It is the early 1980s and I am eight years old. Two dark nipples are firmly stuck on my chest. I think of them as inconsequential parts of my body, so trivial they could be the backs of my ears. I touch them coincidentally when bathing and forget them as soon as my hand moves to more useful parts like my tummy and legs. Then one day there is a sudden change. It finds me prepared with knowledge that it will one day arrive and early puberty is no shame. But miles away is a 12 year old who is shaken when she wakes up one morning and the black knobs are like tingling antennae. She gets even more shocked when she touches them and feels her breast as hard as the avocado pips. She assumes it is a curse.
But just before she grasps the changes in her body, she is uprooted from her birth place to a strange location. Her journey from the green land of bananas that curve to a perfect shape of a half moon takes her to the smoky hard streets of Soweto. She arrives in my neighbourhood, Diepkloof, early enough to be seen only by a few women who prove their worth by waking early to sweep the dry yellow-reddish soil in their yards.
They recognise the older woman she is with and warm greetings are exchanged. No one really pays attention to the young one, she is just a child. But not really, as we are soon to discover. Not a child who is expected to be childlike. Maria, as I choose to call her, is here to be a wife. The woman accompanying her is the first wife to Mr No-shame and they already have four children; the youngest is almost the same age as Maria.
Her arrival makes some gossip in the township; some find it repugnant and others point out it is common in certain cultural groups. No one spells it out: we are witnessing child abuse in the name of culture.
To us children, Maria is one of us. We invite her in the afternoons for a game of ibhathi where we duck a tennis ball. We collect cans from the mounds of rubbish nearby and play skop die bal. She laughs freely like us and jumps in excitement every time her team wins. Then comes 4pm, and we quickly rush to our homes to set the coal stoves on. She too disappears into her home, only when we go back to play later she stays in doors to assume her other role. We dare not ask her what her other role entails.
A few years later she is pregnant. But it is no disgrace. Many teenagers are pregnant around the same time, it is their answer to the call for the need for future soldiers who will overcome the enemy. Mayibuye i-Afrika! is one of the fashionable slogans and it feels like an honour to give birth to a child who can be named Mandla, Sizwe or Siyanqoba, all names that resonate with the spirit of the struggle. This is now the mid-1980s.
Maria gives birth at 15 and is taken back to her village. I imagine her chewing the thick sugar cane from her mother’s fields and wondering if life can ever taste as good. ”Where is the sweetness in my life?” she will probably ask herself as she accepts her fate.
Now in my 30s, how I wish to preserve that sweetness for my children. But before I can worry about protecting them against the ills of our society, I have to make them aware of their bodies. Where do I begin? No. The real question is what do I say when I reach the part between the legs. Vagina and penis sit uncomfortably in my mind. I grew up calling ”it” for girls nunuza, ”it” for boys tswibi. Both words deviate from calling ”it” by its name.
I end up settling for ”flower” for girls, ”zizi” for boys. But as soon as I say the words, I wonder if I can trust the world to allow ”flowers” to bloom, without anyone nipping them in the bud. And can male children grow without feeling accused of owning natural weapons? Is there space to nurture and raise sexually confident children in a world where violation of girls’ and women’s bodies is common practice? How do you teach children about sex and sexuality without instilling some form of fear in their minds about the unsafe space we live in?
Call me paranoid. But, why not? I grew up in a neighbourhood where sexual violence at one point became as normal as having menstrual periods. The 1980s were a mad period in Soweto, too much sex going on among teenagers. If you were not pregnant, at least you had to be raped, some thought. Some girls spoke excitedly about their jackroll (gang rape) encounters and a classmate once boasted to me: ”I enjoy it better when I take it by force”.
I heard that this former classmate is now the respectable father of a girl and is making his way up the corporate ladder. I wonder if he thinks about the future of his girl child; does he share my nightmares about how the deflowering will happen? Who and where? I am already loading my bazooka for men like him.