I spent my maternity leave in Africa so my children could learn about our roots

This First Person article is written by Thandiwe Konguavi, a journalist at CBC Edmonton who recently returned from a year-long maternity leave. For more information about First Person stories, see the FAQ.

I was sitting in the hot tub at a Toronto airport hotel and getting cold feet. 

Along with my husband, the unborn baby in my belly and our three young children, we were in the first days of our long-planned adventure to live for a year in Windhoek, Namibia. The southwest African country is known as The Land of the Brave; with my baby due in a month, I was feeling anything but. 

Surely if I could give birth safely in Canada, why would it be different in Namibia? In Africa? My paternal grandmother had been a traditional midwife in Zimbabwe, long before I — the third of six children — was born in a hospital in the capital city of Harare in 1987. 

Three years later, my mother, two older siblings and I moved to Canada to join my father in downtown Toronto student housing.

And my connection to Zimbabwe was cut.

This maternity leave in the motherland was as much to teach our children about their African roots as it was for me to reconnect with mine.

I met my would-be husband, a born-and-raised Namibian who came to Canada in his late 20s, at church in Toronto. I asked my share of ignorant questions — "Have you heard of Tupac? Did they play Whitney Houston on the radio in Africa? — and he played along, pretending he had never heard of these icons until I heard him rapping "Dear Mama," word for word. 

We didn't want our children to grow up like me.

As the plane descended onto the Windhoek tarmac, the early February African sun streaming through the window gave me an instinctively warm feeling, as if it was saying "welcome home." 

In Windhoek, my in-laws embraced our children who were right away calling out omo and tandaa, the Otjiherero words for uncle and aunt. We loaded our luggage into a large truck. It was one of many rides our children would take in open-cabin vehicles, the subtropical wind blowing in their braids. 

We quickly settled into our new home for the coming year and one month later, our son Munohange was born there. It was a fast, easy home birth attended by a midwife. What had I been afraid of?

Meanwhile, our daughters were already loving classes at the local public school where they were enrolled in kindergarten and Grade 1. In no time, our oldest was counting, singing and reading in the language of her father's Herero people.

As a child, I had spoken Shona fluently until — as my mother tells it — I just stopped talking. When we moved to Canada, I went completely silent — no Shona, no English — until I started preschool. English, which would have been my second language, instantly became my first and only one.