Mandela Mathia waiting for the ‘Promised Land’. Photo: Brett Boardman
For Mandela Mathia, born amid war and hunger, Australia became the ‘Promised Land’. Lose to Win is him telling his story of how that came to be and how he got here.
It starts in South Sudan, where he was born to the sounds of bombs falling and bullets flying. ‘While war claimed the lives of many outside, life was given to me,’ recalls Mathia, whose early nicknames included Kalashnikov and AK-47. His first memories revolve around hunger (breaking into a peanut farm to steal peanuts). The conflict got worse and when he was six, Mandela’s mother moved him and his brother to Juba Town, where the hunger got worse too.
‘As a child, I was worried about being met with a stray bullet or lost to the blast of a grenade. But now I was worried about filling my belly with food, and it didn’t matter how I found it or where it came from or what kind. I just wanted to eat because I felt if death was gonna take me out of this life. I would cry myself to sleep, hoping to forget the pain of an empty belly. Still, I would wake up the next morning to a feverish body, not able to walk but crawling inside our house, shaking from the lack of food.’
Terrible as these memories are, Mathia recounts them on the Belvoir stage with a smile in his voice, sometimes breaking into song. He is accompanied on stage by Senegalese musician Yacou Mbaye, whose fabulous percussive work brings another dimension to the story.
The loss of his mother (who drowned on an expedition to find food) saw Mathia and his sibling separated. When he was seven he was sent to live in the ‘safer North’ and ended up, many months later in Port Sudan, being cared for by his ‘second mother’ and an ‘agent of God’, a woman called Joska whose own children had died in the war.
At 10, Mathia became what he calls a street entrepreneur, selling shoe polish services and trying to stay out of trouble. There were a few wobbles, which he recounts, but he also remembers ‘as a young boy sitting next to elders in church, at weddings, funerals and community gatherings, this talk of a better life, a better tomorrow was always mentioned. For us Sudanese people, America, Canada and Australia were these places.’
A cousin who had made it to Australia, encouraged him to get to Egypt and seek asylum from there. Mathia was 11.
In 2006, his family’s ‘story was accepted by the Australian embassy’.
‘From the day you’ve been notified that they’ve taken interest in you, you have to look at it as a journey that may or may not work out. That with one mistake the dream can be snatched out of your heart. No matter what happens, you always have to be on alert to receive calls from the office. Not only that, your future depends on the political atmosphere in Australia at the time, meaning if a new government took office and was not in favour of immigration then it doesn’t matter where you are in your journey, everything can be stopped, postponed or perhaps deferred till next election.’
Mathia and his family made it. His first impressions of Australia, after four years of living in Cairo, are of fresh air, green trees, seeing the sun in the sky, the M4, and being able to breathe. ‘I began to feel like a human being, it was then I began to dream about what I wanted to be.’
It hasn’t all been plain sailing of course. Mathia has much to say about perceptions and attitudes towards Sudanese people in Australian, and especially Melbourne. He is scathing about the politics and leadership of Sudan, ‘the narcissism and differences that plague and divide the South Sudanese people’ but he has also kept hope and a generous spirit alive.
While he never did realise the dream of playing footie for Australia, he has made his mark on the Australian stage. Lose to Win is his story of self-acceptance, perseverance and hope. Mathia wants to give ‘young people, everyone, the hope to reinvent themselves and feel like there is light at the end of the tunnel.’
Directed by Jessica Arthur, Lose to Win runs for one hour.
At Belvoir Upstairs, until 19 May. Belvoir.com.au
