When Tsokololo decided to fall pregnant with her third child
at the age of 27, by any means palatable, she fancied it homage to young souls
of dead artists.
Maybe a Hendrixian offspring would germinate in her stale
womb, because she often felt stale, rather crudely overused to be warranted any
innocence and chastity.
Her morning slippers dragging mud-clots as she paces towards
mmaPule’s shack, sultry thighs winking from her gown plastered with pink
hearts.
Her idea of having more child support grant to supplement
her life was falling too short of the target.
Her hair was falling apart, she smelt rotten at daybreak and
even though drinking nightly was tiresome she had no other optional calm.
Babies were forever in a foul mood, a strange set of twin
born from a rowdy Malawian man named Zulu.
It was during these rancid mornings of begging for handouts
for her starving menaces that she felt more exposed and judged, cornered to be
slain by gossip and other religious slings.
“Haau, onste onkolota R450 ya R300 eo ke o fileng yona last
month mogirl.”
“Ketla etlisa kaofela mos Pulsie.” Tsokololo retorts with
glaring melancholy of a hungover mother with hungry children.
And all she could think about on her way back from
prostrating herself in front of her binging buddy was not the pornographic
poverty of her stature, but the idea that she will not be the talk of
cab-drives to town.
Staring at other kasie vixens strut shamelessly the early
morning hours, wailing babies at their backs, others pulled by collars towards
nurseries , she wondered if having slept with Zulu was in fact the best revenge
against Mlungisi.
Tsokololo gladly folds her arms to cover her roused nipples
after Nathi whistles at her from behind his shack. She walks towards him, hand
crushing his erection, and eventually brushing a bulgy belly sneaking out of a
worn out t-shirt.
“Why osa batle ka buns Maar Tsokololo?”
“Fokof wena maan, ke nahana otla bua ntho e betere waitse…”
Clutching the wings of her gown and hiding the protrotruding
navel, she notices drops of dried blood from last night’s brawls.
“Bona o etsa hore ke mentreite nou…” Folo chuckles as he
retreats back into his shack, hand scratching buttocks while Tsokololo meanders
in a daze.
She had no other plan but to go visit her twins’
grandmother, porridge could always do for children satiated by sugar and cheap
crisps, even though her unannounced arrival was to open old wounds.
“Banna ke dintja!” She thought about her own brother with
three children on the same street.
And at some interval during her slow trudge towards begging
another enemy, an idea crossed her mind that if women of her generation were to
have their wombs removed, a lot of born-to-die children would be avoided.
Men castrated or otherwise deprived of procreation could
mean lesser mouths to feed and those already dying could as well face the end
of their life expectancies without leaving doomed seedlings.
Other morbid chimes of morning crept into her ear, Tsokololo
traversing potholes of a township in tatters.
This place she called home for her scatterlings, waiting
brewing and stewing in the heat blizzard of summer’s early sun.
Yes, her children were sweating their last nutrients alone,
suckling on salty thumbs and naked cloths hanging around a dishwashing basin.
Today, her aim was resolute. Get fucked and die.
Even if by a gang of mine workers ready for action after
hammering rock, those rough and scaly hands slamming against her buttocks.
She felt used and useable this morning, but she had to go
her dead boyfriend’s mother to shed prayers and sins for food for steam-dried
children left to die before reaching 20.
Tsokololo. That name never made sense to her of course, but
there – it stuck. Whether it meant ‘one-obsessed with dick” that was no
argument for the lucid minds of engineers and psychologists.
A statistic or not, she felt entitled to her mantle as a
product of hectic times, fueled by rage and cheap glossy beverages named after
celebrity and dead animals.
Her dreams of becoming a songstress muffled by a hum, voice
charred by coal smoke from vaping contests in slovenly shebeens, those undying
dreams, they kept her alive as some cursed charm of the downtrodden.
Often she would be heard harmonizing with a faraway beat
slashed by rotting speakers from some binge-hall, while her sleepy shack slowly
gather momentum for dreams and more dreams.
Unfazed, she waltzed past Masphiri’s house, known for
selling the coldest beer all hours of a day.
Eyes transfixed on food, or rather feeding her virtual
orphans; the ones who drag her by skirt seams from get-togethers and
after-tears – she was the fading vixen looking down on her drooping breasts, an
early erection of nipples having faded with the dust gusting about.
“wazo khetha ukundizisela isiswana apha ekuseni kangaka,
emva konyaka unyana wam’efile?” NoVerse screamed from genuflected posture
sweeping rat dropping from her dusty floor.
Tsokololo stood mesmerized by the audacity, the cursed
tongue of a vengeful mother who should been by law.
“Mos hase nna ya bolaileng moar hao Mme NoVeerse… and
ohopole hore ke ena yaneng a nketeka mehla ena.” She retorts spitefully between clenched fists
in her sweat ridden gown,
“Wa’mchisa ngamanzi abilileyo wena dikazi lo Msotho…”
“Ele wena ya nthutileng ho esta seo ho lona letawa la popelo
ya hao!
The obvious was that as they stood faing one another with
blood ringing like dumb flies in both skulls, nothing could mend this tattered
relation.
She was her children’s grandmother, that fact could not be
erased even by lobotomy or any sorcery of sorts; but Tsokololo was a wildling
never to be tamed by a woman who never gave birth to her.
On approach of her leaning shack, her first-born was already
at plan with a neighbor’s dog, that moldy yard full of dog shit and lazy
puppies – but she could not garner strength to reproach the child.
At best he was distracted by fuming stenches of rabid fur
and perhaps a piece of bread from the old woman feared to be a witch by
churchgoers and tsotsis.
Her love for the young an infinite defense she had against
the growing rage of vigilante, fire-stake-protesters.
Ntsika - the last to fall from her sack of seeds was sitting
numbly against a fence pole, gazing dreamily at an orange waving plastic bag
clipped to dry in the wind of another unschooled township day.
To him, a season of despair it always seemed everyday to be,
an eternal clime of their morbid lot, his mother’s swollen navel and bulging
belly striking his small timid mind with vile preconceptions of sex and naughty
songs.
He sat next to her as she slumped on the ragged couch left
by their dead father as sole proof that he once was worked.
Her fingers were tingling with rage, seeing his reflection
on his face, a face always asking for repentance for which she had no reason or
claim; yet she found herself always apologizing to them.
Like at this moment when she strokes his hair feeling like
wooly peas on a soft stone, that smelt of youth perfumed with uncertainty.
Eventually, she had to face that lone shark in this sea of
farers who never reach destinations; with all shame folded like a chain around
her knuckles – suffocating pleas and appeasing her rage. No matter how
enterprising she could be with her body or brow’s sweat, such loans would
forever be inherited by her children, hanging like a noose for any to use at
first instinct.
“Utandihlawula ngani ungasebenti?”, echoed words from a
stuttering Swati accent from a shrewd
woman seated on an exorbitantly kitch sofa.
This was a house to envy, even Tsokololo had to admit, in
the midst of angst and nervous surrender to the slurs the money-peddler was
plying on her unwashed face.
“Mama hle, ketla etsa plane soon. Ene keisitse CV yaka ko
Maspala”.
“Ungati ngemali yenu
yoMagosha la kimina, ngoba ngi’anati nina tikhebereshe teGoli”.
Harshly a warning flashed inside Tsokolo as she watched the
woman struggle to stand from her comfortable affluence of tea and soap operas.
She shifted aside as she squeezed past, into a
well-laundered bedroom, where possible stack of bank notes were scattered under
mattresses or wobbly wardrobes.
After the spectacle of disgrace, Tsokololo could only think
of food, first for herself, even before a bath to calm the throbbing in her
left food once said to have stepped on umuti.
At a kettle’s whistle, her mind drifted with the smell
rising from her humid body, the gown gone sordid with sweat and mud smudges
sprinkled on its back.
A bath was to be firs, and at as wrung her facecloth to dry
her drooping beasts, through the stretch-marked thighs, somberly glaring at the
folded skin resulting from an amateur caesarian, she felt old as a cow’s hide.
Would she ever love herself again, she wondered? Would her
face gloss any mirror she glanced at, like during her heydays of proud and
naïve adolescence?
As she stared at Ntsika licking his fingers off pap and
diced tomatoes mixed with a cocktail of crushed pills, she knew that they would
not live to see her age, nor bother with other wonders of life’s cruelty.
That thought alone was balm to her ever suicidal
temperament, murderous at times though clad in a slight smile, or a grin to
deceive these younglings that all is well with god’s master-plan.
But would there be a soul that will have courage to tell
them they were born diseased, a generation never to bloom with the ripeness of
new promise?
***
Ntsika decides to join Ntsokolo for game of wire-car races
through the maze of a squatter-camp haven they call home.
Men wonder about drunk at noon, dangling their bottles and bags
towards homes they will leave in a few hours and inside herself, by herself –
Tsokololo, hears an ageless wail of unbearable sorrow.
A multitude of cries welling and burning her chest, she lay
on her side feeling separate from her belly full of life and war against birth.
She felt the unborn child wanted not-to-be- born., and
haunting as that notion was, she saw no sin in abandoning herself to unsavory
resolve.
Tomorrow she would visit the clinic and terminate the
pregnancy, but that meant searching this entire scotching afternoon for a
babysitter to watch over Ntsika and Ntsokolo.
Her afternoon naps we ceremonially exhausting, fraught with
nightmares.
And school children voiced their arrival on mirage covered
streets, township air having gained weight of broken and misspent time,
Tsokololo would wake and force herself to drag the final hours of the day to
rest.
The twins were by then reeking of heat mingled with urine
smudges on their pants, palms caked with mud from landfills that bore promises
of discarded toys and other bounty.
Morosely, Tsokololo would wonder how they survive electric
meshes sprawled between taps, a death-trap net of electric strings hovering on
rotting poles, hooked on corrugated steel shacks housing orphans and beaten
hopes.
Yet they always came home safe, unharmed and filthy.
Tinges of a forgotten joy always assembles in her breast at
such times, watching their faces in nostalgic quarrels about the day’s events;
their favorite mischiefs recited like triumphs of disgruntled warriors.
They reflected a marvelous creation of her hopeful womb,
unbelievable as that could have seemed, and solace was found in that evidence
of life and an ability to give life.
Static strobes from their collapsing TV set in the darkening
shack, Ntsokolo connects an overhead bulb and weird light spreads ominous
shadows on their shabby curtains and smiling black faces.
Giggles are heard with each joke from their favorite show,
and Tsokololo marks her aims on characters costumed in success, make-believe scandals
and toxic celebrations, while other peers undoubtedly were also tackling their own
demons and sickly romances, her night bore still no promise of respite.
