the one who was sighing and moaning and generally carrying on, while he whispered and grunted a bit but generally kept his cool.
Perhaps we talked about her because we were girls and she was the girl, and we knew from previous sources of knowledge that she shouldn’t have let him do those things to her in the first place. We had known this from before we suckled our mothers’ breasts. Every girl knows this. The rules are different for us than they are for boys and any girl who pretends that she doesn’t know this, or who momentarily forgets, will find out sooner or later. As different as we were from one another in temperament, the three of us could agree on this. There are some things you just know.
A few days after the peep show, I was sitting outside in the barren yard next to Suzie and Wongani. Their heads had just been shaved and Aunt Tutu had slathered a liberal dose of Vaseline onto their scalps to ward off lice. She had ordered Daphne to ensure that they sat in the sun the whole morning to burn off any vestiges of the bugs. Given her relationship with Wongani, Daphne relished the opportunity to enforce Aunty’s instructions. I sat next to them and drew a line in the ground as Vaseline dripped down their necks and onto their shoulders. Every time one of them tried to move, Daphne ran out of the house and said, ‘Your mother said three hours. You stay there. It’s not yet time, not yet.’
Aunt Tutu may have known the burning sun would do nothing but bake her children’s heads, but the shame of having lice in her house had most likely driven her to administer this particular cruelty. Aunt Tutu did not want it said that she had known about the lice and done nothing to prevent their return.
So we sat and sweated together in the grassless yard – a sacrifice to appease other mothers who would ask where the girls’ hair had gone. Aunt Tutu would say, ‘They had lice so I shaved it and made them sit in the sun to burn the germs,’ and the other mothers would respect her in that fearful way and inflict the same on their own children next time, repeating both the unnecessary punishment and the boastful pretence of motherly sternness. Suzie wiped a trickle of runny Vaseline, preventing it from seeping into her eye, then picked up the conversation where we had left it when Mummy had come to take us home the day before.
‘As I was saying,’ she began.
Wongani and I swivelled our heads to face her and she continued, ‘They aren’t even married.’
‘Yes,’ her sister agreed, ‘which is a pity because they are going to burn in eternal shame.’
‘Straight to hell,’ I sighed, ‘especially her since she’s the lady.’ I was surprised by how nonchalant and worldly I sounded.
We nodded and then shook our heads in resigned consternation.
In the coming weeks, we went into overdrive, spreading the story far and wide. My friends at Burley Court could have told you what happened as if they had seen it with their own eyes, as could my other set of friends at Uncle Stan and Aunt Angela’s house, which was where I spent most of my weekday afternoons when school was in session.
Once the juicy details were shared, and on every street where they had been disseminated, there was almost unanimous agreement that the Girlfriend must have been A Lady Of The Night, brought to Lusaka specifically for the purposes of Doing Sex.
Again and again we returned to the scene in feigned horror. Suzie was especially good at recounting the most salacious details. She always seemed to circle back to the one point: ‘Did you hear her saying “Yes, yes, yes!”?’ She would pant in a lurid pseudoGermanic imitation of the Girlfriend’s voice. We would giggle, and shift uncomfortably. Invariably one of us would wind up the conversation by saying, ‘Everyone knows, it’s only Street Walkers who like S.E.X.’
I felt increasingly uncomfortable when the subject came up. The Girlfriend had actually been nice to us. It had only been for two weeks, but she had lived with us. She had shared our nsima and made us laugh. She had even made us think about school and about President Kaunda. With her questions and her wispy shirts and lowhanging skirts, she hadn’t been a monster – she had just been a girl. She had given me a fragrance stick that smelled like vanilla, and she had given Suzie an empty matchbox with a picture of a dragon on it, and had left a tiny little square of magenta-coloured felt for Wongani. The Uncle had not even bothered, yet here we were saying nothing about him and telling every kid within a fivekilometre radius about her moans and groans.
The Girlfriend’s mistake was not that we had caught her; it was that she liked it. We may have been little, but we knew enough to forgive him and call her the sinner. We were big enough to see that she was not ashamed and this seemed deliciously wrong and also it seemed to explain everything that was off kilter about her. The Girlfriend said what she liked and did what she pleased and, because of this, and because I was a girl just like her, I wondered what it might be like one day to lie as she had, legs spread and arms held high; heavy-lidded, slack-jawed, writhing and unashamed.
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Gogo Lindi
LINDIWE MABUZA ARRIVED in Lusaka the year I turned five. She was the kind of woman who made people nervous. She had been living in America where she had mastered the art of not caring what anyone thought – of being a thoroughly independent woman. She had always possessed this trait; no doubt it had carried her to Lesotho and then to the US and back again. But living in America in the 1960s must have honed it.
She was surly sometimes and unconcerned about what it meant to be a bad-tempered woman. She did what she wanted and argued as vehemently as she saw fit. She disagreed with people and didn’t care if they got offended. Men especially. She didn’t talk about feminism. She just stuck her nose in the air and looked down on men who were not as clever as her. She didn’t care what her intellect did to their egos.
When I met her, she was almost forty, divorced and highly educated. Because Baba was technically her nephew, she insisted that I call her Gogo, despite the fact that she was far too young to actually be my granny. She was odd sometimes. Obstinate, even on minor points like this, but people learnt to back down and let her have her way. They said she was ‘difficult’ and she was.
There were all sorts of problems with being almost forty, highly educated and divorced in those times, but I didn’t know about any of those problems. I just knew that she came along at exactly the point when I needed someone who would be all mine, someone I would not have to share with the big-headed toddler and the milksmelling baby who seemed intent on ruining my life. When it all seemed too much, Gogo Lindi arrived with the express purpose of adoring me.
Before moving to Lusaka in 1979, Gogo had earned a master’s degree in America; then, she had gone to Minnesota to teach. In Minnesota she had fallen in love with a man but when that ended she picked up the pieces and stayed revolutionary. So, when she met me, I suspect she was still a little bit heartbroken and trying to find pieces of herself that she had left on the other side of the ocean, miles away. She was also searching for somewhere new to belong and for someone to belong to.
She had a daughter, Thembi. Their relationship was complicated and by then Thembi was already a teenager – a big sister to me. What Gogo needed was a little one, someone who would simply adore her and not ask complicated questions about where she had been and why she had left her. And so, on the cool evening when Lindiwe Mabuza arrived in Lusaka, she found me, the little girl who had been waiting for someone just like her.
Gogo looked straight through my little ribcage into my full-full heart and realised that I was a precocious and lavishly jealous little girl who could not get over the arrival of not one, but two, baby sisters. She recognised in me a fellow traveller, a little soul who could be tough if she wanted but
