Читать книгу Always Another Country - Sisonke Msimang - Страница 10

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Burley Court

WHEN I WAS LITTLE, we stayed in a series of flats. First it was Burley Court, then some apartments near the University Teaching Hospital and then a small complex in a neighbourhood called Woodlands. The one imprinted on my mind is Burley Court – perhaps because it was the biggest, perhaps because it was the one Mummy spoke of the most. Burley Court was just off Church Road, which was a busy street close to the centre of Lusaka. The residents of Burley Court were part of a new generation of urban Africans who were not concerned with what whites thought of them. Each block smelled like kapenta fish and frying meat. As you walked past open doors and windows you could hear the tinny sounds of Thomas Mapfumo’s ‘Matiregerera Mambo’ or the elegant chords of Letta Mbulu’s ‘There’s Music in the Air’.

Like most kids in newly independent Zambia, I was born free and so carried myself like a child who had every reason to believe she was at the centre of the universe. Our parents also conducted themselves with an unmistakable air of self-assurance. They behaved as though the ground beneath their feet was theirs and the sun in the sky had risen purely for their benefit; as though the trees were green simply to please them. They laboured under the merry illusion that the Copperbelt three hundred kilometres north of Lusaka would power their gleaming futures forever more. They believed they would have the kind of wealth that generations before them had been unable to attain, shackled as they had been to a colonial yoke. They thought – naively, with hindsight – that their own children might become doctors and lawyers and mining magnates. They were innocents, you see. Though they were grown men and women at Independence, their liberation had come in the heady times before the price of copper plummeted, before the plunging currency brought them to their knees and made them beg for reprieve. When I was little the adults in my life were still buoyed by the idea that they had found their place in the sun.

Each morning the men who were breadwinners in our flats left for their government jobs. Their wives waved them off because they were almost middle class and had been persuaded to believe in the curious colonial set-up in which women stayed home and took care of the children and behaved as though this precluded them from other forms of economic labour. Housebound – but assisted by poorly paid housegirls – they turned to idle gossip and raucous laughter. They shelled peanuts and tightened their chitenges and prepared meals fit for their husbands, who were little kings in their own homes. The men for whom these women preened and clucked returned at dusk, striding with great purpose towards their families, making their way to tables laden with nsima and meat stews, to smiling wives whose middles were slowly broadening as they settled into city living, and children brimming with book learning and shiny with achievement.

Mummy talked about Burley Court with such rich memories – about how, every afternoon, once their homework was done, the Burley Court children ran up and down the polished concrete stairwells of Building One or Building Three. In her recollection, we were a rowdy crew of polyglots who screamed in Nyanja and Bemba and saved English for the best insults. Terrence, a beanpole of a kid with a Zambianised British accent, was the most eloquent of us all. He would fire off jokes veiled as insults that were halfway threats to whomever happened to catch his eye.

‘You! Your legs are so thin. Eh! Please eat so that I can beat you nicely and not worry about breaking you! Isn’t it that every night when your mother calls you upstairs for food she just pretending? How can you be eating and still staying so thin-thin like this?’ Terrence himself was long and bony with skin that looked as though it had never been near a jar of Vaseline, let alone lotion, yet somehow he had the market cornered on skinny jokes.

I was not as brave as Terrence. I understood perfectly well that I was an easy target. I spoke Nyanja – though not as fluently as the rest because I was not Zambian. This meant that, although I had all the hallmarks and memories of an insider, I wasn’t one. I could not afford to make the same kinds of jokes. I tended towards the middle of the pack because I knew I was vulnerable. The wrong joke about the wrong child, and the pack could turn against me. Laughter can dry up quickly when you are a child: one minute you are making the gang howl, and the next you are in tears because someone has called you a refugee.

I had to choose how I would distinguish myself and I knew that it had to be safe.

So, I never joined Terrence in his attacks and I never laughed too heartily. I was simply one of the pack – playing hopscotch on the bumpy pavement in front of the steps of Building One in the evenings as twilight settled on the city and cars whizzed past. No one would have thought to look twice at me, nor at my little toddling sisters. We were children like all others; our skinny arms flew and our brown legs kicked high into the air. It was the same, evening after evening: we jumped and landed, threw the stones further and faster, desperate to get in one last skip before we were called inside.

◆ ◆ ◆

There were three of us. I was the first. Then came Mandlesilo, born in 1977 when I was already three, and then Zengeziwe, who followed in 1979. As a child, Mandla was stubborn in the way that middle children must be if they are to survive childhood emotionally intact. She was quiet in a manner more thoughtful than it was shy. She also cried easily – a trait that has followed her into adulthood and which has a great deal to do with the fact that she is the kindest and most sensitive among us. Wedged between an overbearing older sister and a younger sibling who never met a show she couldn’t steal, Mandla was our conscience, the moral ballast that kept us out of trouble simply by virtue of her own principles. Zeng and I would happily have hidden our crimes from our parents, but Mandla wouldn’t let us. She preferred that we not sin in the first place.

Zeng was a crowd-pleaser and remains one today. She was the kind of baby who woke up singing and then gurgled her way through the day, a sweet manipulator whose every sin you forgave because she was too brazen and too gorgeous to resist. This has been her enduring trait. She makes you laugh until your belly aches, even as you know you ought to be weeping with the knowledge that she is not as happy as she seems and is far more complex than she would have the world believe.

As children we were moon-faced and medium brown with plaited hair and ashy knees. We were observant and thus preternaturally sarcastic. We wisecracked our way through breakfast and joked through lunch and told hilarious stories as we played in the dimming light. And because the world was not yet cruel we were innocent in a way that softened our repartee.

Bath time was special. In the tub, Mummy often teased us about our dirty fingernails and scraped knees, about our blistered palms and our chapped feet. She would run a wet cloth over our torsos and soap our backs wondering aloud how we got so filthy. ‘And this cut?’ she would ask in an exaggerated voice. ‘Where did this one come from?’ She would wag a finger playfully and smile. Her staged anger made us laugh and her delighted voice was like honey in warm water. We knew that other mothers hated it when their kids came home with torn dungarees and bloody knees, so Mummy’s revelling in our constant state of raggedness was a novelty of which we never tired.

Mummy loved the small casualties of childhood that marked our bodies. She was riveted by our stories – playground triumphs and the physical indignities of falling and getting scratched – because she knew that the little dings and nicks on our bodies would forge our personalities. We were wriggly and outsized because she encouraged us to exaggerate and amplify. In our retelling, every cut was actually a gash, every scrape a laceration. At home, we were brave, even if outside we navigated with a little more caution.

We were little black girls born into an era in which talk of women’s rights swirled around in the air, but in which those rights were still far from tangible. The first ten years of my life coincided with the UN Decade for Women, so there were always speeches and conferences bringing people together to talk about the urgency of equality. Africans took the UN seriously back then; so, perhaps sensing the imminence of women’s liberation, Mummy set about raising us to be ready for the tipping point – the moment when assertions of female independence would be met with praise rather than admonition. She did this deftly. Somehow she knew that the key would lie in the cuts and the bruises and the shared laughter of our baths.

◆ ◆ ◆

Although most of the Burley Court mothers didn’t work, in our house Mummy earned the money and Baba – being a botany and entomology student at the University of Zambia (UNZA) – went to school to learn about plants and insects. Baba’s other job was being a freedom fighter, but the income from that line of work was negligible. Before he met her, he had been wedded to the Movement for the Emancipation of his People. But then he had seen her one day and liked her smile and liked her legs. They had talked and he had discovered that she played tennis and there was something about that he liked, too. Soon he began to think about her all the time: the Swazi girl with a killer backhand who pretended not to notice him when he and the other guerrillas stood at the courts, watching.

For her part, Mummy liked the tall handsome man whose corduroy pants fitted him just so. She liked his sense of moderation. He drank, but seldom to the point of forgetting. He spent time with the others, but was often on his own. He smiled often, but wasn’t the type of man who laughed gratuitously. In her experience, those types of men always had something to hide.

She qualified as an accountant the year after they met and soon after that he borrowed a tie and she wore a pair of white knee-high boots and a cream-coloured minidress that barely covered her swelling belly and they got married at Lusaka City Hall.

The women of Burley Court gossiped about all manner of apartment business but nothing occupied their time and energies quite like a good discussion about the Guerrilla who refused to work and the Swazi who was so in love with him that she allowed it. Whenever the subject of my parents and their relationship came up – which was often – the women would speculate about the peculiar madness that besets some women when it comes to matters of the heart.

Because their area of specialisation was rumour-mongering, Mummy and her friends referred to them as the Rungarers. Mama Tawona was the lead Rungarer. She couldn’t accept the unchristian relationship that was unfolding before her eyes: Zambia was then, as it is now, a deeply conservative society. Women and men had separate domains and never the twain should meet except where it was sanctioned by God.

Mummy was casually pretty and had nice fit legs, which she was always showing off in miniskirts and dresses that stopped far too high above her knees. She knew how to drive a car and generally lived her life as she wanted. Yet in the eyes of the Rungarers Mummy possessed a number of traits that would doom her to a failed marriage. For one thing, she worked too much, sometimes only arriving home after six, while her Guerrilla came and went whenever he pleased, collecting insects that were ostensibly related to his ‘studying’ and dragging the children along with him in dungarees and denim. They always came back muddy and sticky. It was obvious that he wanted to turn those three poor little things into boys – their hair was cut short and they did not have pierced ears, among other notable offences. Worse, they never went to church. There just didn’t seem to be any order in the lives of the Swazi and the Guerrilla and their children. It was not clear what the organising principle was that kept their household together: it was not God, nor was it family or tradition.

The Rungarers often huddled together in the hallway next to Mama Tawona’s house, bent towards one another in conversation. When they were not laughing loudly, they spoke in hushed tones. They cackled with their mouths behind their hands and then smiled and said hello and imitated politeness when someone walked by. Mummy couldn’t stand them. She smiled broadly whenever she passed them in her smart work suits, but never slowed down to have a conversation. She did nothing to cause them to twist their faces and turn their lips upside down at her but they did it anyway, rolling their eyes as she passed, staring at her new shoes or eyeing her old handbag. She couldn’t win and knew it. She was either a show-off for having too many nice things, or a pitiable mess for having too many items requiring mending.

She gave them as little attention as possible. Her apparent lack of interest in them only fed their envy, though. It stoked the fires of their outrage. On Saturday mornings Mummy would leave early for her French class and as she passed they would harden their eyes. Heh! Maybe this is how people behaved in her country, but in Zambia, she would lose her man if she kept leaving the house for unnecessary things like French classes and tennis matches.

For the most part, the contagion of the Rungarers did not spread beyond their small group. Adult business was largely adult business and kid business stayed among us kids. But there were moments of crossover, when the mutters moved out of the shadows and the hurts that grown-ups inflicted on one another writhed before us like the grass snakes we would occasionally catch and kill when they strayed onto the playground.

◆ ◆ ◆

One day, we were playing a game of hide-and-seek and Terrence was ‘it’. I hid in a stairwell. I knew he wouldn’t think to look for me in that particular area because it was in Building One and Mama Tawona lived in Building One, which meant we rarely played in Building One. I took the chance, though, because I had seen her and two of the Rungarers standing at the bus stop waiting to go to town earlier. I thought I was safe.

I was wrong. Just as I settled into my spot, Mama Tawona and the Rungarers trundled down the hall, loud and out of breath. Perhaps the bus had not come and they were complaining about how unreliable public transport was becoming; perhaps they had been to the market and were back for lunch. I don’t remember precisely but I remember feeling the way they always made me feel – on edge. It was a hot day and they talked freely and easily – the way women do when they are not in the presence of their husbands or their children.

They stopped in front of Tawona’s house and their minds turned to gossip. Soon, they were talking about Mummy. Mama Tawona wondered aloud how stupid that woman could be taking care of that man. She suggested that Baba was not a real man in any case – just a boy chasing childish dreams, playing with guns and travelling all over the place using the Zambian government’s money. And all those parties and all that coming and going by the other guerrillas at all hours of the night! Always someone new sleeping in the house – men and women, men and women, sometimes children also there, inside. What about their own children? Some of those people were criminals. The Rungarers were convinced that a lot of the exiles coming from South Africa were actually just common folk, ordinary people who had concocted elaborate stories to escape punishment for being thieves and muggers. It was so easy to pretend to be a hero – meanwhile, they were just common criminals! Eh. Most of those ANC people were just crooks.

It had never occurred to me to think about my parents as dreamers nor had I thought about our family as being all that different from others in Burley Court. The aunties and uncles and the students who slept in our beds for weeks on end and then disappeared were just a fact of life. This was precisely why I would never make the jokes Terrence made – my difference made me vulnerable to derision.

Until I ran into Mama Tawona’s outrage and consternation, I hadn’t thought about the fact that there were other ways to live. Mama Tawona and the Rungarers represented the moral police. They were arbiters of who would get into the Kingdom of Righteousness and who would not. It was they – and not the landlord – who decided whether you belonged in Burley Court or not.

Mama Tawona was nothing like the other women who populated my life when I was a girl. The rest of them were like my mother. They were members of the ANC or they were students with strong ties to the liberation movement. Many of them were members of MK, a paramilitary wing of the ANC, which meant they were training to become soldiers.

These women were the ones I loved the most. They were sharp of tongue and hungry of gaze and they belonged together in the way of a pack. They were glorious in the multi-toned way of African women – long and lean with upturned buttocks, or sturdy and wide-hipped with slender ankles and wrists tapering neatly into broad feet and slim fingers. They were richly dark with closely shorn hair, or they had pitch-black just-so afros haloing their walnut skin.

They smoked and drank and laughed out loud; free in one sense, you see, but not free at all in the ways that mattered the most. They wore minidresses and long boots and jeans that allowed them to move quickly and jump effortlessly, to run the way women weren’t supposed to. They had arms strong enough to carry AK-47s and their braided hair was pulled magnificently tight; brows always plucked to perfection. They radiated a strange sort of lawlessness. It was as though their half-smiling, half-sneering lips had been moulded to defy the rules. Their ease with words, their comfort with the art of flinging barbs at one another, at women who happened to be passing by – at rival and friend alike – made my heart jump, pump, barapapumpum, barapapapum. I was in love with them.

Plump bums, bony haunches, spread thighs; they sat on our kitchen counters, calves swinging, shoulder to shoulder in sisterly solidarity. When someone put on a Boney M record, they would crowd into the centre of the living room, laughing into each other’s eyes. ‘Haiwena, sukuma!’ they would shout, urging anyone who still thought they might sit down while the music was playing to stand up. ‘Sana, ngiyayithana le ngoma.’ And there they would be, doing the Pata Pata to ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’.

I realise, now, these were new girls, stepping out of old skins. They roared, these young lionesses. They snapped gum and talked about how long they would wait before they were called to the camps. They laughed at their elegantly shabby men. They smiled sideways and sucked their teeth when a beautiful man they could see themselves loving happened to pass by. They breathed fire and revolution and I longed to be them.

The men were just as glamorous. The men who came to drink and laugh late into the night with my parents, the ones we called Uncle, and whose laps we climbed into and who tickled us and gave us sweets, these men were all ‘firsts’. The first African accepted at such and such university, the first black man to live in such and such a place, the first black to lecture at so and so university. Because of this, they had an air of invincibility and supreme confidence about them – even when they were falling-down drunk.

We were mesmerised by the poetry of their intellect. Every weekend there was a debate about when Africa was going to put a man on the moon. And because they didn’t snicker or seem to think this was absurd, neither did we. In the Lusaka of my childhood it was perfectly plausible that we could go to outer space under our own steam. I had no idea that a man had already been sent to the moon and that his name was Neil Armstrong. When I was little we only compared ourselves with the West in ways that favoured us.

In escaping apartheid, the men who crowded into our flat were part of a new breed of Africans who had left South Africa and Zimbabwe and Mozambique determined that they would shine and shine and shine. They were possessed of the secret of freedom, a sort of inner spirit that propelled them forward and made them look – to my wide eyes at least – as though they were soaring.

They were heartbreakingly handsome, these men. They lounged loose and long-limbed across our couches. They had guerrilla beards and unkempt hair, and sinewy thighs and bell-bottom jeans. They drove beat-up falling-apart cars, laughed as though their hearts were not burning and drank as though their nightmares would never stop.

They were idealists and gangsters and hustlers and bright-eyed students who had left girlfriends and mothers and wives and babies who would never know the circumference of their fathers’ arms – little ones who would grow into girls who would grow into women who would hate the men who loved them for not being their fathers. But in our house, they were heroes. My sisters and I knew nothing of the lives they had left behind and so to us they were new men, unmarred by responsibilities and ties to painful pasts and mundane yesterdays. In exile, they created themselves as though from mud and ochre.

Upon leaving South Africa, they had shed their old skins and become the men they had been born to be. Their backs straightened as they descended into Moscow’s frigid embrace; their muscles lengthened as they marched across bush and mosquitoinfested swamps in Angola; their spines elongated as they squelched through bog and marsh. Nonsense may have spewed from their malarial lips in Kongwa but they were free. They marched across Africa singing freedom songs until they lost their voices. They sang until they were dry-mouthed and croaking so that, by the time they arrived at the end of all their convoluted journeys in Lusaka, this place of cigarettes and laughter and hard-soft women, they were exhausted and ready to smile.

Having made it to the headquarters of their movement, which was supposed to emancipate the people, many of them simply collapsed. I see, now, that this is how we found them. We found them fathering fat brown children and loving free women. We found them sitting on red polished verandas feeling the warmth of the Lusaka rain on their brown shoulders. We found them smoking zol and singing Bob Marley’s ‘Buffalo Soldier’.

They came to Lusaka broken by many more things than the struggle for justice. But their demons did not matter here. What mattered was that they had decided to make our little city with its outsized ambitions and its orderly roundabouts their place of safety. For them, Lusaka became the place where black was equal to free, where nobody, not Queen Elizabeth or John Vorster or Richard Nixon, could tell them anything. Lusaka – in all its peaceful futuristic pan-African glory – was theirs and they meant to burrow in its peace for a while.

Some of the residents of Burley Court did not find the women and the men who visited us especially interesting. They found them loud and they resented the fact that their president – His Excellency Dr Kenneth Kaunda – had given all these revolutionaries special status in the country. Dr Kaunda was a dreamer who believed that Africa belonged to Africans. He had said that independent Africa had a responsibility towards the parts of Africa that were still in chains. And so, because Africans in South Africa and Zimbabwe and Mozambique were not free, Dr Kaunda had given us refuge in Zambia.

For ordinary Zambians, our presence was a daily reality, not just an empty political slogan. Most were gracious and embraced our cause. But for others, like Mama Tawona, we were rule-breakers and layabouts. For them, the word ‘refugee’ was a slur. The refugee women took Zambian men while the freedom-fighter men caroused and broke Zambian women’s hearts.

I crouched on the ground, waiting to be found. But the problem with Mummy and Baba was bigger than their being refugees; problem was, they were in love and that idea struck her as laughable.

Their gossip was about this strange and laughable fact. Mama Tawona threw her head back and cackled, talking about my mother as though she were a silly child. ‘Ha, mwana! That love she is feeling for that man makes her think he is wonderful. Meanwhile we all know that is just foolish. Isn’t it that when you are in love even a desert can have the appearance of a beautiful forest?’ She roared with laughter, and Mrs Mwansa (who had no children but at least had a husband, so she was spared from total irrelevance) and Mama Terrence nodded their heads in agreement.

‘She will learn,’ said Mama Terrence.

‘Ehe, she will learn. It will be pain that teaches her,’ said Mrs Mwansa sagely.

Mama Tawona continued. ‘Mmn, but you know men. One day he will wake up and decide that the only thing he wants in this life is the one thing that she has not provided him. Then we will see if she still smiles and says “Good morning” like that in her high heels. Eh! I don’t think so. No. Instead she will be crying, crying, crying tears of sorrow. Eh-eh! Because men are like that. If they don’t get their heir, they will leave you. Until she has a son, she will never be guaranteed that man’s love.’

And so the world’s obsession with boys revealed itself to me. We needed to have a baby brother and it needed to happen soon because my sisters and I would never be enough. The absence of brothers would bring untold misery to our parents. I hadn’t known boys mattered more than girls, that one fictional first-born boy was more important than a fistful of girls. This revelation – that a family without boys is really no family at all – was so significant I didn’t hear Terrence thundering around the corner. I was sitting there turning over our family’s boylessness in my mind, thinking about how I would formulate the question to Mummy when she got back from work, when I felt Terrence’s skinny knee connect with my face. I screamed, and the Rungarers jumped. My cheek puffed out instantly and I saw no sympathy in Mama Tawona’s eyes. She looked at me as though I was a thief.

It hurt.

I only learnt the word ‘primogeniture’ much later in life, but this was my first lesson in the concept. What an absurd idea: that my father may have grounds to find another woman so they might make another child, a boy who would ostensibly be made more in my father’s image than any of us. With my cheek swollen and this new idea thudding in my head I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or vomit.

How could anyone be more like Baba than me? Wasn’t his face in mine? Wasn’t he our dad who loved us more than anything in the world because he took us places – to the market and the mechanic and to visit with his friends to show us off?

Yet once it had been spoken I understood it. It explained all the other times Mummy had been asked – by women she had just met – whether she was going to try one more time. It provided a basis for all the times someone had said, ‘You can’t stop until you get a boy,’ all the times Mummy had turned her face away in anger and pulled us along quickly.

◆ ◆ ◆

A few days after the hallway collision, my cheek was still tender and slightly bruised. Tawona and I were playing hopscotch and – unusually – she was losing. I threw the stone and it landed firmly in its box. I began to hop. ‘You touched the line,’ she shouted.

I hadn’t touched the line. ‘I didn’t,’ I said.

‘You did. You’re a cheater.’

‘You’re the one who’s cheating. Because I’m winning you want to make up stories? You get out of here and go and cheat somewhere else!’ I shouted. I was still angry with her mother, still mulling over the conversation I had overheard, still mad that my face was sore.

Tawona was never one to take an insult lying down. She shouted, ‘Maybe it’s you who needs to go to the witch doctor, and not your mother!’

I had no idea what she was talking about but I felt my face flush. ‘Oh! Now you have no words, eh?’ she continued. ‘Let me tell you something, you stupid girl. If your mother was from our tribe they would have taken her to the witch doctor by now. Anyway, maybe it’s because you people are foreigners. In Zambia we don’t have such things. How can a woman have three girls in a row?

Non-stop. Three? Two is okay. But three!? Eh! Three is a curse.’ She ploughed on, determined to do maximum damage.

‘If she doesn’t fix this problem your father will leave her for a woman who can give him what he wants. No man on this earth doesn’t want sons. I mean! Eh! She should be careful. Do you think that man will stay in the house where there is no one to inherit?’

She continued.

‘A man can never ever love his daughters the way he will love his sons. Boys belong to their fathers. So now, what does your father have? Just girls? So then? Eh! So then he has nothing.’

I don’t remember going for her. I only know there was blood everywhere and I was not sorry that I punched her. I was not sorry at all and she was shocked and no longer smirking and that made me feel better although not much because she had just broken my heart.

Then there was a ring of screaming excited kids around us and she was up and livid, and storming towards the stairwell with the crowd billowing out behind us as she cradled her split lip and smoothed her bloody dress over her paunchy tummy. I hung back, afraid. Terrence turned, then ran back to me. His lips were dry as usual but he was serious. The gravity of the situation was clear to him. ‘You better come, you’ll just make it worse if you don’t.’

Terrence took my hand and led me to the front. We stood, facing Tawona, who was a bloody mess by now. Someone handed her the tooth I had punched out of her mouth. It was dirty and very small and looking at it set her to wailing once more and it made my lip quiver too. I hadn’t meant to knock her tooth out. I was scared; terrified, really. Mama Tawona would have my head.

By the time we reached the top step, Mama Tawona was waiting. Tawona’s little brother had run up to tell his mother that his big sister had been beaten and that I was the culprit. She stood there with murder in her eyes. I didn’t wait for her to start shouting. I couldn’t. I committed an even worse sin: I bolted. I broke the cardinal rule of all African households and ran from an adult who was trying to discipline me. I pushed past her and ran down the hallway and into our house. I was desperate for Baba to be home.

He was. He was sitting at the dining room table with his books on the table and a few beetles spread out in front of him. Mummy hated it when he labelled his specimens on the table and under normal circumstances I would have told him this but this was an emergency and so I rushed forward and crawled into his lap, which I was getting too big to do, and I started to cry. In the chaos of those few moments he thought I was hurt and so he looked for the cut, searching my body for the place where the skin was broken.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, confused.

‘No,’ I cried. ‘No. But, but Tawona said you won’t love me because I’m a girl.’ The words were a jumbled tumble – a snotty rush. ‘She said that, that you only want boys and that we don’t belong here in Zambia, we are foreigners and we should go back where we came from, and then she said we don’t even belong to you, that only boys belong to fathers, girls are a curse.’

I wailed. Ruptured.

He said nothing and this calmed me because, as every child knows, silence is always the beginning of listening.

Baba bent into my hurt and pulled me close. His insides thumped a sonata, his heart thudding dully against my chest: ‘You are mine, you are mine, you are mine.’ Tawona’s words lost a bit of their edge. My own little heart thumped back: ‘I am yours, I am yours, I am yours.’

That night, after she came home from work and heard the story, Mummy made me apologise to Tawona. We went to her house together and knocked on the door. Mama Tawona peered out imperiously.

‘So you have come to say what?’ she said abruptly. Mummy didn’t let her continue. She was curt.

‘We have come to apologise,’ she said. ‘Sonke should not have hit Tawona.’

Mama Tawona began to interrupt her. ‘You think that just saying sorry will be enough—’

But Mummy cut her off. She was not finished.

‘But understand this: your bitterness needs to find another home. It is not welcome in mine. And if it doesn’t, if you insist on this nonsense, then you will see. You will see me and you will know me. That same curse you think has been put on me will be on you. You will be cursed in ways your people do not even understand. Do you know the Swazis? The Zulu people? If you want to see powers, you will see them.’

Mama Tawona’s hands had stayed on her hips in defiance as Mummy spoke, but her face was frozen. Mummy gave her a hard and thorough look and then asked, ‘Do you understand me?’

Mama Tawona remained silent. Ashamed.

‘Heh?’ Mummy repeated, sounding rougher than I had known she could be. ‘Do you understand me?’

Mama Tawona nodded. Then she looked down. She was not the type of woman who admitted she was wrong. That would have required the kind of introspection that women like Mama Tawona studiously avoided. Observing the rules of respectability, and policing the gates, requires a kind of hard-nosed vigilance that precludes sensitivity and thoughtfulness. My mother knew this so it is unlikely that she expected an apology.

But I was still young and so I did expect it. I thought we would wait for her to say, ‘I’m sorry too.’ It was obvious that both Tawona and her mother owed me an apology. That would not come. Mama Tawona shrank in the face of Mummy’s anger, but she was not convinced she was wrong; she had just been caught.

Mummy took my hand and we walked away. We entered our flat and I imagined Mama Tawona still standing at the door – rooted and, for once, speechless.

Baba put us to bed as usual. He told us a story about a girl who found a rock that turned into a star that shot across the sky and I was very tired but I knew that he intended me to know that I was that girl and also that rock that turned into a star and maybe also that sky. He wanted me to know that I belonged in his heart and in his imagination and that I was the centre of the universe.