After I had migrated from Africa, aged 15, I was very distressed indeed, especially by how things went after the destruction of home and country. I was unable to get people to understand my situation in historical and political terms. They insisted on overlaying my reality with a totally different interpretation. Only after many years was I able to fully realize that the disruption of political change had caused turmoil in my father's character, which had in turn led to the increasing turmoil in my own life, whilst trying to make sense of my historical dislocation . My sense of guilt, confusion and distress had been misinterpreted, so that it seemed as if I had conjured them, when they had resulted from regime change. Contemporary gender biases made it nearly impossible for me to get the meaning of my experiences across. In the end I understood I had been dealing with people's mythological frameworks all along.
