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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.