a 

similar attempt to use the language of Black people when communicating with her 

predominantly Caucasian readership at the time. She appears as a sojourner moving through 

Africa through the lens of her Western experience.  

Sindiwe Magona on the other hand opts for a different approach in her life writing, catering 

more for a primarily black public. Magona’s To My Children’s Children (1990) was banned 

by the apartheid government under the Suppression Act of Communism because it was 

viewed as a threat to the apartheid government. The state intended to silence Black female 

writers; but the surveillance had the opposite effect, fuelling the urgency among Black 

women to tell their stories. Magona’s autobiography confronts her existential crisis as a Black 

woman living in apartheid South Africa.  

For many aspiring writers, exile allowed them the freedom to write. In her interview with 

Barbara Boswell (2017) Sindiwe Magona states that she was only able to tap into her creative 

freedom when she moved to the United States at the age of 40 to pursue a post-graduate 

degree. Living abroad afforded Magona the opportunity to exercise her authority as a writer. 

Only when she physically vacated her homeland was she able to see herself as an author. Yet 

she also expresses feeling a sense of virtual homelessness due to her inability to rent or own a 

home in the United States (Rapafa, 2017).  

Bessie Head also belongs in this canon of early Black South African autobiographical writers. 

A Question of Power (1973), was an auto-fictional text she wrote to interrogate themes of 

racism, gender representation and nationalistic agenda. The autobiography shares similar 

tensions as those expressed in Clemmons’ auto-fictional novel based on a Coloured persona 

navigating race and unbelonging in South Africa and abroad. Born of a Scottish mother and 

Zulu father in 1937, Head is separated from her biological mother at birth and is raised by a 

Coloured family before she is shipped off to a Durban mission orphanage.  

Head’s writing explores life in exile after she decides to leave her husband and son in pursuit 

of an activism job. The novel is categorised as an auto-fictional contribution, with the 

protagonist Elizabeth’s life mirroring Head’s. The ostracization and marginalisation 



11 

 

experienced by the character because of her biracial identity strongly mirrors the author’s 

own lived experience. The fictionalised account of Head’s life centres the trauma of Coloured 

women stemming from patriarchal influences in South Africa in the form of physical, 

psychological and sexual violence. More poignantly, Head points to the double orphanage 

she experiences from birth and from exile and the fight against what she terms as a double 

colonization (Head, 1973).  

The structural and personal racism experienced by Black people is therefore unavoidable in 

the autobiographical construction of American and African writers alike. Critical race theory 

cements this ideology of autobiography as repository for Black thought, traditions and 

practices (Bassey, 2016). In this regard, Alexandra Hartman (2018) identifies complementary 

scholarship in embodiment theory, which recognises harmful perceptions associated with 

Blackness fixated on monolithic construction of subjectivity. Black bodies are registered as 

deviant, monstrous and fit for racial aggression for the purpose of elevating whiteness.  

Benouda Lebdai (2015) recognises how African writers are viewed and ultimately 

disadvantaged simply because of their Blackness. The quest for identity through the 

autobiographical process involves dismembering these racial stereotypes burdening Black 

writers. Standpoint theory is one of the responses to these racial limitations, essentially 

recognising human identity within a socio-cultural context aimed at dismantling Western 

subjectivities (Collins, 2016).  

In addition to racial prejudice, Black women writers use the autobiography to process their 

intersectional positioning as far as age, capabilities, sex and nationality are concerned. Here, 

Black women seek to redress injustices through the stimulation of new knowledge and 

practices. Black feminist theorists such as Ashley Patterson, Valerie Kinloch, Tanya 

Burkhand, Ryann Randall, and Arianna Howard understand that the creation of oppositional 

knowledge to confront predominant norms is an important part of including Black women at 

the fore of cultural production (Collins, 2016). 

The consensus from standpoint theorists suggests raising critical consciousness to enable 

oppressed people to contest racist ideologies.  As an example, Black women have individual 

experiences, but as a collective, they can pinpoint trends with leanings and connections to 

oppressive structures. Through group organising, Black women can adjust their knowledge in 

systemically oppressive environments, increasing their chances of survival.  Feminist 



12 

 

standpoint theory makes available a vantage point for a critique of male supremacy and 

patriarchal ideals.  

 

Because of oppressive structure most Black women found themselves at the bottom of the 

food chain, unable to make strides up the social hierarchy because they remain unequal to 

men, or they do not fit in the upper echelons of high class female sisterhood. These 

universalistic categories often fail to distinguish the qualities of marginalised identities. Betty 

Friedman’s The Feminist Mystique (1963) expands on the feminist theory based on the 

universal principle that white American women represent all global women. The grievance of 

Black feminists is that white women do not represent the marginalised interests or a universal 

feminist agenda, instead they push their own agenda. White women take over the public 

discourse with limited understanding of how Black women are affected; projecting their own 

agendas in the movement. Through group collaborations, Black women can influence 

oppressive environments for their benefit.  Black feminists argue that white women are not 

the monolith gender representation of all females. Through public discourse, Black women 

are able to own their distinct narratives free from whiteness (Hoskin, 2017). 

The study read from a Black feminist lens assess how Nomvete, Clemmons and Msimang 

circumvent co-option of their Black feminist agenda in the retelling of their life stories 

outside of white performative activisms. Gender blindness influences the exclusion of women 

from theoretical practices. The marginalisation of women happens both intentionally and 

unintentionally, and contributes to the invisibilization of women, particularly Black women.   

Henritte Dahan-Kalev (2003) argues that the active discrimination ascribed to women in 

public spaces is not because of gender blindness but a class struggle. Women from lower 

class positions are not only below men in higher social standing but also women that are in 

the upper-class system. The study, therefore, assesses how these three women writers adopt a 

feminist agenda in retelling exilic life stories free from the dictates of the Second Wave 

Feminism. These arguments provide a useful launchpad for the exploration of how Nomvete, 

Msimang and Clemons engage with the recurrent intersections of nationalist, racist and 

patriarchal marginalisation in their respective life stories.   

Early post-colonial Black South African autobiographies have demonstrated a preoccupation 

with the re-imaging of cultural memory as far as the project to represent the past and provide 

an authentic display of the present, while making room for the emergence of new realities 



13 

 

branded by distinctions of the colonizer and colonized, the individual and the community as 

well as national and transnational realities.  

Kgomotso Masemola (2017) suggests that disparities within the autobiography do not 

automatically produce un-belonging but should be a process of awakening using cultural 

memory as re-usable images to steady society’s self-image. In the event of exile, memories of 

repression are juxtaposed with feelings of anguish brought on by an escape to a host country. 

Masemola questions why Black South African roots are represented as nomadic. 

The spotlight on some post-colonial Black South African autobiographies more often than not 

start and return to the nationalist project. Black authors highlight the West’s attempts to 

confine Black literature into a monolithic sameness which is largely stereotypical. Motifs of 

nationality, exile and cultural affiliations accent the variance in Black subjects. The re-telling 

of these narratives in Negritudist, Black Atlantic, revisionist, Afrocentric and other typologies 

of transnational culture is a form of preserving cultural memory. From the early to mid-

1800s, for instance, slave narratives shifted from trauma witnessing of their tragedy and pain 

to emotional testimonials with feeling and voice, as the work of figures like Joanne Braxton 

(2010) demonstrates. Here, research on Black women's autobiographies begins with an 

investigation into fugitive and slave narratives of emancipation.  

Braxton (2010) notes how Harriet Tubman’s Incident’s in a Slave Girl (1861) delineates the 

narrator’s voice through a subversion of the oppressor’s language in the letters as a means to 

finding liberation first for self, second to community and finally to a cruel and antagonistic 

world. Tubman critiques the world around her while searching for liberation in the face of 

racism, patriarchy, and marginalization as a Black woman.  

Critics cite a prevailing practice in autobiographical slave narratives such as that of Harriet in 

relation to agency as a power dynamic in autobiographical scripts. For Black men, the ego is 

centralised through the portrayal of strength and power as an integral part of public life. 

However, for women like Tubman, it is the complete opposite. Self-recognition is what 

fosters self-discovery and finding power in powerless situations. Black American female 

autobiographies presented in the 19th century centre family and community over ego. 

Protecting the community and reducing risk to family is the main priority.  

Measured risks were taken because women were loyal and concerned with the safety of 

others and this was clearly documented in their autobiographical writings. Through spiritual 



14 

 

narratives, Black women were able to represent the worlds of the uneducated slave girls to 

missionaries and preachers, challenging gender oppression in an endeavour to carve out new 

identities based on adopted spiritual beliefs, biblical teachings and senses of self.  

Many more generations of Black women in the United States found the courage to script their 

life stories thereafter. Ida B. Wells a Black American woman; drafted her autobiography 

between 1928 and 1934. She died mid-sentence, while in the processing of making a diary 

entry. Wells’ autobiography was later posthumously re-written for publication in 1970 by her 

daughter and various editors, for a collection of autobiographical documents.  Braxton (2010) 

refers to Wells’ autobiographical assemblage as a corrective legacy, rebuking oppressive 

racist systems. A journalist by profession and an anti-lynching activist, Wells lived to amplify 

the voices of Black people as a resistance to the silencing of the Black movement. The 

recovery of Wells’ work almost four decades after it was written signifies what Braxton 

(2010) references as a gaining of lost ground in Black women’s autobiography. 

The work of Black autobiographies involves the re-imagination of cultural memory as a 

representation of the past and a projection of future moments through the emergence of new 

realities. Autobiography is a place of re-awakening using cultural memory as a device with 

re-usable images to maintain society’s self-image. The example of exile life writing displays 

how memories of repression are paralleled by sentiments of anguish and loss driven by 

loneliness experienced by the writer in the host country.  

Black South African men present similar agitations as those of Black women within the 

context of life writing on exile. Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959) features a 

range of common tropes in Black South African autobiographies. Like Magona, Mphahlele, 

laments the difficulty of writing in apartheid South Africa. He wrote his autobiography in 

Nigeria at the age of 37 because it was only after he went into exile that he was able to find 

his creative voice. Exile provided Mphahlele with an opportunity to re-discover what he had 

lost in apartheid South Africa.  Mphahlele admits his autobiography was a device to address 

questions about his identity when he was exiled in Nigeria (Masemola, 2017).  

For both Mphahlele and Magona, home is tied to ancestral relations. The ancestral connection 

was not made by Mphahlele until he departed his homeland, which thrust him into the 

discovery of a protest register directed at the apartheid government. Clemmons, Msimang and 

Nomvete use similar stylistic strategy in their autobiographies to critique the realities of home 

and exile. There is an almost journalistic reportage tone present in the autobiographical 



15 

 

writings of Mphahlele and Msimang, in their documentation of the Black nationalist agenda. 

Clemmons also uses a blog to present a similar news reportage style in her work, as I 

demonstrate later in this study.  

Women occupy the world as colonized, infantilized regressive people with white men in the 

forefront of national progress. The struggles of Black women are further diminished because 

nationalism is bred from masculinized memory and nationhood is constructed on male 

identity and male power. Black women fighting alongside their male counterparts have not 

been guaranteed inclusion as equal inhabitants within the nationalist project (McClintock, 

1993). 

Black women are portrayed as a primitive category, whereas men by contrast are depicted as 

progressive mediators of national modernity. Oftentimes, they are assumed not to meet the 

criteria of national survival, ultimately becoming silenced for the elevation of patriarchal 

practices (McClintock, 1993).  

Black feminist theories respond to the invisibility of women as active participants in nation 

building, by assessing the connections between class, race and ethnicity, which privilege 

white feminism. With this in mind, it is clear there are different narratives that represent 

varying genders, class, race, ethnicities of nationhood and there is not a singular or universal 

blueprint of national identities. Therefore, how do Nomvete, Clemmons and Msimang re-

imagine masculinised memory, considering how African nationalism has historically been 

constructed from male identity positionalities? This is a question that drives the discussion in 

later chapters of this study. 

Anne McClintock (1993) demonstrates that women are assimilated symbolically in the 

national project with no visible or tangible agency. The role of women was traditionally 

viewed as metaphorical whereas men were able to take on more dynamic responsibilities and 

attain recognition for these. Contrary to these gender framings, the study illustrates how 

women are not just transmitters of culture, reproductive agents or replicators through 

marriage, but fundamentally active agents contributing to the national cause. The portrayals  

of family within the autobiographical texts discussed here reject notions of women as mere 

passive recipients or non-participants in the national project. Instead, the autobiographical 

narratives allow mothers and female family members to be recognised as fundamental 

contributors to African nationalism.  



16 

 

Even so, it is not uncommon for women to be used in the nationalist project only to be 

discarded when the state reaches its goal. Because women are considered symbolic carriers of 

the nation, Black female autobiographies are important producers of meaning. The dynamics 

involved in autobiographical writing highlight a transition from nationalist movement to a 

gender representation actively resisting gender dimensions based on masculine concepts. 

The question of how to theorise patriarchal oppression in concurrence with class exploitation 

is relevant in this research study because it provides insights into how the man rules with 

authority over the family using the woman’s virtue as a tool to propagate male agendas. Carol 

Pateman (1998) hypothesizes that women should not be seen simply as passive figures in the 

determination of gender relations, arguing that not all women are oppressed the same way or 

in the same extent even within the same societies.  

Leigh Gilmore (1999) alludes to codes of masculinity entwined in the autobiographical 

representation of a man in his role as poet, scholar or hero resulting in the autobiographical 

effect. The representative man is at the core of autobiographical production. The gendered 

visualisation of autobiographical writing impacts the creation and reception of women’s self-

representational narratives. Historically, dominant mainstream self-reflective autobiographies 

omitted women intentionally because masculine identity was the default and most highly 

recognisable autobiographical form. I will draw on these theories in thinking about gender 

formations in these three women’s autobiographies. 

Jan Stats and Peter Burke (2000) argue that people who affiliate with a particular group share 

a strong connection. The disadvantage of this type of a collective is the negative social 

stereotyping. The outcome is the individual seeking validation begins to perform in ways that 

will be acceptable to the group and maintain consistency. Understanding how Black women 

use the autobiography as a catalyst for the study of specific social identities and collective 

thinking is important for this analysis. Do the primary texts function as a gauge for role 

identity of Black women? What are the implications or restrictions involved in persuasive 

self-representation?  

For Kerstin Shands et al (2015) the category of gender and the nation provides an 

understanding of how Black women have been historically conscientized. Winnie Madikizela 

Mandela touches on these nationalistic sensibilities in her autobiography Part of My Soul Left 

with Him (1984). The autobiographical narrative references Madikizela Mandela’s father’s 

teachings about her ancestral lineage, the colonizers, and the history of Black people. The 



17 

 

autobiographical narrative paints a picture of Madikizela Mandela’s poor upbringing and 

early politicisation. The autobiography functions as a device intent on distancing Madikizela 

Mandela from the myth that her political consciousness was a direct result of her relationship 

with Nelson Mandela. Madikizela Mandela documents the start of her activism with the poor 

women of Soweto. Her first arrest was during a demonstration against pass laws. At the time, 

she already had a career as a social worker from which she was fired because of her politics. 

The autobiography covers her diary entries during her imprisonment in Brandfort, detailing 

doctor’s visits, meals, mental deterioration, her anxieties about her daughter at home and of 

course the letters she sent to Mandela during this period.  

Ellen Kuzwayo, a fellow comrade to Madikizela Mandela, takes a different path in her 

autobiography. Kuzwayo selects what she considers successful Black female professionals to 

profile alongside her own personal story in her autobiography, Call Me Woman (1985). 

Unfortunately, her story becomes minimised and de-personalised because she focuses on a 

global story of gender representation within the nation building project. The approach 

Msimang elects to use in the telling of the gender and nation story, as I discuss in chapter 

two, resembles aspects of Kuzwayo’s writing, making the earlier life inscriptions an 

interesting point of reference for this research.  Marriage, abuse and prison feature 

prominently as sub-themes of feminised representations in Kuzwayo’s autobiography. 

Estrangement and unbelonging is also clearly inscribed in the text. Kuzwayo’s decision to use 

pictures in her autobiography as a connector to her family and other Black professional 

women in her autobiography demonstrates a trait commonly exhibited in Black women’s 

autobiographies (Coullie, 1994). 

David McCooey and Maria Takolander argue that life writing as a practice is concerned with 

“self and other, memory and others, past self and present self” (2017: 277). The exploration 

of life writing is useful in understanding the restrictions involved in accurate self-

representation. Feminist post-colonial writing has shifted from autobiography consisting of 

literary texts to include testimony, auto-ethnography, digital life writing life, graphic and 

audio-visual life writing forms. Contemporary life writing is largely defined as experimental 

because it is measured on the new traditions of reading historical standards of the genre.  

Victorian biographies and autobiographies were constructed with the same principles as  

nineteenth century novels, which is why it is often presumed that contemporary biographical 

works deploy narrative strategies of fiction in the earlier era. Feminist critics have raised 



18 

 

concern with the outdated model of subjectivity in Victorian biographies, detecting a gender 

bias which has become adapted as ideological work, and raising concerns of contamination in 

the genre.  

Autobiography offers an inherent assurance that the name on the book cover is also the 

narrator of the text relaying truthful facts about the life story. The pact aligns with Dorrit 

Cohn’s (1989) theory of referential and fictional text suggesting the text should be read in a 

particular key of either historical fact or fiction. Other scholars do not subscribe to this type 

of classification.  

 

Certain publishing houses may supress genre designation in experimental life writing because 

of overt or covert agendas. The life narrator engages the personal story within a confined 

moment in time. The autobiographical subject is in dialogue with herself using personal tools 

to access memories from the past while interacting with the current state of the present.  

Autobiographical writing is a performative enactment of self or the “I” which is neither 

stagnant nor unified because of the constant and unavoidable discourse associated with 

cultural meaning. Memory is an enactment of the past that can be accessed through a recall of 

experiences that occurred over time.  According to Daniel Schater (2007) memory is in our 

bodies because memory has history. Experience is how a person becomes a subject with 

social identities, which become material, economic and cultural.  

 

Smith and Watson (1998) suppose the autobiographical subject knows themselves as a 

subject based on particular experiences attached to social status and identity. Through 

embodiment, the body becomes the site for autobiographical awareness because life narration 

happens and multiplies there based on the subject’s experiences. Agency on the other hand is 

the production of autobiographical scripts with specific subjectivities and how the narrator is 

able to manoeuvre cultural subjects to relay particular stories using oppositional 

consciousness. What emerges are cultural sites of marginality displaying contradictions that 

exist in heterogeneous dialogues of identity.   

 

Since life writing is a self-reflexive process, the experimentational slant in life writing is 

measured against new writing conventions in a post-modern era. Cohn (1989) proposes that 

auto-fictional writing is not bound by factual accuracies, because a story can be manipulated 

to achieve fictive narrative goals. This study interrogates where the auto-biographical ends 



19 

 

and the auto-fictional begins using Philippe Lejeune’s conceptualisation of the 

autobiographical pact. The autobiographical pact confirms the contract between the author, 

narrator, autobiographical subject and the reading audience.  

The pact implies an agreement that the narrative voice belongs to the author documenting her 

story. The author is therefore expected to share historical facts using real names, to 

demonstrate the authenticity of the auto-biographical process. The pact aligns with the 

referential theory because it suggests each narrative should be read from an autobiographical 

or auto-fictional lens. The autobiography as defacement, elucidates elements tied to the 

confessional pact as described by theorist Paul de Man as a way of understanding the 

connection between life writing and identity. Life writing involves more than writing about 

past events; it is about displaying an inner consciousness (Cohn, 1989). 

Patterns of distinction in the research is the material location of the authors when scripting 

their autobiographical texts. What we can see in our case, is a trend amongst all three authors’ 

choosing to write their autobiographies outside of South Africa. For one, Msimang started 

drafting her autobiography after a year’s sabbatical at Yale University in the United States in 

2013. The choice to write from a personal perspective and not entirely from an activist slant 

enabled her to recall her childhood memories and nostalgia for a home she never knew but 

hoped to return to one day (Msimang, 2018).  

Nomvete is also assumed to have written about her journey to self-discovery when she left 

South Africa after a failed marriage, which left her emotionally and financially destitute in 

2006. The decision to return to her sister in Britain is important because that is where she was 

able to find safety and solace to process her trauma and write. Clemmons also begins writing 

her auto-fictional novel as an escape when her mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer. The 

writing process begins at her parents’ home in Philadelphia as journal entries, which 

Clemmons modifies into an alter-ego in her auto-fictional text.  

Although the authors write away from their homeland, there is a clear intention to promote 

their books in South Africa, demonstrating the importance of returning with their 

autobiographies and openly dialoguing about their journeys with local audiences. The life 

stories give each of the authors an opportunity to have their voices heard.    

Autobiographical literature possesses heroic qualities of an exile’s life to find triumph over 

estrangement or a sense of homelessness. Whereas expatriates live in a foreign land 



20 

 

voluntarily, an exile as defined by Said is any person unable to return to their home country 

through banishment. The stigma associated with exile is the supposition of a dire life as a 

foreigner.  

Edward Said (1999) reflects on exile as the tension between human existence and place or the 

habitation between self and home known by an undefeatable sadness. Critics of exile 

narratives mark narcissism and egocentrism as hindrances to the writing project, produced by 

feelings of isolation, terror and loneliness. Fetishization of exile is likely to occur in these 

instances because of remoteness from familiar influences. The loss of critical perspective and 

haste to affiliate with national organisations or parties is a common trap exiles face. Contrary 

to exile, nationalism nurtures self-awareness in exiles through communal reconstruction of 

history, language and ethnicity. Home is accessible from subtle writing.   

Isabel Macedo and Rosa Cabecinhas (2014:55) define home as “familiar spaces” and the 

“symbolic home as connected to memories of exile and nostalgia.” The feelings of home 

draw the emotion behind the collective and individual memory. An individual is able to recall 

memories based on the social context. Memory work cannot take place without the context of 

the public that occupies that society. The individual in a group setting is induced to remember 

private and personal memories. Old memories are essential in the crafting of autobiographical 

works by using the past to make sense of the present. The reproduction of memory is what 

preserves collective identity. Home is a place of no return where even if it is possible to go to 

the specific geographical location, another definition explains home as the lived experience 

of locality, sights and sounds and smells.  

Language works in tandem with memory because memory is accessed linguistically. Life 

narratives locate the author within the context of family or larger society. Therefore, it is not 

surprising that autobiographical writers use memory to reference their experience with their 

family or the greater collective and connection is found through past and present memories.  

Autobiographical memory of a colonial past is one of the studies undertaken by scholars 

which questions the distancing of the writer from her own perspective and the deliberate 

attempt to include the perspective of others and co-exist with multiple perceptions and  

conflicting memories.  The “other” is referenced as a potential collaborator. In using memory 

to remember a colonial past, material culture is the most common prompt. This type of 

memory is embodied physically but also psychologically (Macedo and Cabecinhas 2014). 



21 

 

The conceptual metaphor theory studies patterns of thinking using embodied metaphors as a 

means of relating with the reader’s experience. In essence, embodiment theory presumes the 

way an individual’s mind works is tied to their experience of the external world. Individuals 

make sense of the world using embodied experiences and metaphor through a projection of 

tangible things onto abstract things, therefore the mind is the body. Anne Holm (2019) 

specifies that the brain fits into two categories; settled or a racing mind. There are varying 

patterns of interpretative engagement with text. Second generation cognitive approaches of an 

individual mental state relates to the four “E’s”; namely embodied, embedded, enacted and 

engaged states of being.  

Holm (2019) takes it a step further through a presentation of metaphorical expressions 

portraying displacement theories. Embodied metaphors are known for taking on bodily 

experiences onto non-figurative realms keeping the body as the centre of focus. How do the 

three primary text use metaphorical language of this nature for the activation of memories of 

the past while creating new forms of expression? This question is explored in the chapters 

that follow.  

Edward Said (1999) among others, makes the inference that the life of the exiled is destined 

to a fugitive state because of what is remembered. Autobiographical writing within the 

context of home and exile follows similar story-telling patterns of estrangement, loss and 

feelings of abandonment. Along similar lines, the terror management theory postulates that 

individuals have a fear of death and prefer to think about anxiety-inducing thoughts 

intellectually. To manage the terror, individuals establish cultural worldviews within the 

safety of autobiographical production, which creates the impression that death is avoidable if 

the author follows textual cultural worldviews (Simon et al 1997).  

The above discussion maps the scholarly and theoretical debates with which this study is in 

conversation; and hopes to build on, through its reading of the three women’s 

autobiographical texts.  

Apart from the current introduction and a concluding chapter, this research report is divided 

into three analysis chapters, each exploring one of the three texts. Chapter one analyses 

Nomvete’s Dancing to the Beat followed by an examination of Msimang’s Always Another 

Country in chapter two, and in the last chapter, Zinzi Clemmons’ What We Lose. The study 

examines the connection between Nomvete’s story and the larger narrative of home and 

unbelonging. How does Nomvete use her autobiography to track her journey home? Is 



22 

 

Nomvete’s autobiography a useful study of the identity complex of Black women in exile and 

also with the collective; and if so, what can be drawn as common practices forming group 

identities from this perspective?   

The chapter opens with an exploration of Nomvete’s identity as it relates to a physical and 

spiritual location. Nomvete’s journey and search for a spiritual home is the cornerstone of her 

autobiography; how she manoeuvres from religion to religion demonstrates the extent she 

connects home with spirituality. The double blade of returnee experiences further exacerbates 

Nomvete’s longing for acceptance in a home that is unfamiliar but a place she so desperately 

wants to find acceptance professionally and personally. The chapter assesses how Nomvete 

works through her trauma of displacement caused by this unbelonging and finally returns to a 

newfound self.  

Chapter two studies Msimang’s Always Another Country as an autobiographical narrative 

that performs extensive labour in unbundling feminised representation of gender, through an 

arrangement that, does not study Black masculinities exclusively as the pillar of the 

nationalist project but takes a more collaborative approach, which involves Black women’s 

narratives in the nationalist movement. Msimang’s use of symbolic maternal depictions in her 

autobiography forms part of the close study of this research based on her mother and paternal 

aunt Gogo Lindi.  

This chapter also explores the influence of black-middle class privilege and the 

accompanying guilt returnees must contend with in post-apartheid South Africa, 

professionally and in the context of interracial relationships. Msimang’s refection on 

nostalgia and disillusionment as a second-generation returnee is also rich in insights into 

post-apartheid experiences for returnees. 

The last chapter turns to Zinzi Clemmons’ What We Lose as an auto-fictional meditation on 

themes related to identity and Black women’s personal and socio-political perspectives on 

race. Clemmons’ fictionalised reflections on race as a Black woman of South African descent 

born of a Coloured mother creates interesting points of analyses explored in this chapter. 

Since life writing is self-reflexive in nature, experimenting with auto-fiction as a form tracing 

the blur between fact and fiction is a fundamental insight in this chapter.  

The research, therefore, assesses Black female writers’ use of the autobiographical practices, 

for the retelling of their own exilic life narratives embedded in South African history from the 



23 

 

authors’ perspective split into three generational timeframes. These offer unique 

contributions as individual and collective bodies of work.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



24 

 

Chapter 1:  Loss, Spirituality and Belonging in Pamela Nomvete’s 

Dancing to the Beat of the Drum 
 

Focusing on cultural and spiritual dislocation, the analysis in this chapter follows Black 

women’s use of autobiographies as a resource for dissecting themes of displacement due to 

exile. The analysis draws on Pamela Nomvete’s Dancing to the Beat of the Drum (2014) 

through a close reading of the incongruences between the expectations and realities of 

return/returnee experiences of exiled Black women. The chapter further reads 

autobiographical storytelling as a healing device that is useful in connecting the gaps caused 

by a spiritual, emotional and physical dislodging of roots among exilic writers.  

Born in exile in Ethiopia to activist parents in 1964, as the youngest of four children, 

Nompumelelo Pamela Nomvete belonged to a family banished from their home country of 

South Africa. Nomvete’s family first settled in Zambia before moving to Ethiopia. 

Subsequently, Nomvete was sent to boarding school in the United Kingdom. Thereafter, she 

graduated from the Welsh College of Music and Drama. Nomvete always had a yearning to 

return home to South Africa to explore her identity. She was able to return in 1994, in time to 

cast her vote during the country’s first democratic elections. The plan was to live in 

Johannesburg for two years before returning to London.  

Nomvete worked at the Windybrow Theatre prior to scoring her first breakout role as Ntsiki 

Lukhele in the hit soap opera, Generations. The role catapulted Nomvete to celebrity status 

during her six-year tenure with the show. Ntsiki Lukhele’s character was ground-breaking, 

and the soap opera’s portrayal of middle-class Black women in the media was considered 

pioneering. Nomvete’s dreadlocks were a talking point because most women on television 

wore synthetic wigs on air at the time. Nomvete also spoke with a thick British accent which 

was largely uncommon in Black South African television programmes of that era.   

Nomvete’s career spans over 30 years, including appearances in both the small screen and 

film screens. The most notable roles Nomvete portrayed include Thandi in Zulu Love Letter 

(2004) a lead role for which she won a FESPACO Best Actress Award (2005). Prior to that, 

she had been nominated and won Best Supporting Actress for her role in Nothing but the 

Truth (2002). Nomvete also won the NAFCA Best Actress Award for the leading role in the 

film Kingmakers Diaspora (2015). She also appeared in Sometime in April (2005) shot in 

Rwanda alongside Idris Elba, Julius Caesar, A Raisin in the Sun where she received Regional 

https://esat.sun.ac.za/index.php/Nothing_But_The_Truth
https://esat.sun.ac.za/index.php/Nothing_But_The_Truth
https://esat.sun.ac.za/index.php/Julius_Ceasar
https://esat.sun.ac.za/index.php/A_Raisin_in_the_Sun


25 

 

Vita award for Best Actress, and The Good Woman of Sharkville (2002).  She later wrote and 

directed a stage production known as Ngiyadansa (2015) starring South African poet Lebo 

Mashile. 

In her autobiography, Nomvete writes of two significant relationships before her marriage in 

2002, to her late husband Collins Marimbe. The two relationships mentioned were with her 

peers in the arts academy, one with a famous Generations co-star and the other with a 

business partner and friend who was in a relationship with another woman at the time. 

Nomvete had a secret relationship with her producer beau and fell pregnant. The relationship 

deteriorated and ended after her miscarriage. Nomvete was introduced to her now ex-husband 

Marimbe, thereafter, at an industry party. The marriage ended in divorce in 2007 after years 

of emotional abuse, leaving Nomvete physically and emotionally destitute.   

 

Cultural and Spiritual Dislocation  

In her autobiography, Nomvete laments her inability to speak, understand or write in her 

home language. Nomvete fits into what Xuemei Li (2007) defines as bilingual status because 

although English is not her mother tongue, the language carries a symbolic resource with 

inherent political and cultural meaning for her as a Black woman autobiographer. Language 

is connected to power for writers assembling identities in exile. Not only is language a means 

of identity production, it provides access to collective social identity. Cultural identity is a 

safety net for individuals in exile desperate to belong. There is an unrelenting longing to be 

reflected within the group. Li (2007) explains that the phenomena of souls in exile chasing an 

elusive dream is well-founded because maintaining identity from the first language does not 

guarantee acceptance upon return to exiles’ home countries. A reconstruction must take place 

where a second self evolves in the second language to find acceptance in the new home 

country — in Nomvete’s case, her home in South Africa. The emergence of the second self is 

reliant on the returnee’s ability to re-integrate and successfully re-enter their home country. 

Returnees can locate a second self only when they are able to reconcile their idealised version 

of home, with what has been lost in personal identity, and the disappointment once the exiled 

returns home.  Nomvete’s second self eludes her upon return to South Africa. She is unable to 

possess it despite her longing for an identity linked to her home language. She has no access 

to that part of herself because of what exile has taken from her life. 

https://esat.sun.ac.za/index.php/The_Good_Woman_of_Sharkville
https://esat.sun.ac.za/index.php/Ngiyadansa


26 

 

Dancing to the Beat of the Drum is written in what can be considered a foreign language 

because it is not Nomvete’s language of birth, but it is the only language she knows; creating 

an expectation for Nomvete to claim multiple identities because of her exilic status. As a 

writer, she has to write in her adopted language — English — as a survival strategy to access 

symbolic resources in both the new context of exile, and old world of origin, South Africa. 

Nomvete’s inability to write in her mother tongue puts her in an “awkward in betweeness,” 

having no history while feeling the weight of cultural homelessness (Li, 2007:271). 

A balanced self emerges upon the journey to self-discovery in the writing process. 

Oftentimes, writers in exile are immersed in a “doubleness of identities and doubleness of 

writing styles” (Li, 2007:267). This doubleness is a constant source of turmoil and 

unbelonging. Therefore, a new identity is formed through the recollection of past memories 

actuated by the new language, which in this case is English. Bilingual writers — in the sense 

of writers born into one language community, but socialised to speak a second one — use 

nostalgia to merge the past with the present in an attempt to recreate home by combining the 

new exilic culture with the first culture.  

Teresa Piacenti (2008) hypothesizes that the categorisation and identification process of self 

or others is based on establishing meaning in interactions. Since the process of identification 

is in constant flux, the process of becoming and being is fluid. Exiles are othered relationally 

based on their gender, ethnicity, sex, social status etc, because they are considered a threat to 

national identity in both the country of their origin and the host country. Exiles must contend 

with feelings of unwantedness in both the new foreign land and their original home country, 

thereby inhabiting a double social-pariah status. The exile is oftentimes confronted by an 

identity crisis triggered by dislocation and displacement in the host country. The dislocation 

makes it difficult to connect with a collective family support system because of dispersal. 

New connections have to be cultivated because of the barrier to traditional social connections, 

and this leaves the exiled vulnerable. Living in exile makes Black female autobiographers 

susceptible to a loss of identity. To remedy the situation, the writer in exile may exercise their 

agency through social and political activism that gains expression in their life writing.   

Nomvete uses Dancing to the Beat of the Drum to think through physical and oftentimes 

spiritual experiences of loss and her desperate need to belong. Her sense of physical 

dislocation as a returning exile deepens her spiritual displacement as a writer. The 

autobiography is divided into four sections titled as follows: Young and Free, The Return to 



27 

 

South Africa, Slave at Work, Slave at Home and Once in Exile Always in Exile. The sections 

appear to be apportioned according to momentous fragments in her life story, beginning with 

her birth in exile and childhood memories, her return to South Africa and marriage, and the 

closing chapters dedicated to her physical and spiritual destitution, prompting a full circle 

exploration of her decision to return to the UK.  

Nomvete’s father, Bax Dale Nomvete, was one of the first few Black South Africans to be 

accepted at the University of Cape Town in the early 1950s. He excelled in his studies and 

was later offered a scholarship to Manchester University just after the birth of Nomvete’s 

eldest sister. Nomvete’s mother, Corah Sibongile Kumalo was the daughter of Chief Walter 

Kumalo of Ladysmith. It was Nomvete’s maternal grandmother who convinced her daughter 

to follow her husband to the United Kingdom (UK). While in university, Nomvete’s father 

gave many talks on the atrocities Black people had to endure in South Africa, triggering the 

apartheid government into declaring the Nomvetes’ as exiled. Nomvete’s eldest sister had not 

yet followed her parents to the UK. The apartheid regime threatened Nomvete’s father, 

harassing him to stop his truth campaign about South Africa. Thereafter, the South African 

government destroyed Nomvete’s sister’s birth certificate. What ensued was a five-year battle 

to get their child out of the country with the assistance of the Conservative government in the 

UK. The Nomvetes petitioned to have their daughter released on humanitarian grounds, and 

eventually, she was re-united with her parents. In her autobiography, Nomvete laments the 

irony of the whole situation, where a British government that has no regard for Black 

Africans in their country was at the forefront of her sister’s release from South Africa. 

Though born in exile, with no connection to her country except through her family, Nomvete 

identified as South African. She writes about the discomfort of calling herself South African 

when she had not been there, nor could she speak the language. She felt more confident to 

name herself as an African because that was more familiar territory, given her upbringing in 

multi-cultural environments, both in Africa and the United States, prior to the move to the 

UK. Nomvete’s father’s career was a primary factor in the family’s moves to different 

countries: he was the Director of the Economic Commission for the African division of the 

United Nations in Addis Abba when Nomvete was born, lectured on Economics at Harvard 

University in Boston, Massachusetts in the late 1960s, and lived in Zambia in the 1970s.  

Much like Sisonke Msimang, whom I discuss in the next chapter, Nomvete travelled and 

lived in various countries. When her family moved to Zambia, she was exposed to a variety 



28 

 

of freedom fighters such as Chris Hani who visited her home frequently. Nomvete’s father 

had a vision for a united Africa, even prior to the formation of the European Union. He 

created the Preferential Trade Area which produced the first Southern African traveller’s 

cheques in the 1970s. The objective was for citizens to travel from Zambia to Zimbabwe with 

one currency. She reports that this was met with great resistance from the West, to the extent 

that there were threats to his life. His dream of a united Africa was ultimately undermined.   

Growing up in exile, Nomvete, like Msimang some years later, had enormous admiration for 

her father. The paternal influence on both these two Black women writers is heavily shaped 

by their fathers’ economic and political positions; and the impact of what they were able to 

achieve despite the obstacles of spiritual and physical dislocations sparked by exile.  

In her autobiography, Nomvete reflects on her spiritual displacement and her journey towards 

spiritual healing. Initially, church was not a place Nomvete frequented as a child because her 

paternal grandmother was kicked out of the rectory when her husband (Nomvete’s paternal 

grandfather) died. Nomvete’s spiritual dislocation can be traced back to her parents’ 

relationship with religion. Growing up, Nomvete’s mother was a staunch Christian; her father 

was spiritual but was alienated by the church when his father died. Nomvete’s father was 

very bitter toward the church for kicking his mother to the kerb in the family’s moment of 

need because the family was left vulnerable and equally dislocated.    

The position of the presiding cleric had to be occupied by Nomvete’s father who was 25 

years old at the time of his father passing. He was enlisted to take over his father’s position in 

the church, even as the same church simultaneously kicked out his mother. It is not surprising 

therefore for Nomvete to inherit a similar resentment for the church. The hypocrisy and 

expectation of the church that Nomvete’s father ought to remain loyal to the office of the 

priesthood while his mother was left destitute prompted a long-standing bitterness stretching 

across generations among the Nomvetes.     

After her upbringing in a Christian household in Ethiopia, Nomvete writes about her first 

religious confrontation in an all-white, girls’ school, when her parents enrol her in 

Cheltenham Ladies College in the UK. The decision to take Nomvete and her sister to a 

private school in a developed country was fostered by her parents’ desire for a world-class 

education for their children. Also, Nomvete’s father had access to opportunities that would 

otherwise not have been unavailable to other Black families because of his directorship 

position in the UN. Following her enrolment at Cheltenham Ladies College, Nomvete only 



29 

 

saw her parents once a year for the next four years of schooling. In her autobiography, 

Nomvete recognises her privilege and the sacrifice her parents made in affording her better 

life choices. She does not perceive her parents’ choices to send her to a boarding school 

abroad as abonnement but does see the situation as an enormous contributor to her sense of 

dislocation. 

As one of only four Black girls in the school, Nomvete writes about a standout racist 

occasion which took place in church during a mandatory Sunday service. The preacher made 

derogatory utterances about Black people, commenting: “I was watching TV last night and 

there they were. These black people, they are so destructive that even the devil has 

abandoned them” (Nomvete, 2014: 15). The preacher’s offensive comments about African 

people was the beginning of Nomvete’s awakening to racism overseas, which further 

deepened her dislocation. Although she was still a teenager, Nomvete knew how her Black 

body appeared in a foreign country, as she comments: “there we were, thrown into the heart 

of the British establishment” (2014:13).  

In subsequent years, Nomvete begins an aggressive search for her spiritual home. The return 

to South Africa functions as the impetus necessary for the resolution of a spiritual un-

belonging she had lived with for years. Nomvete’s journey leads her to fundamental spiritual 

exchanges with prominent figures such as Zindzi Mandela and traditional healer Credo 

Mutwa. Finding her mother’s spiritual home in Zimbabwe when Nomvete is on the brink of a 

divorce becomes an expected, emotionally charged, and necessary expedition in finding her 

spiritual roots. The autobiography links the return to Christianity to Nomvete’s desperation to 

survive when she is confronted with physical and spiritual destitution after her divorce, 

similar to what her grandmother experienced when her husband died.    

Nomvete opens up about her search for spiritual belonging very early on in the 

autobiography. Former President Nelson Mandela’s daughter Zindzi Mandela introduces 

Nomvete to spiritual leader Credo Mutwa. Because of her admiration for Mandela, she feels 

affirmed by Mandela’s endorsement of her South African identity when he calls her a “child 

of Africa” (Nomvete, 2014:82). She does not hesitate to follow through with a visit to 

Mutawa’s compound. Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa is widely known as an author of African 

mythology, Zulu tradition and folklore, including a graphic novel titled Tree of Life Trilogy 

and Indaba my Children. Mutwa’s prophetic gift is remembered for prominent predictions 



30 

 

including the death of Chris Hani, the expulsion of former president Thabo Mbeki from the 

ANC and the demolition of the World Trade Centre.  

Nomvete describes Mutwa as a “shaman, traditional healer, sangoma…he is the spirit of 

Africa… with a wealth of African history and a deep sense of the African character” (2014: 

82). He referred to himself as sanusi (Zulu diviner). Mutwa used prophetic sculptures to 

communicate his premonitions about the AIDS pandemic and owned a hospice clinic with his 

wife Virginia. At the time of Nomvete’s visit, Mutwa lived in a desolate part of the Cradle of 

Humankind just outside of Johannesburg.  

In her writing, Nomvete jubilantly remembers Mutwa addressing her by her television 

character’s name Ntsiki. Nomvete describes her encounter with Mutwa as otherworldly. The 

trip to the Cradle of Humankind was marred by the presence of her charlatan husband, 

Marimbe. Nomvete’s first spiritual dislocation is tied to her physical exile from South Africa. 

Now that she had found her way back to her physical home, the moment of spiritual 

reconnection with the help of Mutwa almost escapes her because of her deceitful husband.  

Nomvete’s veneration for Mutwa conjures feelings of shame and disappointment at the 

neglect of what she considers African heritage. She depicts Mutwa’s home as unkempt, and 

strongly believes he has been forgotten by the people of South Africa. Mutwa could be better 

honoured in Nomvete’s view; her writing ascribes the neglect of Mutwa as a direct derivative 

of the dilapidation of nationhood and African heritage in the country.  

The meeting begins on an immediately poignant mark when Mutwa starts reading the bones 

and reveals Nomvete’s prophetic gift as a sangoma. The calling, according to Mutwa, is a 

generational gift transferred from her grandmother and mother. Although Nomvete’s mother 

is a Christian, and not a practising sangoma, Mutwa insists that Nomvete should seek her 

mother’s blessing through the laying of hands on her red and white cloth. Mutwa’s 

instructions are followed by a prophetic message over Nomvete’s life. The spiritual exchange 

with Mutwa is charged with hope, allowing Nomvete to catch a glimpse of her spiritual home 

through the encounter. In her book, she extends her gratitude to Mutwa for revealing a 

significant piece of her history tied to her African identity that was otherwise unknown to her. 

The meeting with Mutwa is a moment of triumph in the midst of a sustained search for a 

spiritual and cultural home. She closes the reflection with a special appreciation for a 

profound spiritual encounter with her shaman, intoning: “thank you so much for the spirit of 

Africa Credo Mutwa” (Nomvete, 2014:84). 



31 

 

Through the process of self-revelation, the reader is guided through the writer’s feelings of 

relief, joy, learning and hope for a deep connection with her spiritual home. Mutwa has 

provided Nomvete with a new portal through which she can access her home. He gives her a 

transcendent means of entry via the supernatural to retrieve her most basic desire for  

belonging: “it was after that day that I decided somewhere deep in the core of my being that I 

was going to continue to search for my spiritual identity” (Nomvete, 2014: 84).  

The search for a spiritual home is not a once off event in the autobiography. The pages of 

Nomvete’s story display occasions of hopeful anticipation and devastating disappointments 

as the autobiography manoeuvres through each of Nomvete’s spiritual encounters. Nomvete 

selects an instance during the breakdown of her marriage to illustrate the depth and breadth of 

her spiritual search. At the height of Nomvete’s marital woes, her husband convinces her that 

they should seek marital counsel from a sangoma; at a time when Nomvete has resigned from 

the soap opera Generations and can no longer afford therapy. Nomvete realises the sangoma 

is a counterfeit, nothing like Mutwa. However, the contrived encounter does manage to lead 

Nomvete to her maternal ancestors in Zimbabwe.  

The sangoma’s reading of the bones direct her to what becomes a homecoming journey to 

Bulawayo. The trek to her mother’s homeland is laboured because Nomvete’s life is on a 

downward spiral with no acting roles in the horizon. Adding to her anguish is her marriage, 

which is on the precipice of implosion because of her husband’s drug addiction and his live-

in mistress in her marital home. Although Nomvete’s spiritual trek to her maternal family’s 

spiritual home in Bulawayo is tarnished by the presence of her husband, she is vindicated by 

the awareness of the presence of her ancestors within her midst.  

On what she terms the mountains that speak, Nomvete discovers her mother was a 

descendant of Mzilikazi, King Shaka’s nemesis who broke away to Zimbabwe. The name 

Bulawayo is derived from Nguniland once occupied by the Kumalos during the nineteenth 

century. Nomvete’s mother’s maiden name was Kumalo. The newfound knowledge of her 

family history ignites a yearning within Nomvete for a dialogue with her ancestor. But the 

journey to Zimbabwe and the actual arrival in Bulawayo is not without obstacles, including 

fraudulent spiritual guides and more unanswered questions.  

Nomvete’s husband was from Harare, rivals to Nomvete’s people, the Ndebele. A week 

before the trip to Zimbabwe, Nomvete has a dream as she sleeps in her red and white cloth. 

The dream could be interpreted as a premonition readying Nomvete for her spiritual voyage. 



32 

 

In the dream, Nomvete remembers being in the middle of no-where, somewhere in Africa, 

surrounded by arid land. Nomvete was not alone in the dream; there was a young man and a 

young woman; the three of them sat on a mountain with their feet dangling in the air. When 

she looks up the sky is filled with a bright light followed by cows and sheep with bells falling 

to the ground around her but her accomplices next to her could not see what was happening. 

The young man begins to make his way down the mountain and does not heed Nomvete’s 

warning of wild dogs. Moments later they hear his screams and the young woman left behind 

with Nomvete is indifferent to the young man’s fate and exclaims that it was his fault for 

listening to the warning.  

Nomvete’s dream unknowingly leads her directly to a compound where her guide resides. At 

first, she does not recognise the place because the trip happens at night and continues into the 

early hours of the morning. When Farai (pseudonym for Marimbe in the book) and Nomvete 

begin to worry about their whereabouts, they are greeted by two wild dogs. Nomvete instructs 

the driver to follow the dogs, which lead them to a kraal where they are welcomed in by the 

gatekeeper and invited to spend the night in the yard in their car. In the morning when 

Nomvete is able to find her bearings she laments, “as I focused I was overwhelmed by a 

sensation that I can only describe as recognition. This place was familiar to me" (Nomvete, 

2014:111). Once Nomvete’s confusion lifts she sees cattle with bells on their necks in the 

kraal, similar to the ones in her dream. These observations evoke a hopefulness in Nomvete 

about her ancestors and her spirituality in her maternal homeland.  

Unfortunately, she is introduced to a fraudulent gatekeeper when she requests a guide to take 

her to the sacred mountains to commune with her ancestors. The gatekeeper is unwilling to 

leave the bar and keeps Nomvete and her entourage waiting the whole day. When he does 

become available after much persistence, he returns drunk and takes Nomvete’s money for 

the trip to the mountain and advises her to return the following year as this is not the right 

time of the year for the mountains to speak. Nomvete breaks and curses the gatekeeper with 

the wrath of her ancestors. She describes what follows as “unearthly, it was as though I was 

transported into some fantasy world that was unfamiliar yet familiar” (Nomvete, 2014:113).  

She writes that she sees three people glide into the hut where she was with Farai: a beautiful 

dark-skinned woman with short silver hair and the second looked like the gatekeeper’s wife 

and the third was the young man who led them to the gatekeeper’s hut.  



33 

 

Nomvete explains how the three spiritual figures sat close to her encircling her protectively. 

They began to speak to her and apologised for what had happened to her during her trip to the 

mountains, promising to instruct the gatekeeper to return her money because he was unfit to 

take her to the mountain. The silver-haired woman tells Nomvete to return early the 

following day. The gatekeeper returns Nomvete’s money and this moment exposes the 

gatekeeper as belonging to a generation of fraudsters. According to the locals, the ancestors 

refused to commune with anyone of European descent. Because this fundamental law was 

broken, the ancestors refused to speak.  

Nomvete’s visit to the mountains give the community enough ammunition to take the 

fraudulent gatekeeper to trial by the community leaders. When she finally summits the 

mountain, Nomvete leaves more confused than when she began her spiritual voyage because 

she has no answers from her ancestors. She feels more confused possibly because she was 

looking for her ancestors to grant her instructions about her life, even though she knew what 

she needed to do, starting with divorcing her husband. The spiritual exploration in Bulawayo 

does not fulfil her initial quest for clarity about her spiritual and familial roots, but it becomes 

an important intervention contributing to the reversal of many years of duplicitous acts on 

sacred land. These forms of duplicity are partly responsible for the silencing of Nomvete’s 

and other ancestral voices on the mountain.     

Because she leaves the mountains dissatisfied, the search for a spiritual anchor does not 

cease. The closing chapters of the autobiography examine Nomvete’s spiritual unrest when 

she is introduced to a charismatic church through fellow actress Chi Chi Letswalo. The 

introduction to a cult-like charismatic church in a warehouse building in Johannesburg seems 

to metaphorically mirror the chaos in Nomvete’s own life; and the church functions as an 

additional escape from reality. This period marks a strong shift in Nomvete’s spiritual focus. 

At this point, her narrative is no longer preoccupied with the uncovering of African 

spirituality and speaking to ancestors after the disappointment of the silence of the mountains 

that speak. Now, Nomvete is focused on learning how to pray in tongues under the guidance 

of a preacher, Brother Brown. Nonetheless, reflecting back on her spiritual journey in her 

autobiography, Nomvete recognises a common thread in what her spiritual mentors were 

attempting to teach her: “all these great spiritual seers were advising me to find my spiritual 

voice” (Nomvete, 2014:136). To her, this voice was inside her all along, but she was too 

afraid to activate it because she was hungry for affirmation from strangers.  



34 

 

By her own account, she had all but lost touch with reality at this stage. Nomvete’s marriage 

to Farai had collapsed, she was destitute and had lost everything. Her new relationships with 

some of the women in the church displayed some of the toxicities prevalent in church. 

Nomvete craved anonymity, she never fully accepted her celebrity status. At a time when she 

was destitute the church offered Nomvete the perfect opportunity to hide in plain sight. The 

revelation of her prophetic gift and descent from a family of healers, as prophesied by Credo 

Mutwa appears again in her reflections on her time in the church cult. The majority of her 

spiritual exchanges after her awakening encounter with Mutwa appear to prey on her 

vulnerability, ignorance and desperation.  

The last chapters of her autobiography narrate some of Nomvete’s most outlandish behaviour 

anchored in a desperate attempt at locating a sense of spiritual identity. Nomvete writes about 

an occasion when she was living in a garage, when she received a message from God 

informing her that he would dismantle the South African Broadcast Corporation (SABC) if 

the organisation continued broadcasting negative and harmful images to the youth. The 

message delivered while Nomvete was praying in tongues. She narrates how she received 

specific instructions to “go to the SABC and pray in its corridors, spread the blood of Christ 

along its contaminated walls” (Nomvete, 2014:149). Nomvete recalls getting past security 

and performing this ritual with two church congregants.  

She arranges a meeting with one of the SABC’s top female executives to deliver a personal 

message from God. Nomvete believes the meeting was God ordained because she had 

attempted numerous times before to meet with the same executive to pitch her business 

proposal but was unsuccessful. Before sharing her message from God, Nomvete draws on her 

prophetic gift to attest to her credibility; because she was able to share personal information 

about the executive that she would not have had access to outside of divine power. The 

executive was able to confirm the details of Nomvete’s prophecy and received Nomvete’s 

warning without hesitation. This part of Nomvete’s spiritual journey is startling to her, and it 

is equally startling for the reader. At the meeting, Nomvete reveals God’s disappointment 

with the management of the SABC, especially the negative content that was adversely 

affecting the youth. Nomvete explains that God’s wrath would fall on the executive if she did 

nothing. Jobs would be lost and the corrupt would be exposed thereby dismantling the SABC. 

The instruction was to replace the corrupt structures in the SABC with new leadership serious 

about serving the youth. Nomvete writes that after she delivered her message from God, the 



35 

 

executive was on her knees begging for the Lord’s forgiveness in her corner office. Similar, 

to her dreams and her experience in Zimbabwe, Nomvete’s spiritual gift is endorsed on 

numerous occasions in the narrative. She seems to point to a confirmation of the legitimacy 

of her prophetic gift no matter how misguided in execution it seems to be at times.   

Nomvete’s undeniable spiritual gift seems to be at risk of dilution because of her physical 

dislocation. She feels spiritually disjointed because she is not confident about her belonging 

in South Africa. The repeated relocation from religion to religion is a symptom of a person 

tying personal identity to an elusive spiritual awakening. Nomvete seems to be awaiting a big 

moment of revelation. There is a disconnect between home and spirit created by an unfilled 

emptiness caused by a wandering soul born in exile. Nomvete knows her purpose and place 

in the world but struggles to fit in.  

The eventual spiritual migration and final stop at Buddhism brings her to a renewed sense of 

self. There is safety in Buddhism because it is presented by her sister when they reconnect 

after a protracted estrangement during Nomvete’s destitute years. Buddhism reconnects her to 

her family after South Africa’s rejection. In the end, Nomvete believes she is “walking in an 

Enlightened state” (Nomvete, 2014: 197).  However, the pull of her African heritage does not 

cease, because she claims she “dreams the dreams of sangomas, the seekers of truth on the 

fiery continent of Africa, every single waking and sleeping moment of [her] life” (Nomvete, 

2014: 200) despite adopting  Buddhist culture.   

 

Ambivalence of Return: Double blade of returnee experiences.  

Writers who are uprooted from their home country remember a different reality from the 

present reality unfolding in their home country. The requirement for the exiled is to occupy a 

geographical location different from the place of origin. The spatial and temporal removal 

from one’s country of origin and inability to return is a fundamental feature of all three 

primary texts in this study. Edward Said defines exile as an “unhealable rift forced…between 

the self and its true home” (2001:173). Michael Siedel terms an exile “as someone who 

inhabits one place and remembers or projects the reality of another” (1986: ix). Elsewhere, 

Hamid Naficy elaborates that exile “consists of multiple and variegated exiles, big and small, 

external and internal, fixed and voluntary” (1999:9).  



36 

 

The terminology of exile is not confined to political banishment with no resourceful means of 

making it home. The stigma is slowly lifting with expatriates choosing to voluntarily live in 

foreign countries. The exiled is forced to leave, the expatriate chooses to be a resident in an 

alien country. In reference to exilic and diasporic literature, this distinction becomes 

important because exilic autobiographies in particular traverse feelings of homesickness and 

nostalgia for the old home country, whereas writers of the diaspora are sometimes enchanted 

with the homing process in the host country. There is often an absence of the deep longing for 

home for writers in the diaspora accompanied by a measured balance of the past and the 

present home.  

According to Mohammed Naigub (2011) the absence of home is the first failure for the exiled 

because it signals the start of a rift in identity.  The vacancy created by the absence of home 

becomes a problem for those who are lost in foreign lands searching for home. Home has a 

particular meaning for the exiled; it brings with it an un-ending quest to recreate belonging; 

and an inability to do so aids feelings of estrangement when a place called home cannot be 

forged. Individuals who have not experienced this type of hostility often take home for 

granted. Prior to migration, the idea of belonging to a community is taken for granted. 

Narratives of exile throw the question of belonging into sharp relief both for those in exile 

and those who remained at home.  

Nomvete’s Dancing to the Beat of the Drum is composed of contrasting temporal and spatial 

environments. Like many other exilic writers, Nomvete taps into the nostalgia and memory of 

home. The loss of home is a persistent motif throughout her autobiographical writing, unlike 

diasporic autobiographies which may be invested in the new homing process.  

Home is often considered a place of safety, intimacy and familiarity. In addition, it is a place 

of belonging and community. When home becomes a place that is physically unavailable, 

writers like Nomvete utilise memory to retrieve and commemorate home. Memory becomes a 

default response when home is inaccessible. Therefore, we can see how the absence of home 

triggers Black women autobiographers to recall their home country as they retell their life 

narratives. Repetition is a principal detail of turning a foreign place into home. The purpose 

of Black women writing about their experience of exile is to find a connection from 

unfamiliar to familiar through a process of creating a home in a strange territory. The 

memory of home is often romanticised in comparison to the new country of residency. 



37 

 

Secondly, nostalgia is induced by the idealization of home being a place fixed in time and 

space left behind.  

Once home is sentimentalised, it becomes difficult for the new foreign residence to be fully 

accepted, further actuating feelings of loss, abandonment and un-belonging. Naigub’s (2011) 

observation that exilic culture remembers home from a biased perspective is correct because 

it is rarely an accurate depiction of a home left behind or how events of the past transpired; 

usually it is tainted by longing and fantasy. Exile autobiographies are impaired by two motifs: 

the separation from home country and the romanticization of a lost home.  

Autobiographical memories take on the narrator’s character. Writers collate the life events 

and experiences similar to how they recreate a story. Over time, the memory of an individual 

is altered to suit a composition for a particular event: “thus in some sense autobiographical 

memories become fictionalised and re-organised to fit the demands of storytelling” 

(Randvansky et al 2005:796).  Autobiographical memories carry all the fundamentals of a 

story worth telling. Not only do autobiographical memories possess a narrative character, but 

to a certain degree, vicarious autobiographical memories surface in the narrative, giving the 

reader the impression that they have lived the experience. The reader experiencing the events 

first-hand directly from the narrator’s description, can empathize with the narrator. It is 

during the reading process that the audience begins to form opinions about the characters; 

some characters are liked more than others because of their relatability, suggesting 

autographical memories serve the authors writing them and their audiences.  

Part of the intrinsic value of the autobiographical process is accessing cues available for 

aiding in the retrieval of memory. According to Randvansky et al (2005), using the situation 

model to decipher how mental representations of specific events and episodes are organised 

is helpful in the preservation of autobiographical memory. The model is bound by a spatial-

temporal framework known as events models. The situation model consists of multiple 

models termed episode models. The information usually unfolds in consecutive order based 

on the connection and importance of each event to another. Consequently, this study can be 

applied to autobiographical memory and additionally linked to the informal structure of 

events memories. There are four criteria:  

One event must precede a second event in time. Second, the first event must be 

operating at the time the second one begins. Third, the first event must occur in order 

for the second to follow. Finally, the fourth criterion is that the first event’s 



38 

 

occurrence is sufficient to cause the second event to occur (Randvansky et al 

2005:798).  

The study investigates how autobiographical memory is composed, utilised, stored and 

retrieved in the long term. The proposition of autobiographical memory structured in 

chronological order based on Anderson and Conway’s theory (1993) suggests the first event 

memory must appear in earlier parts of the autobiographical storyline, concluding with the 

last one. The most important event episode should appear in the foreground, less significant 

detail must filter to the background. The process of recall by the writer happens either 

organically or prompted through constrained recall exercises.  

Nomvete spells out the double blade of the return/returnee experiences in the early pages of 

her autobiography, by using specific memories to highlight significant life events. Born in an 

upwardly mobile Black middle-class family, Nomvete documents her father’s upward 

trajectory as a director of the United Nations Economic Commission. She comes from a fairly 

well-connected family; her exilic memories reference notable South African freedom fighters 

as regular visitors in her home in Zambia and Ethiopia. Although Nomvete never formed 

personal relationships with any of the stalwarts, her access to privilege is undeniable.  

An inference can be made to Nomvete’s sudden success in the entertainment industry to her 

exilic privilege. Although she was not connected to industry heavy-weights, and got her 

acting jobs on merit, her acting career was catapulted by her class position in exile, making it 

possible to build lucrative professional networks. When Nomvete arrived in Johannesburg in 

April 1994, the intent was to vote in South Africa’s first democratic elections and return to 

London after two years. Those plans were postponed when she discovered her deep desire to 

connect with her homeland and her career began to rise. Nomvete credits her speedy rise to 

career fame to her international upbringing. The friendships and business acquaintances 

Nomvete formed when she returned to South Africa were partly in recognition of the 

professional networks and platforms she was exposed to in exile.  

Nomvete holds an Acting and Performance Art qualification from the Royal Welsh College 

of Music and Drama in the United Kingdom. When she ventured into the performance 

industry in 1994, this set her apart from South African actresses, more so among those who 

did not have any formal training. She does not mention her acting qualifications or her time 



39 

 

in college in her autobiography1. The chapters jump from pre-school, to high school and 

straight into her return from exile. Dancing to the Beat of the Drum displays the duality of 

fame and fortune and the loss of self because celebrity status.  

Nomvete’s most critically acclaimed role as Ntsiki Lukhele from the soap opera Generations 

is what shot her star to the top almost instantly. She found out about the role from a romantic 

partner who was already part of the cast of the soap opera. The two were working together at 

the Windybrow Theatre. A lead actor playing the role of Archie Moroka in the soap opera, he 

introduced Nomvete to the producers of the show. She auditioned for the role of Ntsiki 

Lukhele and was offered the part. Initially, this was intended to be a short recurring role but 

Nomvete’s talent was so impressive, the writers and producers decided to reframe the 

storyline, turning the role into a permanent lead role on the show. Nomvete’s character — 

Ntsiki Lukhele — was a figure South African viewers loved to hate. The show was almost a 

mirror of her own life as a successful young Black woman climbing the corporate ladder in 

the new South Africa.  

She writes that fans often conflated the TV character with her as a person. Nomvete’s fans 

violated her privacy by camping outside her apartment, peering inside her windows or 

knocking on her door to request autographs. At the height of her career, Nomvete was unable 

to take other acting jobs because Generations took over her entire life. At the same time, she 

became typecast and was unable to exercise her creative freedom.  

Nomvete continued working on the soap opera for six years as one of the high earners, able to 

purchase a top of the range car and a house in one of Johannesburg’s plush northern suburbs. 

The wage gap between the high-income earners on the set of Generations was a point of 

major discomfort for Nomvete. She writes about projecting her exilic guilt often knowingly 

and unknowingly on set. The discrepancies in earning power hit her hard, and like Sisonke 

Msimang (in the next chapter), she found herself overcompensating by speaking up on behalf 

of the underrepresented. The Generations production crew was the most underpaid. Nomvete 

describes her shock at how one of the senior make-up artists on the show was unable to make 

ends meet. When Nomvete advised her make-up artist to ask for a loan of a R1000 for 

building renovations to extend her two-room house, the loan was declined by the show’s 

producers. Nomvete describes the careless manner staff were treated on the Generations set. 

 
1 Nomvete provides a short biography about her educational background on her official website. 

https://www.pamelanomvete.com/biography 



40 

 

The soapie had the highest ratings at the time but her make-up artist’s wages could not cover 

a simple building project, nor could she secure a small loan from the production company.   

Nomvete’s autobiography also describes a fellow actress who used to live in the production’s 

dressing room because she had no home. Some of her co-stars were on the covers of 

magazines, but they were living below the breadline. Nomvete’s guilt fuelled her to advocate 

for the rights of her ill-treated colleagues. The culture on set was toxic and distinctly 

unprofessional. Because of her exilic background, her colleagues turned to her to raise their 

grievances because they believed management valued her more as she was a ‘foreigner’ with 

a British accent.  The assumption was that management would listen when she spoke:   

The more I tried to speak up, the more I felt beaten down. The weapon that was used 

against me was that I was a foreigner and therefore and had no right to an opinion. 

This was communicated ever so subtly, but it was extraordinarily effective – with my 

ranting falling on deaf ears, I began to implode. The poison was seeping into my 

system; I was becoming toxic to myself (2014:45). 

Nomvete’s efforts did not yield results because the production company managing the 

operations of the television programme did not consider any of her requests for wage 

increments for her low-earning colleagues. None of her complaints were taken seriously.  

According to Nomvete the producers of Generations were reckless in the management of the 

talent. They often hosted wild soirees, providing free alcohol which guaranteed high 

attendance because people wanted to drown their sorrows. These parties left the talent highly 

inebriated and unable to perform their acting duties the following day. Although Nomvete 

attended the wild parties and admits to driving home drunk on numerous occasions, she never 

allowed her lifestyle to interfere with the execution of her work. She reports that she never 

drank during working hours. Nomvete credits her British professional training for her work 

ethic:  

A great deal of snobbery was seeping through because my thoughts were that this 

would never be allowed to happen in England. I did feel that the management was 

basically incompetent… This is where England had done a great job. Here we were, 

children of exile, adopting some of the superiority born of being products of the 

British system (Nomvete, 2014:48). 



41 

 

Nomvete’s simultaneous sense of alienation and professional superiority is a common state 

for many returnees in the corporate environment. She oscillates between coveting the 

approval of her peers and loathing the lack of professional competence among the very 

colleagues she is defending. The duality of living as an outsider in her home country — her 

desperate need for affirmation from her community while absolutely loathing the lack of 

work ethic among her people — is not unique to her.  

Nomvete’s overcompensation as a response to her exilic class and cultural privilege is 

displayed in her public and private life. The decision to hire her husband as her manager is 

another demonstration of her ambivalence towards her exilic privilege. Nomvete’s keen 

awareness of her husband’s charm is described in grand detail in the autobiography. The 

events leading up to her marriage and unhealthy tie to her in-laws display her desperate desire 

for acceptance: “I was losing focus and consequently lost ability to be discerning” (Nomvete, 

2016:26). Nomvete understood inviting her husband to be her manager was a bad idea but she 

was too deep in the dysfunction to make any discerning decision about her career or personal 

life.  

She thought giving her husband a piece of her professional career would not only appease her 

guilt for her profound success, but also make her husband feel included in a world he was so 

desperate to belong in. Hiring Farai as her manager was obviously a mistake because he did 

not have the professional expertise for the job. Worse, it gave him an opportunity to entrench 

himself further in Nomvete’s life and take control over her while securing fame for himself. 

Nomvete writes of her husband’s control issues. He decided what she ought to wear, and 

coerced her to attend industry parties, because he wanted to network with celebrities.  

Nomvete’s desperation to shrink her success cost her professionally. Farai did not secure any 

acting jobs for her during his time as her manager but Nomvete continued paying him. 

Meantime, he sabotaged any potential roles and became infamous for being difficult to the 

point where Nomvete was overlooked for acting roles, despite her talent and high prof