ONE DAY I will write an essay, ‘All My Mothers’, because I have been blessed with an array of human beings who have been very loving towards me: my parents; my grandparents; my aunts and (most of ) my uncles; the extended family; and my teacher in Standard 2, dear Miss Vuyelwa Mabija (A Ndlovu!). This list includes a number of men because by ‘mothers’ I mean all those who made me who I am today, whether female or male, old or young.

After lunch break one day, Miss Mabija took us out of the classroom onto a little hill. It was the first lesson I’d had on writing. She brought an orange. She made us look at it, and she made us feel it, our eyes closed. She made us look at it with our eyes open, then smell it and taste it. There must have been thirty or forty of us, but we all ended up with little pieces of the peel, the rind, the fruit, the succulence, the little things in the orange that burst open inside you. Today, whenever I write, I think of that lesson, how this woman taught us to describe and write about an orange. The ease with which she went about it was nothing short of magical, for not only did she manage to get us into the orange, inside and out, she empowered us, gave us an invisible magic wand. That day I, for one, was gifted with belief in my ability to say, describe, tell anyone anything, anywhere, any time. Ndlovu zidl’ ekhaya ngokuswel’ umalusi!

When I became a young woman, my family marked the occasion with a ceremony we call intonjane. This announces to the community that the girl has now become a young woman.