Sisonke Msimang is a South African writer, activist and political analyst based in Perth, Western Australia, whose focus is on race, gender, and politics. She is known for her memoir Always Another Country: A memoir of exile and home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018), a biography of anti-apartheid activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
Msimang initially grew up around South African freedom fighters such as her father and great-uncle. Her father was a leading member of uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), in the 1960s, and her great uncle was one of the founding members of the ANC. The family later moved to Kenya and then to Canada in 1984 when Sisonke was 10. Msimang completed most of her schooling in Ottawa, Canada, and her final years at the International School in Kenya as an expatriate.
Between 1992 and 1996 Msimang earned a Bachelor of Arts in politics and communication studies at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and returned to South Africa in 1997. Between 2002 and 2005 she obtained a master’s degree in political science from the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town. Msimang’s first job was in 1997 as a programme officer at the Australian High Commission in Pretoria, which is where she met her husband Simon White.
From 2003 to 2005 Msimang worked as a gender advisor for UNAIDS to help forge HIV/AIDS policies specifically relating to African women and girls. From 2005 she was the Executive Director of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa until November 2012. In June 2013, she took up a senior role in policy development at the Sonke Gender Justice Network, which worked with men and boys in promoting gender equality.
Msimang began her writing career in earnest from 2013, writing regular columns for the centre-right Daily Maverick. In her first book, Always Another Country, she thanks editor Branko Brkic and CEO Styli Charalambous for ‘giving me a start’.
She has been both storyteller and facilitator for The Moth and TED events, has hosted and participated in several Doha Debates, and in 2020 was the Literature and Ideas curator for Perth Writers Week. She won the Western Australian Writer’s Fellowship at the 2020 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards.
As of 2021, Msimang is Head Story Trainer at the Centre for Stories in Perth.
