That black girl magic

meujwaraworld

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That black girl magic! Born with odds stacked sky high against her. Subjected to molestation, rape, cat calling, ridicule, assumptions of stupidity/anger/bitterness from birth but still shines bright. Expected to dim her light, to make the man she loves feel adequate and manly. Judged by her ability to reproduce and maintain a marriage, happy or not. Still she shines brighter than ever. Afraid of the power within her, the tactics become more personal. She faces attacks on her body. She is not thin enough, she is not light skinned enough, her skin is not clear enough, she's not shaped like a pear, her hair is not straight and long enough, her nose is not narrow enough.. Yet she continues to shine! She may live in fear of being killed by the one closest to her heart and she risks anyway and loves. She is left to fend for her offsprings when the responsibility gets too much for the sperm donor. She struggles and performs miracles with grace and poise. Even then she stays shining. #thatblackgirlmagic https://www.instagram.com/p/CBnVC0bpChE/?igshid=ij8p5w8pvvq8

#thatblackgirlmagic

Consent

Today I had a flashback. A priest that I love and respect once said (in my presence) that if a woman is over 30 and doesn't have a child, he wonders how many abortions she's had. This hurt and confused me!
Doesn't the Catholic church preach chastity and celibacy?

Why do you preach one thing but expect people to do the opposite?
And why should women be dictated to about their lives and bodies? What's wrong with choosing to not have children? What if the people you're judging have fertility issues? What if there are other factors in their lives, which has led them to childlessness?
It's funny that everyone wants to beat down a black woman and oppress her, but we're trying to fight racism, xenophobia and homophobia together.

This is what triggered the memory:

We need to gather our lost brothers together. Let's fetch them please! Gather 🙏your 🙏brothers🙏!
Women are not play things, at whatever age. Don't inflict pain on a girl or a woman just because she falls outside of a certain age bracket or whatever else you have made up in your minds to justify your trashy behaviour.
If you wouldn't want anybody to do it to your mom, sister or daughter DON'T DO IT TO HER.

If you think I am bashing all men, then you are one of those that need to be collected. Real allies exist and I have shared a few of their posts on my social media with the hope that you will be more receptive to the message if it is from a guy.

I chimed in, saying:

'And for the record, just because you are married or dating doesn't mean that she consents automatically. Even if her excuse is lame in your eyes, i.e. A headache or tiredness... No means No!
Oh and if you decide to go for it whilst she's fast asleep or passed out, regardless of previously granted consent, you are a rapist.
To be safe, ensure that she's of age; awake and sober and she is not hasitant. Don't force yourself on girls and women.
Don't beat them up. Don't kill them.
Don't play games with their lives. If your intentions are not good, leave her alone.
There are so many girls whose future prospects died the minute they fell pregnant and the baby fathers are living their best lives with no care for the lives they have condemned to poverty.

Today, I am calling you out on your bullshit and you know who you are. We have been silent for far too long as sisters, cousins, aunties, daughters, nieces, mothers and grandmothers.
STOP ABUSING WOMEN. WOMEM ARE HUMANS TOO.
DON'T BE TRASH.
#GBV #STOPKILLINGWOMEN'
Another ally whose message I concur with :

It is really scary being a black woman in South Africa in 2020. Let's talk guys. 😢

Village Chronicles - The Land

So a few months back, just before the national lockdown in fact, I attended a meeting with my grandfather, the induna.

After the meeting I asked him about the land of our great ancestors, which is being given away freely to strangers, without our input or consent and his response sounded as if his hands were tied. I reminded him nicely that the chieftancy which Mdambiso rejected (because he didn't want to deal with the English) is ours, a fact which the Dumas (current chiefs) acknowledge.

I decided to leave the conversation there, because: 
1) I am not the child-bearing type (So I can't speak for non-existent offspring)
2) I am a woman and not the marrying type (women cook, clean and care for families around here, they don't discuss land)
3) I have learned the art of picking my battles and staying firmly in my own lane. Not yet mastered it!

I was clearly not the only person observing this trend of giving our land away willy-nilly, because at Babomncane's funeral the issue resurfaced (and no, I wasn't part of that discussion).
Most of the men in our family/clan have passed on, so we are vulnerable and easy to intimidate and dismiss.
Yesterday the young men of the clan showed bravery when they summoned the powers that be and asked them to reserve land for them and their children to build homes. A move that I support wholeheartedly. It is this altruism, that I inherited from my dad that made us the rime targets for 'political killings' in the 90s. A story for another day.

At this point we must just forget about having gardens in the future. We are slowly becoming a township and I find this sad, because we don't have a lot of economic activity in the area. We need agricultural land, even if it's just to sustain our households.

Ilali is losing its laliness (I have just invented a word!!!)
😒

Virginity and the measure of a young maiden's value

You might call this Horsetail reed, in isiZulu we call it umhlanga. In some villages, it is the pinnacle of a young maiden's virtue.
Legend has it that if a non-virgin attends the reed dance their reed will break during the parade. If you have never heard of this reed dance tradition, please hurry up and Google it. Please keep an open mind!
Well, I was raised differently. You see for over ten years my dad was a father of only girl children and at some point it looked as though I was gonna be a last born forever but then the special 3 burst that bubble for me.
So my dad didn't treat us like typical girls in the village. We could wear shorts and track pants, he involved us in fixing things around the house. I particularly enjoyed climbing up the ladder, the view from the roof was quite nice.
So when a local school teacher one Saturday morning came to ask Daddy if she could take us for virginity testing, my dad turned red and asked her in agitation 'where exactly do you conduct this virginity school? How many classes have my daughters attended and with whose permission?' She tried to explain that there was no school, and that they were simply collecting girls to be tested so that the qualifying maiden's would be bused to the reed dance. My dad refused. My dad envisioned a life of dignity and academic excellence for his daughters.
Parents released their girls and many scandals were uncovered. There was plenty of gossip and unfortunately not enough accountability, no procecutions followed. The testing only uncovered the rampant abuse of girls and reinforced the notion that these girls were responsible for their incestuous molestations, rapes & other abuses. They were the talk of the village.

Can you imagine how damaging this whole thing was to these girls! Their faces were painted red. #scarlet| They were yelled at by these women who had fetched them from their homes. Ostracized by their peers & the general public.

Fast forward to 2006 when during a workshop of Education For Life workshop, the first ever EFL I attended. The facilitators made us sit in 2 groups (virgins vs non-virgins). Oh the harsh, judgmental exchanges were so unchristian! I wondered if EFL was really something I wanted to implement. Turns out that they had made up the awful exercise. It is unheard of in E4L.

In my chuch, we have a sodality called 'the children of Mary', virgins who wear white dresses, blue capes and white veils to church because black people are obsessed with uniforms. A few years back, a group of these children of Mary coming from church were given a lift by a group of men in a minibus taxi. They ended up raping these kids. I know they lost their membership in the sodality, but I am yet to hear anything regarding the arrest of the perpetrators or counseling for these girls.
Christians are very quick to judge women and girls, not so effective and efficient in supporting them. So before you bash the reed dance, please understand that it's not the only oppressive structure that girls are subjected to ezilalini.

In recent years it has become fashionable for men in their thirties and above to drive their fancy German cars to the Reed Dance Festivals (either the Zulu or Swazi one) simply to gawk at semi-nude girls or in search of young naive girls to use and abuse.

 Let's be real for a second, if we are to address gender based violence in an effective way we need to start at the root of the problem.
The way women are perceived shows in how they are treated in society. The fact that rapists are going after women of all ages, even little babies speaks volumes. Just last year, we were on the receiving end of their sickness or perhaps a demonstration of their power over the weaker gender.

When these crimes are reported, they're not even investigated. Even if you go out of your way to investigate and track down perpetrators, the police (especially at Sawoti Police Station) will just let the suspects go without so much as an interrogation. The frustrations of being a woman in rural South Africa.

We go to bed engulfed in fear because we live in a society where a woman being raped is the norm and police inaction certainly reinforces it.

Theresa Bossert

Only when you are aware of your privilege, acknowledge it and the consequences of the lack of said privilege on others, can you put yours to good use.
This is the story of Theresa Bossert.

Once upon a time I proposed an admin workshop for my partner organizations to run concurrently with HTS training that we were mandated to do for our HCBC cadres. It got hijacked and we ended up having to travel to 5 venues in 5 weeks and boy was this stressful!
I remember how we were told that there was no accommodation for Mnakile and I at Mariatrost (Mashishing) & Ave Maria (Tzaneen) but they had reserved a place for Theresa. I had done the bookings myself and made sure that deposits were paid but I couldn't be accommodated.
Theresa had her standard response "if you don't have a place for my colleagues to sleep, I am also not staying". She literally had to threaten them to give us rooms, which were there of course.
We stopped at Harry's pancakes on our way to Mashishing and the waiters wouldn't talk to us. She had to order on our behalf and they told her that she was very kind and good for taking her helpers out to lunch. She tried to explain that she was not our boss, to no avail.
The same happened when we stopped at Sunland Baobab, and she began to ask us how we are navigating this life of white people's assumptions of us and we advised her to keep her ears and eyes open at all times, especially at work.
It was like the curtain was suddenly pulled back and she could see clearly what we were subjected to, simply because we are black.
When we went back to the office, our lunch claims were rejected but hers paid in full, no questions asked. She took our rejected claims and resubmitted them under her name, lo and behold they were paid. For the rest of our country-wide 5 weeks training marathon, she assumed that responsibility of submitting claims for us. Now that's what I call using your white privilege to help black people.
If the privileged were to spend enough time with us look at life objectively without making excuses for the disparities, we can turn the tide on racism. She later confessed to us about all the things that white kids are taught about black people.

I am here for a purpose

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My mom’s at that age where she repeats stories over and over. She tells me stories of my childhood and what a sickly child I was.
She was once isolated in a packed bus bringing me back from hospital. They had discharged me but I looked like I was about to die, many assumed that I was dead already. They wouldn’t sit next to a woman carrying a dead baby, so she sat like a VIP(minus the curious onlookers’ stares and harsh, hurtful words).
Things got so desperate that my grandmother uFrancisca herself had to move in with us.
My mother and MaMkhulu uWillo even went to the sangoma to consult with the ancestors and I’m not sure if they paid for their consultation coz she says they came out running and didn’t stop until they reached home. The sangoma had told them that I would be dead by the time they reach the house.
Sometimes I wonder if I am really alive#matrix.
All these stories tell me that I am alive for a purpose and that I am not going anywhere until I have fulfilled it.
Part of the story is that because I spent so much time in hospital, I wouldn’t take the breast anymore and I refused the bottle, so I grew up using sippy cups. My mom say one day when she visited me in hospital she saw that one of the moms had been feeding me cheese curls, so that became a staple food for me since I wasn’t interested in her breast milk anymore.
Formula and cheese curls sounds like a cool combo.
Isn’t it ironic that the cheese curls contributed to the excessive weight gain when I had unlimited access to the stuff.
Listen, I could eat any junk food and drink any amount of fizzy cold drink I wanted when my dad opened his shop in 1989. Often I was left in charge whilst my parents attended to other things.
I digress.
Unfortunately a cousin who was the same age, (and suffered the same symptoms as me) didn’t make it. May her innocent soul rest in peace.
My mother pushed against popular beliefs and prevailing practices to seek medical care for her children, much to the annoyance of certain individuals who sarcastically commented on ‘how precious’ we were. “Igugu bo lezngane”- Shane Msomi
Our neighbors rallied around my mom and helped to care for us, & for that we are forever grateful

Healing of Memories Part 3

 I praise God for his grace and mercy. I am still standing. I can smile. Despite all of it, I can still smile.

 “My soul magnifies the Lord,
47     and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48 for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
    For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
49 for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
    and holy is his name.
50 And his mercy is for those who fear him
    from generation to generation.
51 He has shown strength with his arm;
    he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
52 he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
    and exalted those of humble estate;
53 he has filled the hungry with good things,
    and the rich he has sent away empty.
54 He has helped his servant Israel,
    in remembrance of his mercy,
55 as he spoke to our fathers,
    to Abraham and to his offspring forever.”

I had to start with this preface. This story still evokes bad memories.

I am finding that when I write these stories and publish them I can let the feelings associated with them go and move on. Or at least try to move on.

When Sbona and I started our new jobs on the 3rd August 2010, we were the butt of every joke in the office. You'd be walking to make tea downstairs and be bombarded with questions about the project and how we might be let go if it doesn't materialize. We laughed it off and focused on making a success of it.
Finance people wouldn't even attend our meetings with the donor, they would pop in for like a quick 5 minutes and then disappear. Our work wasn't important enough.
This changed when another donor was changing direction and there was gonna be less money coming in. A lot of people were suddenly interested in our work. Some wer even instructed to make sure that we fail, so that they could take over our project.
I'm summarizing here because I am trying to tell only my side of the story.
There was suddenly a lot of talk about us being both Zulus and from KZN. Regardless, we got rated A+ by the donor and got to help out other partners with reporting tools and training.
When time came for phase 2 negotiations with our donor, Njandini aka Fakazile was all over it.
She knew dangerously little about the project, the beneficiaries and the HIV and OVC situation in South Africa and would make us all cringe as she made ill-informed statements and demands to the donors who were too polite to call her to order, (unlike the Dept of Health people, a story for another day).
On our way back from one of these negotiations Mnakza and I were asked to go and badmouth a fellow team member to the then director.

In my view, asking us to help her kick a colleague out and us refusing to do it was what started this never-ending war against  my colleagues and I.
I will only mention what I was subjected to, the other people involved can tell their stories if they so wish.
I remember saying 'in my culture we live by the values of Ubuntu, I will never contribute to the demise of a colleague', to which she replied "that's just stupidity, so you don't want to secure your position! People are going to be let go, we are downsizing".
My hell started with a barrage of emails, (which I still have) where I was told that I was incompetent and that I couldn't count. Nevermind that I did differential calculus at varsity and actually passed. The then director accused me of being unprofessional by responding to the emails and defending myself. Very telling.
I disproved that narrative a thousand times over.
It didn't help that a group of people joined us from another organization and I was enemy #1 automatically. They critisized everything I did and said and personalized EVERYTHING.I touched on it when I wrote about Johan. I was the one at fault by default because I had brown skin & they had blue eyes.
New rules started being enforced, petty rules like I couldn't buy water or coffee unless I am buying breakfast & then breakfast was disallowed altogether. This only applied to me for years.
I had to submit my family members' contact details to be checked against my phone bill (they had done the same to Sappie). Meanwhile some people were making international calls to friends using company phones.
I am the only PM who has had to report directly to the Sec General of the organization! She had the audacity to tell me that I report with an uppity attitude, that's why the Director and FM don't understand the program, when she'd never seen/heard me give a report. So, I reported to her & in turn she would report to Voroso and Njandini🤷
And I was denied a raise when the entire organization got salary increases. They then decided that they would give me an unsolicited revolving loan instead. I wonder what creative accounting was being played here.
I already told the story of being called a racist.
Sometimes I would be set up to react, just so they can prove that I was problematic, an angry black woman🙄.
I resolved to retain a lawyer when things got too technical. After 8 years of working for the organization as a 'permanent' employee, I was told that in order to continue working there I would have to forfeit the medical aid, retirement annuity and severance pay. Oh also, I had to agree to a 3 month probationary period.

These people knew about my ongoing health issues and how much I needed my medical aid.
These are church people by the way, so I was really confused as to where God fitted into this whole unsavory sham of an operation. I could not bring myself to attend Mass and pray with people who would have danced on my grave, had I died from all their taunting and abuse. My faith is in God but I started to question if we were talking about the same being when we referred to God. My relationship with God was definitely shaken. Maybe it was shallow and not strong enough to begin with as some people have insinuated, implied and said it outright.
Let me cry about this a bit, maybe I will finish the story someday.
I am definitely not ready to be done with this.