Bootie shorts, skin-tight clothes, insanely low-cut tops, fancy make-up and always in stilettos. That’s how beautiful girls are described by the world. A book judged by its cover. A generation ruled by a machine. “Pi! Pi! Pi!” A hospital machine breathing life to a human. “Tap! Tap! Tap!” A computer commanding a human. “Click!” A machine directing all the switches off and like every day, darkness overcomes the world.

Twelve hours later, the sun started flicking like a miner’s torch deep beneath the earth. A place where only black men could go to make money for their families thousands of miles away from home.

The sun rose brightly in the wake of the beautiful mountainous Kingdom. Roosters started singing their first morning lullaby, waking up the first-class; the class that owned people somewhere. That particular class only needed thirty minutes to get to their second homes. They were people who dreamt and hired people to build their dreams. They were the source of the increasing income to the country. By the time they were settled in their second homes and started coming back to the reality of hunger, roosters were singing again back home.

With the help of the hens, even the laziest people in the second class began to slide out of bed. A woman, who woke up thirty minutes after the first class, came out of the house in a hurry and fear of being fired for being late. She had lived like that for quite a long time, like common sense was lost, making the same mistake every day.

The last class was there, not really sure when to wake up. But surely, they would, even the blankets were bound to get tired of people, right?

In one house, a father left in the hour of first class and a mother in the second-class hour. The house was left with one person, a girl – as she saw herself – Mpho who was sitting on a chair in front of the mirror. She had been sitting there since her father left. Just like waking up wasn’t her choice, sitting there wasn’t her choice either.

Her mother had told her to wake up and prepare herself for the blind date she had arranged for her later at 11:00 a.m. Mpho couldn’t understand why she had to wake eight hours before the date. But her mother had answered easily that Mpho needed all that time to make a good impression on the man she had to meet. She knew she needed to win him over and that first started with her appearance.

Like always, her mother was the one who had to get what she wanted in everything. Despite the five other men who had already refused Mpho, her mother was very determined to find dates for her. Mpho’s mother blamed Mpho for the men not wanting her, she complained it was because she didn’t hold herself like a lady would. Her father seemed to think Mpho didn’t fit in anywhere too.

For the longest time, Mpho couldn’t understand her parents. Just a month ago, she was their perfect son. She went to work with her father and was proclaimed as the heir of the company. She attended meetings with her father and everything was usually smooth for them. The only problem was that people kept calling Mpho a girl.

One day they had to attend a meeting with other first-class men and Mpho was invited. Her father introduced her by name and one of the men remarked the beauty of Mpho as a woman and even offered to marry her. Her father joked about it, but corrected the guy that Mpho is a man.

But it didn’t end there, her father gave her mother the responsibility of her. He told her mother that Mpho was now in her hands. Just like that, she was a girl again and from that moment she had been on several blind dates attempting to find a husband.

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Tell us: Why do you think Mpho’s parent want her to be a girl and not a boy?