I was asking the people I love to relive the utterly horrific and explain to me how they felt about that horror, to tell me what it did to them on the inside. To reveal the feelings they’d had to not feel in order to survive. My lack of understanding is a luxury paid for by the experience they lived

I think that my parents would like me to know how they contributed to our freedom. My professional skill and proximity to the primary sources should make telling their story an achievable task. But all my elders were trained in forgetting. Some of this was struggle discipline. Some of it was survival. And then there is the passage of time, decades in which some memories were lost entirely and others faded to the point that they can barely be seen.

I have spent many years judging my dad’s performance as a father. I have spent much less time considering what it took for him to keep going, and to give me what he did. He knows I’m writing about him, and about the things that went wrong and the places where we both fell short. Opening up in the way that he has a radical act of generosity.

Lebo, you’re really more British than African.’ It was an observation rather than a criticism, but it landed in my ears and my heart as a questioning of my identity and my efforts. I detected, or perhaps projected, something else too: the belief that exiles had things easier because they had chosen to leave. It may be that there are people who have navigated this more deftly than I did, without all the pain and anxiety. I wish that had been my experience too.

But from where I stood, it didn’t seem that my dad really enjoyed having me around. Like most children, I assumed the behaviour of the adults in my life was motivated by how they felt about me, rather than their own despair or distress. I know now that the pain of the breakdown of the family he had made sat on top of the wound of being torn from the family of his birth. And to that the brutal aloneness of exile, and it all felt unbearable.