Category: Self Portrait

My predicament is laughable. I am not sure where I’d be safer; in South Africa or in the first world country I current live in. At the UK death rate, Africans will be donating funds to the west and changing channels to avoid adds with dying Europeans and donations for R1 that can feed a suburb for a day. Who am I kidding? The West has ravaged the continent to such extremes that their worst days are still far from Africa’s best.  It is quite a turn of events to say the least, one that none of us ever saw coming when we welcomed a 20-plenty decorated with new adventures, starting businesses, planning weddings, praying for great jobs… Do I regret moving? I’m not sure, depends on whether or not I die.

Just before the outbreak took hold, I had taken a social media hiatus to reconfigure my state of mind to a new reality in the UK. So naturally as it spread, I dug a bit more and buried my head a little deeper in the sand, maybe to the level of the waterbed. Once a week, I lift my head up from the ground, dust off the sand, and head to the supermarket smelling like a fresh carrot; shopping bag and sanitizer in hand, intent on only touching what I am sure to buy. It is in these moments that reality either slaps me sideways or squeezes me so tight, tears well in my eyes. What began as bewilderment that first Saturday when I walked through Tesco’s empty shelves has matured into a constant state of shock. They had hung up banners of a sale which partly explained why people had bought out certain products, but people had also bought things that weren’t on sale. I figured the English were more sale crazy than I had anticipated. The following day, I went to Sainsbury and a similar scene panned into view. Only this time I was slowly lowered into an alternate dimension as it dawned on me that people had been panic buying. I watched as we all ‘zombied’ through the store, aghast! This was happening to me, to us.

Something about the loneness of it all sets me in a room with the transfigured 12-year-old me who kissed a boy in my first blog share. She was able to do this because our mother had left her behind in the guardianship of Priscila’s family who lived in the backroom next door to ours in Chiawelo. It was the year my mother finally got a suited job but in Giyani, so she couldn’t come back for me or take me out of school mid-term. For a few months I tried to assimilate with the “Ndou’s’” until I decided i was better off caring for myself. My parents consented and so the food portion of the money sent to the ‘Ndous’ for my wellbeing, now came directly to me. Once monthly, I’d catch a taxi from Chiawelo to Bara and then connect to South Gate Mall. I remember a diet of boiled chicken, undercooked pap, and lots of eggs. I was a big girl who’d once left a pan teeming with oil over a hot stove distracted by street play. I returned to a room up in smoke and never told a soul about it because I was determined to assert and keep my independence. Arg that little girl, that spirit, that will and resolve to throttle life. I could do with a bit more of her courage.

Though doubly burdened for home and here, faith anchors a shifting soul. I pray for headway in vaccine research, I pray that when this all ends, we will care for the earth better, only using what we need, when we need it. May we never again need a stark reminder of our own fragility – like the morning dew, like withering grass.

Oh God – Look what has become of us.

We were circling London, waiting in the air traffic que to land. That’s when it settled in me. Before this moment I had felt everything. I had been excited about finally having something genuinely good happen to me, about God showing up in an undeniable way. I was overwhelmed with love, the eruptious celebrations for a communal win and the ensuing veld fire, ablaze with dreams. But Grief, the poet’s servant, was the most prominent. I grieved for everything I was leaving behind, everything I had worked so hard for but couldn’t fit into a plane. I grieved a vacuum of life I would never actualise in South Africa. I grieved every experience capsulated in time that I was going to miss: birthdays, successes, a niece too new to know me, and the possible loss of loved ones in my absence. Leaving was right, in the same way that winter is necessary. The reward of marriage and children is often said to be unequivocal joy and sense of purpose. I have found the same to be true for singlehood, but in the way of self-abandon into freedom’s boundless wingspan, souring.
It’s strange that is was only as we spanned the clear, blue skies of London, that my resolve settled. I hadn’t realised this, but it had waned in the waiting because waiting can draw out joy, stretch your faith so tight that when you finally have the dream, it’s lost its newness. I finally had what I wanted and couldn’t remember why I had wanted it. As the plane waited its turn on the runway, and I looked down at the London Eye and the river Thames, my resolve softly seeped in. The ‘ground’ felt firmer and I knew that no matter what, it would work out. I felt like a sprout, meeting the sun I’d always felt from beneath the ground. I felt the flow of blood into old hustler veins, I felt that maak-‘n-plan spirit awaken, my ‘guluva’ coming alive!!!
This is all to say that I literally had no balls for this until the very last minute and maybe that’s why I only finished packing in the airport, missed my connecting flight in Dubai, started my period on the plane, and trudged all the luggage my mother wouldn’t let me leave behind half-way across a new country. Listen, to each, her own–🤣!!

Nwa’tati sometimes courage meets us on the way and the liver grows as we step up.
Thank you for reading. I’ve made us a messy video of the truth, lol. Ce la vie ❤

Hi. This is so cool. Ok. So here’s what happened…

I am 12 years old. I live with my mother in an outside room in Chiawelo, ext 3, hala Mangalani. Before we moved here, we shared another room with my father at the SAPS barracks in Protea. Propriety was relative, privacy a simple turn of the back, and minimalism was the child of poverty before it’s curation by pious elitists. My father, a village boy, longs for the bellowing of cattle and the rough rustle of bush wind. He transfers to Giyani SAPS and effectively ends all our residential privileges. It’s strange, or perhaps a form of unresolved trauma from leaving without understanding, that even at this age, I still have dreams of me running in the corridors and playing between the flats. A few years into marriage and three children later, my mother graduates with a degree in Education. She, unlike my father loves the city but also needs a job, so we are staying. I am in grade 6 at a public school in Lenasia, I am almost done, why move me?
Our new neighbours have 3 sons and their daughter, Priscilla, 2 years older than me, is my best friend. She has a cousin. We will call him Leonardo, which isn’t much of a disguise but anyway. After months of stolen looks, shared apricots from the garden tree, and Priscilla’s insistence, Leonardo becomes my first boyfriend. Don’t ask where my mother is, that is another blog. I love him, he is a douchebag, its finally happening. I am with the brown eyed, thick browed, chocolate skin, curly haired, Leonardo. Things are going great, we smile at each other and play a little closer when he and his family visit on Sundays, a visit always too short. The only problem is I played it big on the streets. I’ve been acting grown, I hang out with my very grown Priscilla, everybody thinks I’m grown. But I’m an imposter and my cover is blowing up as soon as I kiss Leonardo because that’s when the whole world (the street) will find out that I can’t kiss at all and that I’ve been fake grown all this time. Mxm. I sit on it. I practice with the mirror. I ask Priscilla to teach me, but this was before ‘I kissed a girl and I liked it’. Eventually I forget, for 2 seconds. In that 2 seconds, on a Sunday afternoon, I am standing at the door of our backroom, holding a PS ‘I Love You’ chocolate, trying to work up the courage to declare my undying love to my De Caprio. At that moment, he appears, see’s the chocolate in my hand, and grabs it from me. He then runs into the main house. In a panic, I run after him and find him in one of the bedrooms. It takes me a sec, and then it lands. Damn, this ni&&er got me into a room! Yho, yho, yho!!! There is no way out. Chickening and leaving would be an obvious admission to a lack of knowledge and skill. The cards have been dealt, a baby girl’s gotta play. What I do not know at my tender age is that I want this, but I wish it was vulnerable and honest and true. His brown smouldering eyes are looking into mine, the room is dimly lit from late afternoon sunlight, he leans in, our lips touch. Wait, jiki-jiki I push him back and say, ‘Omg, you can’t kiss!!!’ and I run out of the room, leaving a bewildered, chocolate thief.
Ahh man, touch down! I played the game like a G! Don’t need to tell you that our ‘Takalani Sesame’ love fizzled after that. I don’t know if he ever saw through my bluff, my street cred stayed tight. I wonder though if his version of the story is that of an ego so scarred, he got kissing anxiety (eix), or if he remembers it at all (lol) . In retrospect, as an actual grown, skilful woman (wink), I wish my mother and I had spoken about first kisses and about not giving them to boys I feared would shame me.