Juggling Truths by Unity Dow

Author:Unity Dow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789085241522
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2004-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Ten

Just as rumours about Frieda and the bad things that she had done died down, my own sister Mmadira came home from Johannesburg, South Africa, with a distended belly and a long sad face. At first she had refused to say anything about her condition, crying endlessly whenever our mother sat her down for private discussions. My grandmother muttered that no girl was ever safe in fast Johannesburg, but my mother answered that it did not seem that any girl was safe anywhere. My father was silent and pensive and my sister Keneilwe was extremely responsive to Mmadira’s needs. She cooked her special foods and would not let her do such heavy work as stamping sorghum. She whispered to her, telling her that everything would be fine. She promised to help her with her troubles and assured her that only good would come from her condition. It seemed to me that a lot of cagey words were used when I was around.

Mmadira had been eighteen when she first did a motshela-kgabo or monkey crossing into South Africa. Monkey crossings, that is, jumping over the fence like a monkey, were common because that was the only way Bakgatla could go back to their land, across a political border they had never really accepted, if they did not have a passport. Many were not keen on the long process of obtaining a passport or limitations on their stay in South Africa, so they simply did not bother to obtain documents. The crossings were called monkey crossings also because the Bakgatla’s totem is the monkey. Monkey crossings were dangerous because, if the Boers caught the offender, she or he could be beaten and killed or beaten and sold to a farmer to work for up to a year with no pay, little food and no access to life beyond the farm. But Mmadira was good at monkey crossings, so she was never caught. But after a few such crossings, she decided the risks were too much so she did get a passport. She bought it for a chicken and a bucket of beans from a friend who got married and did not need it any more. In the passport, her name was Johanna Modise but, since having more than one first name was common enough, which confused the authorities, and a surname was an invention of the authorities, which the Batswana still found confusing, no one in authority was ever the wiser. The attitude of the authorities was that the natives could never decide on one name, anyway, so what if the woman called Johanna was answering to some other name when speaking to her companions. What if it took more than one calling of her name to get her to the head of the queue? There was a resemblance between the two women but it did help that, whenever she crossed the border, Mmadira always wore the same clothes her friend had worn when her passport photograph was taken.

Just one day before

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