I can move these two long legs I have; at times my friends say that I walk very fast. Because of this I love the miniskirt – it lets me walk as fast as I like. It’s just that when I am in one, Mars gets aroused and one never knows what they tell themselves after smoking weed and hanging around on their favourite corner. I don’t like to provoke Mars. When they notice me, they shut up and all eyes follow me, taking every step with me, and when I greet them they just keep looking at me without responding and I can still feel their eyes on me until I am out of sight. Scary. Very scary. I do not wear miniskirts when I am going out without my bodyguards.
Mokgethi enjoys reading and loves poetry above everything.
Writing poetry and reading: I do not know why I started doing these things but I am doing them. I try to read as much as I can and not only schoolbooks, which I have to not only read but understand and know as well. At my previous school I had a big library to play with, but here there is only a book storeroom that I have no access to.
A few books have had a profound effect on me. One was Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. Another was Camara Laye’s The Dark Child, which Mamafa holds dear. The funniest book I ever read was Chenjerai Hove’s portrait of Zimbabwean life: Shebeen Tales. I tried to read Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom but it proved to be a long read to freedom and I failed before passing the twenty-seventh page, which makes me feel like I haven’t reached freedom yet. I cannot say it is boring because for a book to be boring one needs to finish it and then say it as a fact, but I continually got stuck somewhere because of some other things that distracted me and I do not like to keep reading the same book for four weeks. Eventually I lost interest.
My ultimate love is modern poetry; it is short, direct, nothing but raw talent. Kopano Dibakwane is my ultimate contemporary poet. I always take his work to the loo, then take too much time, more than necessary, enjoying him.
Mokgethi doesn’t really care about magazines or newspapers.
I have never found a magazine that truly has that much to offer me. There was one that I used to buy; it was full of sex, celebrity news and fashion. Not that I am interested much in the sex but I read that as well. Newspapers: I do not really read a newspaper; I scan the headlines first, then I read what I think is interesting. But most of the time there isn’t that much that interests me.
Mokgethi dreams of playing tennis.
Netball is the sport that I play, but we only start to practise if we are going to play another school and usually only a week before the game. I would love to play tennis and here in our community we have a tennis court that has been vandalised, refurbished, vandalised and refurbished once more and today lies vandalised. In my whole life I have never seen anyone playing tennis there but I hope that one day I will play on it.
Mokgethi is a very intelligent girl who is concerned about her schoolwork.
I really am. I can solve any mathematical equation, write a very sound essay and read and understand a book on my own. I have never, ever failed a test or an exam in my whole schooling life and the last time I took an evaluation test they didn’t believe that I was from a rural/disadvantaged primary school. I can speak five of our national languages excellently and, except for Xhosa, I can converse in the others – not well, but okay.
Mokgethi likes to think that she is very sociable but she is definitely not streetwise.
I am a private person. I am my own best friend and when I am with this best friend I don’t notice time passing. I do not have a best friend from my primary school period as I do not have a true friend from the time I spent at private school. I have church friends only because I am going to church with them and high school friends that are only friends because of this common thing we share – school. I do not have a boyfriend as I never had one before and I do not think that I am ready to have one yet.
Above all, Mokgethi likes to think that she is an intellect.
Yes, I am an intellect. Why am I saying that? Because I am. My friends can tell me this and that, using their experience to guide me, but for anything academic they have to consult with me and listen very carefully.
Next year I will be in Cape Town, at the University of Cape Town preferably. I would love to be in Britain, at Oxford University, on my first step to greatness, but a hundred wishes squared plus nine wants minus a billion complications equals X. X as in the unknown sum. Mathematically I can solve any equation but this X, this real-life X, remains an X no matter what I do.
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
