We Kiss Them With Rain Read online

  “Cetshwayo, you don’t know how lucky you are. Child, you make me want to weep for your proud ancestors. Through your name, you can trace yourself back to Shaka, that beautiful son of a defiant mother Nandi, his aunt Mkabayi who strategically ruled the Zulu kingdom from behind the scenes, and even further back to his grandfather Jama ka Ndaba.

  “Leave things that you don’t know about to television. I can see that you’re intelligent, your transcript shows that. And I want to give you a chance. So I’d like you to come and intern for us.” And just like that she smiled and extended her hand to Cetshwayo, who was now totally mute, as if his tongue had been cut out of him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Gradually, Zola swallowed her pride and allowed Sipho to assist with Mvelo’s school fees and pocket money. But when he said that he wanted to send Mvelo to a school in town, she flatly refused. For once she and Nonceba were in agreement. Although Zola’s reasoning was different from Nonceba’s. She was concerned about her daughter’s living arrangements, that she would be teased by children with rich parents because she lived in eMkhukhwini, the shacks, while they lived in posh places.

  Nonceba was surprised that Sipho would want Mvelo to go into a system that would steadily poison her. “She will get a better education there, please let’s not argue on this one, Nonceba,” he sighed.

  “But Sipho, you know what happens at those schools. The girls take purgative pills to flatten their stomachs like ballerinas. She will unlearn all that she has learned about herself so far. She will want to slice her nose thinner and break her back just to be noticed.” She reminded Sipho about his niece Nomusa, from the bundus of eMpendle, who had tried to commit suicide after he had enrolled her in a private boarding school and she found she no longer fitted in anywhere.

  Suicide always touched a nerve with Nonceba. Her mother had walked into the ocean. She was just a year old but she knew the horror and the shock of it.

  Sipho tried to reason with Nonceba, saying that Mvelo was stronger and different from Nomusa. But she wasn’t convinced. “What is wrong with the schools here where her friends are?” she challenged Sipho.

  He said township schools were ill-equipped, that the teachers were not well-trained, and the children were misbehaving.

  “And they don’t misbehave in the private schools? Do you see girls in the township schools puking and shitting their guts out because they want to be thin?”

  “No, but I see them pregnant, Nonceba. Not just one or two, but quite a few of them,” Sipho shot back.

  “Girls in private schools get pregnant too; they just pop in to the Marie Stopes Clinic and have an abortion.”

  “So what are you saying, Nonceba, that it is better to populate the township than going to Marie Stopes?” He was exasperated. Her arguments were always out of step with everyone else.

  “I am saying, why do you have so much faith in the private and Model C schools? Black middle-class parents like you should put their energies into the public schools, your own old schools here at home, not in town. I mean, why pay thousands of rands for fees, transport, endless field trips and even salaries for private tutors when you can fix a school here and let the children learn for twelve years, having paid less than two thousand rands per year? Hell, university fees are nothing compared to what is forked out for these private schools. Can’t you see the message? They are trying to keep out the riff-raff by putting up the fees. And a child will not develop neuroses about her blackness in a local school.

  “All these educated people shouldn’t be putting their faith in private schools just because they’re fancy and they’re in town. Their resources should be invested here. We won’t have a class issue then, this new racism where certain blacks are called Boss and Madam. The apartheid that the masses fought against, we are now doing it to ourselves. What I am saying is that I want to protect Mvelo. I want her whole. If she needs to learn English, I will teach her in addition to what she is learning in the township school. And I will teach her the kind of history that she needs to learn, not the version that they will teach her about Shaka being a ruthless cannibal. I will give her the gifts that I was lucky to receive from my grandmother that are not in the pages of any history book.”

  She put her arms seductively around Sipho and he melted. He agreed to everything that she asked of him. First order of the day for Nonceba, with Zola’s permission of course, was to accompany Mvelo to school. She wanted to meet her teachers and introduce herself. After Nonceba shook hands with all of them, Mvelo knew that she had noticed something about Mr. Zwide, the History teacher. Nonceba had asked to speak to him in private. After collecting his tongue that was practically hanging out, he must have foolishly thought Nonceba was flirting with him.

  He was mistaken. What Nonceba wanted to do was to warn him. “Listen to me very carefully, Mr. Zwide. I see you. I can see that you are abusing your power and taking advantage of these teenage girls. Just know that if you ever so much as look at Mvelo the wrong way, I will be onto you like a ton of bricks.”

  Between Zola, Sipho and Nonceba, Mvelo was in a good place.

  When Nomagugu, a drama student at the University of Natal, came with the gospel of reviving traditions like virginity testing, Zola said Mvelo should go. She said it was a good measure to protect her from boys and lurking perverts. To make Zola happy, she reluctantly went, but she felt it put her in direct danger, making her a target, a buck separated from the herd. She secretly asked Nonceba’s opinion about it.

  Nonceba of course had a different way of seeing it. “I think there is something very powerful about virgins. Have you noticed that most religions put some form of emphasis on virginity? I know that they come across as controlling women’s sexuality, but if you choose to be a virgin for as long as you want, the choice is in your hands,” she said. “Once it’s gone, it’s gone, you can never reverse it. But you can choose when to go with whom you want. You can channel your sexual energy into other things until you’re ready to change that. Know what I mean?”

  What Mvelo liked about Nonceba was that she made sense to her, even though most people thought she was an oddball.

  Mvelo went to the virginity testing grounds with clarity in her mind. She was mainly doing it for Zola, yet she also felt she had ownership of herself. And like many girls her age, she was curious to see what and how they tested. She discovered that there were good testers, who were concerned about rampant child abuse and saw testing as the traditional way of solving the problem, but others were drunk with power and the media attention they were getting. Foreign correspondents and rich perverts flocked in with cameras for a flesh circus of unspoiled girls spreading their legs.

  Genuine news people were careful not to impose, while the drooling voyeurs used long lenses to focus right on target, just like they did during Umkhosi Wohlanga, the reed dance, where scantily-clad young Zulu maidens present reeds to the Zulu King.

  For testing, the old women would line the girls up early in the morning, usually near a river. They would lie down in a row, each with a checker, and open their legs. With two fingers from each hand, the checker would pry open the lips of their little vaginas, looking for an “eye”; the vagina of a virgin is closed up, like a flower bud that looks like an eye. Once she had seen the eye, the checker would come up from between the legs of the virgin and nod to others. There would then be much ululation and joy from the old gogos. The girls got written certificates and were marked with a dot on their foreheads to indicate that they were still pure.

  In Mvelo’s shantytown, she became known as a virgin girl. Easy prey, like a zebra running among the springboks, marked.

  She felt sorry for the girls who had lost their virginity but had to attend the testing for fear of their parents. They sometimes found ways to fool the testers, using a piece of raw liver well placed to make it look as if the hymen was still intact. Some used the chalk from the school blackboard. It was a sad affair because they developed diseases. Testers caught on to the trend and the girl
s were humiliated in front of the crowds of spectators. Then there were those predators who hunted virgins because a rumor circulated that if an HIV-positive man slept with a virgin he would be cured.

  A sexual genocide of children and women began through rape by desperate men. Girls were getting raped left, right, and center. Before Mvelo got home, she learned ways of protecting herself, wiping the white dot from her forehead. She didn’t need outside proof to be proud of herself.

  Every three months, Mvelo went for a test. The day she stopped going was when one of the older girls was found to be “damaged.” This is how the testers referred to girls who were no longer virgins. The girl was about to be married to a traditional church elder who wanted proof that she was “unspoiled.”

  There was tension in the air. The girl chosen by the traditional leader, who was old enough to be her grandfather, was carrying a load on her shoulders. She didn’t want to be married to the old man. She was in love with a young man her own age and she had willingly given herself to him. How could anyone call her damaged? She was in love. If she had been raped, it would be a different thing.

  She didn’t try to hide it, she just lay there and let the tester spit on her and insult her. Then she began to wail. It was humiliating. After the test, the girl walked away towards the railway tracks, where she lay down and let the train damage and kill her.

  Mvelo fainted that day. She was upset and confused by everything. She woke up at home, with the dot of pride still on her forehead. She wiped it off and told Zola that she was never going back.

  Most girls in the shacks were damaged from rape. These young girls had trouble on their shoulders. How could they tell their mothers that it was people they trusted, family members, friends of the family, and their “uncles”—their mothers’ lovers—who were molesting them?

  Mvelo began to resent the whole affair of testing, because they weren’t questioning why the girls were “damaged,” except when the girl was very young. The rape epidemic was so rampant that some mothers brought in extremely young children as a safety measure against abuse. The “uncles” avoided children that were being tested. They did not want to risk being discovered.

  When Mvelo stopped going for the tests, her peers thought she must have been damaged. Why else would she stop going? But she was determined not to let the gossip upset her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mvelo’s downward spiral began with the news of a death in 2002. Nonceba’s grandmother had died of old age in the States. It was the first time that Mvelo had seen Nonceba so distraught. She was beside herself with grief and Sipho looked on helplessly because he could do nothing to make her feel better. She had to go and bury her grandmother.

  It was clear that it wasn’t going to be a short trip. She needed to attend to all her grandmother’s affairs and spend time grieving. She left, promising to send Mvelo additional math lessons and care packages with all sorts of American goodies through the post. Zola never communicated with Nonceba, out of pride, but she did not interfere with her daughter’s friendship with Nonceba. Nonceba sent the packages to Mvelo’s school address and continued to communicate with her teachers to ensure that her education did not suffer.

  Sipho tried to sell his house. He was lost without Nonceba. He feared that she would not come back, so he started making plans to go to her in America. No one wanted to buy his house in Mkhumbane because Nonceba was rumored to be a witch. That didn’t stop Sipho from going to her. He left the house with Mzokhona, his brother, who was very different from Sipho. He was like river debris that moves in whichever direction the river flows, drunk from noon till night. Sipho packed his bags and flew away to join Nonceba.

  Nonceba’s grandmother Mae had left America for Africa looking for something she already had. She could trace her roots back to West African slaves and Native American buffalo hunting tribes. And then there were the despicable horrors of the violations of slaves by their masters. It led to her looking less African and more exotic, as though she was from lands unknown. Growing up in the virtually whites-only potato state of Idaho, she did not fit in, so she set out to find a home.

  This led her first to the reservations. But watching the devastation of people who were once so close to nature, cramped into a small space in a vast land that they once roamed freely, depressed her. The alcohol and gambling infuriated her. It drained her of hope. So Africa became her destination to search for a place to belong. Her goal was to find the blackest man she could find, who would make her children black, so they would not have the identity crisis that she’d had.

  Black girls wouldn’t usually give the darkest men the time of day, but Mae was drawn to them like a moth to a light. She found one who was from the proud Tshawe, Phalo, Hintsa, Gambushe, Majola and Thembu, the Xhosa chiefs. She didn’t have to go far. She met him on the plane even before touching down in Africa.

  He was coming home after studying in the States for some years, helped by scholarships from the missionaries. They were drawn to each other like old souls hit by a sense of déjà vu. Her plan to embark on a pilgrimage from the foot of Mother Africa in Cape Town to her head in Egypt were shelved right there. Gugulethu Hlathi couldn’t thank his ancestors enough for bringing him this unexpected beauty.

  When the two met, they were the answer to each other’s dreams. And then their daughter Zimkitha, “beautiful,” Nonceba’s mother, was born. They settled in a small tranquil village near the Wild Coast. Zimkitha was the answer to Mae’s prayers. Black enough to be viewed as African, with stubborn Native American high cheekbones and hazel eyes, she fit comfortably into the black community. She did not have to endure the cruelty that her mother had experienced. Darker people admired her light skin and treated her well. Children wanted to be her friend, and teachers treated her with extra special care.

  It was in her late teens that trouble came knocking. Like a young mule, she couldn’t be tamed, and the volatile political uprisings at the time did not help.

  Her parents had taught her that she could be anything she wanted to be; she knew no boundaries of rules imposed on blacks. The beautiful Wild Coast was not big enough for her, it choked her free spirit. Events leading to the Soweto uprising saw her cut the apron strings from her protective mother and dictatorial father. She moved to Johannesburg, settling into a cosmopolitan, interracial Hillbrow where she and a bunch of frustrated liberal white youth appointed themselves as civil disobeyers.

  Influenced by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., they went around peacefully transgressing. When accosted and forcefully removed from benches marked for whites only, they would sing and dance. Zimkitha loved it, but underneath all this there was serious work going on. They were merely distracting the police from catching on to the young freedom fighters who were mobilizing locally and internationally to set South Africa free.

  Part of the reason that Zimkitha started sleeping with Johan Steyn was merely because she had been told not to. She was arrested under the Immorality Act after being caught with him, a well-known Afrikaans dominee’s son. Then she found herself in jail, pregnant with Nonceba, Johan’s daughter.

  She had seen the police coming and she dared Johan to kiss her in front of them. He was terrified at what she was asking him to do. Just when he was about to turn and run, she grabbed hold of him and kissed him deeply. The truth was, she never really loved Johan, her relationship with him was just part of her rebellion.

  Johan was timid and Zimkitha was frustrated by this. She suspected that deep down he was still under the spell of apartheid indoctrination. Her relationship with him was the beginning of her downfall. Prison hardened her heart and turned her carefree spirit fearful. Having a child killed her adventurous impulses.

  Kissing Johan in public had pressed the buttons she intended to press. The police immediately threw her in jail, and roughed him up, calling him a disgrace for consorting with a kaffertjie. But Johan didn’t have the courage to stand up for her. He could feel her eyes burning through his back as he walked away,
deeply conflicted and embarrassed. She had thought the act would dislodge a freedom fighter latent in him, but she had miscalculated. She had thought he would not let her be arrested with his baby in her belly. When she saw him hang his head in shame, she knew the sting of betrayal. It was no longer a game to disobey the law.

  Every step that he took away from her further disconnected him from Zimkitha, and he knew that he had now done something profoundly immoral.

  He wrote letters to her compulsively, but he never sent them. In the letters he apologized to her over and over for his weakness and inability to face up to what he knew was wrong.

  “What you will never understand is how hard it is to see disappointment in my father’s eyes. He is a proud man of God who believes that it is God’s will that blacks and whites should never be together. I could never tell him about making you pregnant. I can’t bear to lose his love and trust in me. I am the first born of five sons. It would kill me to have my brothers look at me with scorn. I was a good son before leaving Bloemfontein to come to Johannesburg. I believed my father’s theories until you sat across from me that day. Your carefree laugh and devil-may-care attitude scared me, but I was drawn to you at the same time. You came into a bar where only the bartenders and not the patrons were black. Yet there you were, a beautiful and tempting black woman. I didn’t think you noticed anyone there, let alone me. We were just white faces drinking our beers, and you were with your liberal white pals, stirring up trouble by entering a bar that you knew you were not allowed in. Our shameful secret fantasies were exposed as we blatantly and lustfully stared. Then you and your friends stood up to dance, your hips gyrating as if you were in your own living room. One girl in the group put her arm around your waist as you danced close to each other, your bodies touching. My head began to spin as I watched you in silence. It was the wife of the bar owner who snapped us out of it. She slapped the lust out of her husband, who was practically drooling, and they manhandled you and your friends out of there. They may have removed you from the bar, but not from me. I followed the group until I got a chance to worm my way into your life by making friends with some of your friends, and pretending to be fighting for the same cause. I didn’t fool you, though. It took time for you to drop your guard with me. You had breezed into my life and turned me inside out.”