Fear of Change

I was in my thirties before I ever held a book written by a black woman in my hand; that was Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Now I am in my fifties and have read a few more such books, not as many as could be reasonably expected, given our numbers – in 2022, Africa alone has over 700 million women. However, for reasons too many, too painful, sickeningly familiar and inseparable as resin from bark in our lives, the vast majority of African women and women of African descent have yet to tell their stories.

I am no historian. Thus, in my case the telling cannot be in that mode. History's dry exactitude kills the story: too many details simply disappear. My personal preference is music. If I could sing, I would have left songs that spoke of incredible beauty and unspeakable horror, for I have witnessed such things as make me want to shout about them from the mountaintops: the courage of women, forced to live whole lifetimes without their husbands. In my poetry, I call these women ‘gold widows’, as their men slaved hard in the gold mines of Johannesburg for gold that they and their women would never see, never wear. Meanwhile, alone in the damned villages, the women kept home, family and communities intact. They raised children, sowed and reaped fields, nursed the sick, and buried the dead – women dug graves and put corpses to rest.