Untitled (3 page)

Pieces of Mokgethi

Statements about Mokgethi:

Mokgethi is a beautiful girl, though she likes to pretend that she isn't.

I always say that I am not beautiful, I just suit myself beautifully. I have a light complexion and I am tall enough to be a model (at nearly one point seven metres). I am not proud but I know I have a body, a body that makes all men think impure thoughts. How do I know this? Although my breasts are small, they started to develop when I was ten and by thirteen they had fully developed. They have been like this ever since and ever since the men cannot keep away.

Any part of me that I dislike? Yes, the fat. I am not saying that I am fat but sometimes I want to be thinner. Maybe it is because of outside influences, advertising. Most of the time, though, I am very fine and happy with myself.

Part of me that I like the most? It could be my brain, my thinking ability. But my brain is in my head; I cannot see that as part of me. The part of me that I like the most is my belly. It is the flattest belly that one could ever ask for. Just below the ribs it sucks itself in, so that on any given day I can eat as much as I want and it comes out only just a little bit. Unlike other people, I never suck in my belly in public – I don't need to; it is always belly-sexy-licious.

Love my nails, my hands, though I am only growing the smallest nail on my left hand and my thumbnails at the moment. In this part of the world a girl has chores that are not nail-friendly. When I was in private school I grew them all and then painted them black. As soon as my grandmother saw this she demanded that I cut them immediately. When I asked her what was wrong with them she just got angry, so I cut them, but even when they are cut short they are still hand heaven and men notice them before I even say a word.

Mokgethi likes to walk fast.

I can move these two long legs I have; at times my friends say that I walk very fast. Because of this I love the miniskirt – it lets me walk as fast as I like. It's just that when I am in one, Mars gets aroused and one never knows what they tell themselves after smoking weed and hanging around on their favourite corner. I don't like to provoke Mars. When they notice me, they shut up and all eyes follow me, taking every step with me, and when I greet them they just keep looking at me without responding and I can still feel their eyes on me until I am out of sight. Scary. Very scary. I do not wear miniskirts when I am going out without my bodyguards.

Mokgethi enjoys reading and loves poetry above everything.

Writing poetry and reading: I do not know why I started doing these things but I am doing them. I try to read as much as I can and not only schoolbooks, which I have to not only read but understand and know as well. At my previous school I had a big library to play with, but here there is only a book storeroom that I have no access to.

A few books have had a profound effect on me. One was Tsitsi Dangarembga's
Nervous Conditions.
Another was Camara Laye's
The Dark Child
, which Mamafa holds dear. The funniest book I ever read was Chenjerai Hove's portrait of Zimbabwean life:
Shebeen Tales
. I tried to read Mandela's
Long Walk to Freedom
but it proved to be a long read to freedom and I failed before passing the twenty-seventh page, which makes me feel like I haven't reached freedom yet. I cannot say it is boring because for a book to be boring one needs to finish it and then say it as a fact, but I continually got stuck somewhere because of some other things that distracted me and I do not like to keep reading the same book for four weeks. Eventually I lost interest.

My ultimate love is modern poetry; it is short, direct, nothing but raw talent. Kopano Dibakwane is my ultimate contemporary poet. I always take his work to the loo, then take too much time, more than necessary, enjoying him.

Mokgethi doesn't really care about magazines or newspapers.

I have never found a magazine that truly has that much to offer me. There was one that I used to buy; it was full of sex, celebrity news and fashion. Not that I am interested much in the sex but I read that as well. Newspapers: I do not really read a newspaper; I scan the headlines first, then I read what I think is interesting. But most of the time there isn't that much that interests me.

Mokgethi dreams of playing tennis.

Netball is the sport that I play, but we only start to practise if we are going to play another school and usually only a week before the game. I would love to play tennis and here in our community we have a tennis court that has been vandalised, refurbished, vandalised and refurbished once more and today lies vandalised. In my whole life I have never seen anyone playing tennis there but I hope that one day I will play on it.

Mokgethi is a very intelligent girl who is concerned about her schoolwork.

I really am. I can solve any mathematical equation, write a very sound essay and read and understand a book on my own. I have never, ever failed a test or an exam in my whole schooling life and the last time I took an evaluation test they didn't believe that I was from a rural/disadvantaged primary school. I can speak five of our national languages excellently and, except for Xhosa, I can converse in the others – not well, but okay.

Mokgethi likes to think that she is very sociable but she is definitely not streetwise.

I am a private person. I am my own best friend and when I am with this best friend I don't notice time passing. I do not have a best friend from my primary school period as I do not have a true friend from the time I spent at private school. I have church friends only because I am going to church with them and high school friends that are only friends because of this common thing we share – school. I do not have a boyfriend as I never had one before and I do not think that I am ready to have one yet.

Above all, Mokgethi likes to think that she is an intellect.

Yes, I am an intellect. Why am I saying that? Because I am. My friends can tell me this and that, using their experience to guide me, but for anything academic they have to consult with me and listen very carefully.

Next year I will be in Cape Town, at the University of Cape Town preferably. I would love to be in Britain, at Oxford University, on my first step to greatness, but a hundred wishes squared plus nine wants minus a billion complications equals X. X as in the unknown sum. Mathematically I can solve any equation but this X, this real-life X, remains an X no matter what I do.

James and Mamafa

Today is a day that I do not have words for. I survived this long because there were people around me who cared and loved Mokgethi, but I knew all along that this day was coming.

There are two people I trust; two people who, I know, understand who Mokgethi is. I don't like to be found anywhere after eighteen hundred without them, as after that I do not trust anyone else. Even my girlfriends will sell me. They have been trying to set me up with whoever they think I deserve to be with or whoever they think deserves to be with me since forever.

These two people understand what Mokgethi is all about, what Mokgethi stands for, where Mokgethi is going and they have come to accept Mokgethi, they are not expecting to change her to be what they want her to be or do things that they want her to do. If Mokgethi takes a wrong step, they will tell her: “Mokgethi, you are now going the wrong way. This is not who you are.”

I will then correct myself.

I always set them up with whoever they want to be with and in return they tell me all of the dog's habits because they are dogs themselves.

When I am between them I can survive a long night because they will never set me up with anybody. For that reason some people hate them, but they are the best friends I have: James and Mamafa.

I have learned to trust these two boys. Though we never really talk about it and never planned it to be this way, it happened, and we were all comfortable with the way it was. Not that they are aware that their function is to protect me, but they do, every time.

Their protection is like that of God. Mokgethi will never know that the hand of God protected her from a certain danger that she was facing, just as I will never know of all the things that James and Mamafa have protected me from, but looking at what others like me go through when we are all covered in darkness, I cannot stop appreciating the two boys in Mokgethi's life.

We have been together since primary school but we completely connected with each other last year and I hope that we can grow old together in this way.

James is a boy who can make every situation feel good and if it is already good he can make it wonderful. If there is anything true about him, it is that once he gets out of his family's gate he becomes more human and happy, but inside the world feels heavy on him. James is only happy when he is in the streets.

He is a Casanova in the making. He will be overly sweet to a girl that he is interested in, but after he is done doing what he needed her for, he becomes the opposite of that overly sweet, caring boy and begins mistreating her. He will justify himself:

“I have been begging for too long. The begging is out of me, I cannot beg any more.”

Mamafa is what we call a “chomi ya bana”; he keeps female company only to revel in it. We make him feel like a general in the military. He has loads of girl friends just for the purpose of being friends and nothing more than that. He knows his way around schoolbooks and of all the pupils in my community he is the only one with an interest in books other than just schoolbooks. He has a big love of poetry and inspired me to express myself in poetry because he can write a poem so simple and naive that I will reread it over and over.

Mamafa likes to think that he is gifted with great wisdom and knows everything in this world. Soft speaking, he is choosy about the words that come out of his mouth, so choosy that he can tell somebody shit without ever using foul language and they will only understand him long afterwards.

The funniest thing about Mamafa is that he always fails to have a private conversation with a girl. We can have a conversation in the street and no one will hear what we are talking about, but let a girl who has a crush on him try to talk to him and his voice will suddenly go very high, so that everyone can hear him.

I tried to set Mamafa up with some of the girls who had a crush on him. He talked to them and held their hands and as long as a third party was around he was comfortable, but if the third party left the scene he started talking in a high tone, getting very uncomfortable and nervous.

James says that if Mamafa ever has sex he will ejaculate all his intelligence and that's why he will never lose his virginity, but the truth is that he is abstaining for reasons that only he knows. It is true, though, that he is still a virgin and his mind has not ventured much into sex.

Mamafa's bedroom is like a palace – he has a computer, a television and a DVD player – and we often spend time there, James illegally downloading music while Mamafa and I get lost in this or that.

If there was anyone who was going to deflower me it was going to be Mamafa; he could have done it long ago because at times I just lose control. He will hold himself back and comment:

“No, Mokgethi, no. You are losing yourself now. Regain your senses.”

Though I will deny it to his face, the fact is that sometimes I call Mamafa without really knowing why. I see too much sex on television. I hear too much sex from my friends. And sometimes it just gets to a girl and I feel like I am losing out, like I need somebody to hold me and do all the things that I have been doing virtually in my mind to me physically. When this power takes over, that is when I call Mamafa. I know that if he can just ... Then I go over to his place, still hoping so much that he can just ... But he never has and I am always very angry when my real self comes back and thankful that he didn't just ...

The last time I was very obvious. We were sleeping in his bed; he was in his pyjamas and I was in my underwear only, my leg was touching his leg.

“Maf, don't you think that this is the right time for us?”

I was getting all hot.

“The right time? Right time for what?”

“You know, the right time.”

“I don't know.”

He didn't respond.

I paused, not knowing how to transmit my thoughts to him. (We are seventeen and everybody is doing it and we, too, are going to have to do it someday, so why not let that someday be today and let us just live it.) This was my thinking.

In silence we fell asleep.

The Guardians

My township is not that big and it is surrounded by the trust land of a king. We all look at him as our king, though we are part of a municipality. The township was started in the early 1960s. The stands are much bigger than the average South African township stand, but the houses were originally very small two-room houses, one room built of concrete blocks and the other of corrugated roof sheets. When it is hot, it boils up inside and it freezes when it is cold. Our home is these two small rooms that have been extended, though the extensions were not planned very well. In this house live my grandmother and my uncle, the last-born of her family. My two aunts, that my mother came between, are both married and live elsewhere with their husbands and children. These are the four people who are responsible for Mokgethi and her younger brother.

Most of the time our guardians make me feel that this is not my home and I am only here because they are obliged to look after us, because my mother is no more. Mokgethi and Khutso have never been a part of this family. None of them – my grandmother, my uncle, Aunt Shirley and Aunt Sarah – want us around. These four people control nearly every aspect of our lives but they are doing it only because they are obliged to, not because they want to. They are not caring for Khutso and Mokgethi and they do not ask us what we think, feel or want. Everything that happens to us, even the smallest thing, is decided between them, then it is final.

I do as I am told, though, because the four of them are our guardians and they always tell us that they have our best interests at heart.

My life is one big contradiction. I think it is very funny as I am looking at it. People doing exactly what they tell you not to do. What is a girl supposed to think when somebody is telling her “Do not associate with boys. In fact, stay away from them.” and then the very same person complains to her grandson: “Why is there never a girl coming here looking for you?”

That is what I have seen in all parents; they like it when their sons are breaking girls' hearts but they hate it when boys are playing with their daughters. But, in their grown-up minds, how do they expect a girl to stay away from boys who are not told to stay away from girls but are instead encouraged to go after them?

My Uncle Lefa is the ultimate man in this community. At thirty-nine, he has fathered four children. He is a “teacher with a BA in Education from the university, not from a college of education”, as he likes to tell those who are not aware of this fact. He wants to be my military defence – he is always reprimanding me and warning me about boys, trying to instil fearful respect in me – but apart from this he hardly has any interest whatsoever in Mokgethi or what Mokgethi is doing. But then he tries to date my friends that he met when they were visiting me, the very same person who doesn't want to even see me with a boy.

He went after Pheladi and Joy and Lebo, all of whom he got to know when they came looking for me at our home. They told me everything, from the moment that he started showing interest to when he finally said his mind. Then they asked me what they should do, so I told them that he was just looking for sex. In reality they were only gauging if I approved of them having a relationship with him – he had impressed them from the beginning, even before he showed any interest.

“You didn't tell me your uncle was so cute. I like the way he smiles; he is charming.”

That was Lebo's comment the first time she saw him.

Then he comes to me as if he is some kind of god, telling me the dos and don'ts even when he knows that I know how he conducts himself with a girl two months younger than I am. How can he lecture me when he is trying to pick up my friends? Why does he keep pretending that he is holy?

I feel for my grandmother; I know that she loves us very much, she wants us too. I can ask her for something and she will want to give it to me. The trick is to stop her from asking for a second opinion, because then she is put in a place where she has to choose between her own children and her two motherless grandchildren. Everything that she does for us has to be approved by Aunt Shirley; she is my grandmother's thinking tank and if she sees everything to be right, then in my grandmother's eyes it must be right too.

There was this time when my grandmother wanted to build a new house. Aunt Shirley said no:

“Ma, we grew up in this house and you never thought of changing it. Now that we are not living here you want to build a new house? For whom? Because you are dying?”

“My grandchildren will live in it after I have died.”

“Which grandchildren? If you have money, give it to us and let us enjoy it, because if you build a house Lefa will sell it after you die.”

That was it; the house was never built. Because my grandmother's most trusted person said no to it.

Not that my grandmother is a stupid woman, no. She was a teacher for many years but she didn't have any teaching qualifications so she was eventually asked to resign, as there were enough candidates that the teachers' colleges were producing. She has since taken a job working for a pharmaceutical company. It is just as my uncle said:

“If you want everything to be alright, you have to do it their way, which is actually my sister's way. She is controlling her family as well as this one.”

My grandmother has a secret life which she thinks no one is aware of, but I know about it. There is a Saturday, midday one – Uncle Mashego – and a midnight one, who comes as he wants – I call him Grandmother's Midnight Man. If I want my grandmother to do something for me without having her fuss too much about it, the best possible time to ask her is on a Saturday afternoon, after Uncle Mashego has come calling.

When Uncle Mashego – he is not really our uncle, we just call him that out of respect – drops her at the gate, she is a young girl again, losing everything that comes with being a grown-up, wizened grandmother until Sunday morning, when she regains her grown-up, wizened self.

Uncle Mashego is married since long ago and has his own set of grandchildren. He is a retired police officer and these days he rears chickens at his home, which he sells. He also distributes tomatoes to street vendors.

I don't know if Uncle Mashego's wife knows the extent of his friendship with my grandmother, but I know that everybody thinks that they are just veterans of friendship – they have been friends from long ago when they were still teens.

Klip Man is Grandmother's Midnight Man. The survivor of everything not good in life, he is not pleasant to look at and the fact that he rarely talks makes him even scarier. The scars on his face are the scars of apartheid's brutality, scars of being caught on the wrong side of people, scars of what prison can do. But he is still walking on his two feet and it looks like he can survive another fifty years.

There is a story that some Boers caught him stealing from them. They beat him up bad, grievous bodily harm first grade with intent to kill. When they were all tired, he stood up and looked at them.

“Is julle nou moeg? Huh!”

They beat him again, until they were convinced that he was dead, but as they were about to leave he opened his eyes and looked at them.

“Ek is a klip van 'n swart man.”

He stood up again, with blood all over him, knocking one of them down flat before taking to his heels. They couldn't catch him and that is how he came to be known as Klip Man.

Only alcohol makes him vulnerable; without it I wouldn't have known that he sometimes sleeps in our home. When he is drunk he will talk to himself as if there are two or three people talking at the same time, him and two other him-selves; listen carefully and you will hear that he is three people in one.

He jumped the wall and fell on the flowers:

“Wat gaan nou aan?”

“Ek het geval. Is jy a moegoe?”

“Ek sê vir jou.”

I knew who it was.

“Starrag verseker, jy maak lawaai.”

“Ja! Ek raas nie.”

“Voetsek, jou gat, hier is die ander man se huis, respect. Ek weet die moegoe is lank dood, maar respect.”

The message was clear. He knocked at my grandmother's window while having some low little disagreements between him-selves.

“Nou wat soek ons hier so by die dooie man se huis?”

Though my grandmother wanted him to go, she couldn't get rid of him and so, eventually, she let him in. The whole night she kept trying to keep his voice down but it was too late; I knew my grandmother's secret.

When sober you would never know that he was there. He will come an hour after we are all in bed. A single loud knock at the window and the outside light at the back of the house will be turned off as she opens the door. As the door closes, the light will be back on again.

I don't know what time Klip Man leaves our home because my grandmother always has to wake me up in the morning, but what I do know is that he does not have the same effect that Uncle Mashego has on her because she is always the same granny in the morning.

My grandmother likes to make comments while Khutso is around. Khutso doesn't make his bed or even wash the bedding and she says the reason for this is because he doesn't have a girlfriend, and boys who don't have girlfriends hang around street corners in packs, searching for comfort in weed.

“Every day, every night, he is with boys and boys.
Knock-knock
. ‘Is Khutso here?' It will be boys. There is never a day that there is a knock and a sweet young voice says, ‘Is Khutso here?' It is always boys and lots of boys.”

He will usually just pretend that he hasn't heard her but one day he did respond:

“Gran, maybe you don't know 'cos you are of another age, but in my age, women kill. In my age, any association with women is detrimental to your health.”

“Why didn't we kill you long ago?”

“I mean girlfriends.”

“You get yourself a girlfriend, she won't kill you, but you have girlfriends and you will die.”

Good point but this is the person who doesn't even want to see me talking to a boy. She hates Mamafa with all her heart and refuses to greet him if they meet in the street, but she can tell a boy younger than I am to go and get himself a girlfriend.

Aunt Shirley. Sometimes I do not know what to make of her. I cannot say that she loves me ... No, she definitely does not love me. If there is anything that I am to her it is a servant, a helping hand. She has two daughters – one is twenty and the other is seventeen – who are, like me, doing Grade Twelve. She bought her two daughters phones, but when my grandmother bought me a phone she complained about it, saying that the phone would make me naughty. She then developed a habit of searching through my phone and wanting to know everything about what she found there:

“Whose number is this?”

“Mokgethi, what does this message mean?”

“What is he to you, Mokgethi?”

When her daughters are home, their boyfriends and male friends visit and she has no objection, but when I was staying with her, one of the rules was that no boys should come to her house. One day a boy came to the house uninvited, looking for me. He happened to be a friend of her daughters and he came because he was used to coming all the time during the school holidays. This time I was blamed for inviting boys to the house and for that reason she chased me away, telling her mother that I am a whore and she cannot live with whores. I was happy to leave.

While I was living with Aunt Shirley I had to clean the house every weekend and cook and wash the dishes every day after school. Worst of all were the holidays, when her children would lounge around the house, playing host to their innumerable male and female friends. I would have to clean up after them and if the house was not clean at the end of the day I was the one to take the blame.

Aunt Shirley is married but she will leave her home to visit us here on a Monday or Tuesday, maybe even for both days, to see how we are doing. This is her reason, given to her husband, for coming here but in truth she just wants to see her other men.

I do not know if my grandmother knows about Aunt Shirley's other men, but I think she must know. If indeed her boyfriend is coming, Aunt Shirley will shout if we switch on the outside light, saying that we are wasting electricity for nothing. If he is not coming she will switch on the outside light herself. Then I know she is not here for that or maybe the man has cancelled and disappointed her.

Aunt Shirley is a nurse and has been a nurse since she left high school. This year she has gone back to nursing school – I cannot say for what because I have never been interested in nursing. I think she is the one influencing the decision that my grandmother took of sending me to nursing college next year. Aunt Shirley says that it is cheap and there is plenty of work available for nurses.

“My mother had a degree from a university, Aunt Sarah has a degree from a university and so does my uncle. Grandma, why would you want me to have a one-year nursing diploma?”

She doesn't say anything.

“Why would I be born to people who have degrees and then disgrace them with a one-year nursing diploma?”

“We don't have money.”

“You have been paying four thousand rand a month plus the hostel and all the other things and suddenly you cannot afford to send me to university?”

At that time tears were letting themselves out of my eyes. There was no logic in what she was saying and so, knowing this, she became a millipede and rolled herself up, her face fermenting into anger.

“Grandma, I did not say get angry with me. I just want to understand why you are saying what you are saying.”

But she didn't say anything. This is my family – full of secrets. They were paying four thousand a month for the three years that I spent in a private school and now they are telling me that there is no money.

Then there is my other aunt, Sarah. She is a lecturer at the University of the North and does not live with us but with her family in Polokwane. Even though we live so far apart, she is the only one of my guardians who tries to understand what it is like to be a teenage girl today. She wants to understand all that Mokgethi is. I can talk to her the whole night, talking about me, and she will tell me things that happened to her when she was my age. She is equally connected with her only daughter, who is twenty; they are more like best friends.