Gradually, Zola swallowed her pride and allowed Sipho to assist with Mvelo’s school fees and pocket money. But when he said that he wanted to send Mvelo to a school in town, she flatly refused. For once she and Nonceba were in agreement. Although Zola’s reasoning was different from Nonceba’s. She was concerned about her daughter’s living arrangements, that she would be teased by children with rich parents because she lived in eMkhukhwini, the shacks, while they lived in posh places.

Nonceba was surprised that Sipho would want Mvelo to go into a system that would steadily poison her as it had done to CJay. ‘She will get a better education there, please let’s not argue on this one, Nonceba,’ he sighed.

‘But Sipho, you know what happens at those schools.
The girls take purgative pills to flatten their stomachs like ballerinas. She will unlearn all that she has learnt about herself so far. She will want to slice her nose thinner and break her back just to be noticed.’ She reminded Sipho about his niece Nomusa, from the bundus of eMpendle, who had tried to commit suicide after he had enrolled her in a private boarding school and she found she no longer fitted in anywhere.

Suicide always touched a nerve with Nonceba. Her mother had walked into the ocean. She was just a year old but she knew the horror and the shock of it.

Sipho tried to reason with Nonceba saying that Mvelo was stronger and different from Nomusa. But she wasn’t convinced. ‘What is wrong with the schools here where her friends are?’ she challenged Sipho. He said township schools were ill-equipped, that the teachers were not well-trained and the children were misbehaving. ‘And they don’t misbehave in the private schools? Do you see girls in the township schools puking and shitting their guts out because they want to be thin?’

‘No, but I see them pregnant, Nonceba. Not just one or two, but quite a few of them,’ Sipho shot back.

‘Girls in private schools get pregnant too; they just pop in to the Marie Stopes Clinic and have an abortion.’

‘So what are you saying, Nonceba, that it is better to populate the township than going to Marie Stopes?’ He was exasperated. Her arguments were always out of step with everyone else.

‘I am saying, why do you have so much faith in the private and Model C schools? Black middle-class parents like you should put their energies into the public schools, your own old schools here at home, not in town. I mean, why pay thousands of rands for fees, transport, endless field trips and even salaries for private tutors when you can fix a school here and let the children learn for twelve years having paid less than two thousand rands per year?’

‘Hell, university fees are nothing compared to what
is forked out for these private schools. Can’t you see the message? They are trying to keep out the riff-raff by putting up the fees. And a child will not develop neuroses about her blackness in a local school.’

‘All these educated people shouldn’t be putting their faith in private schools just because they’re fancy and they’re in town. Their resources should be invested here. We won’t have a class issue then; this new racism where certain blacks are called Boss and Madam. The apartheid that the masses fought against, we are now doing it to ourselves. What I am saying is that I want to protect Mvelo. I want her whole. If she needs to learn English, I will teach her in addition to what she is learning in the township school. And I will teach her the kind of history that she needs to learn, not the version they will teach her about Shaka being a ruthless cannibal. I will give her the gifts that I was lucky to receive from my grandmother that are not in the pages of any history book.’

She put her arms seductively around Sipho and he melted. He agreed to everything that she asked of him. First order of the day for Nonceba, with Zola’s permission of course, was to accompany Mvelo to school. She wanted to meet her teachers and introduce herself. After Nonceba shook hands with all of them Mvelo knew that she had noticed something about Mr Zwide, the History teacher. Nonceba had asked to speak to him in private. After collecting his tongue that was practically hanging out, he must have foolishly thought Nonceba was flirting with him.

He was mistaken. What Nonceba wanted to do was to warn him. ‘Listen to me very carefully, Mr Zwide. I see you. I can see that you are abusing your power and taking advantage of these teenage girls. Just know that if you ever so much as look at Mvelo the wrong way, I will be onto you like a ton of bricks.’

Between Zola, Sipho and Nonceba, Mvelo was in a good place.

When Nomagugu, a drama student at the University of Natal, came with the gospel of reviving traditions like virginity testing, Zola said Mvelo should go. She said it was a good measure to protect her from boys and lurking perverts. To make Zola happy, she reluctantly went, but she felt it put her in direct danger, making her a target, a buck separated from the herd. She secretly asked Nonceba’s opinion about it. Nonceba of course had a different way of seeing it. ‘I think there is something very powerful about virgins. Have you noticed that most religions put some form of emphasis on virginity? I know that they come across as controlling women’s sexuality, but if you choose to be a virgin for as long as you want, the choice is in your hands,’ she said. ‘Once it’s gone, it’s gone, you can never reverse it. But you can choose when to go with whom you want. You can channel your sexual energy into other things until you’re ready to change that. Know what I mean?’

What Mvelo liked about Nonceba was that she made sense to her, even though most people thought she was an oddball.

Mvelo went to the virginity testing grounds with clarity in her mind. She was mainly doing it for Zola, yet she also felt she had ownership of herself. And like many girls her age, she was curious to see what and how they test. She discovered that there were good testers, who were concerned about rampant child abuse and saw testing as the traditional way of solving the problem, but others were drunk with power and the media attention they were getting. Foreign correspondents and rich perverts flocked in with cameras for a flesh circus of unspoilt girls spreading their legs.

Genuine news people were careful not to impose, while the drooling voyeurs used long lenses to focus right on target, just like they do during Umkhosi Wohlanga, the reed dance, where scantily-clad young Zulu maidens present reeds to the Zulu King.

For testing, the old women would line the girls up early in the morning, usually near a river. They would lie down in a row, each with a checker, and open their legs. With two fingers from each hand, the checker would pry open the lips of their little vaginas, looking for an ‘eye’; the vagina of a virgin is closed up, like a flower bud that looks like an eye. Once she had seen the eye, the checker would come up from between the legs of the virgin and nod to others. There would then be much ululation and joy from the old gogos. They got written certificates and were marked with a dot on their foreheads to indicate that they were still pure.

In Mvelo’s shanty town, she became known as a virgin girl. Easy prey, like a zebra running amongst the springboks, marked.

She felt sorry for the girls who had lost their virginity
but had to attend the testing for fear of their parents. They sometimes found ways to fool the testers, using a piece of
raw liver well-placed to make it look as if the hymen was still intact. Some used the chalk from the school blackboard. It was a sad affair because they developed diseases. Testers caught
on to the trend and the girls were humiliated in front of the crowds of spectators. Then there were those predators who hunted virgins because a rumour circulated that if an HIV- positive man slept with a virgin he would be cured.

A sexual genocide of children and women began through rape by desperate men. Girls were getting raped left, right and centre. Before Mvelo got home, she learnt ways of protecting herself, wiping the white dot from her forehead. She didn’t need outside proof to be proud of herself.

Every three months Mvelo went for a test. The day she stopped going was when one of the older girls was found to be ‘damaged’. This is how the testers referred to girls who were no longer virgins. The girl was about to be married to a traditional church elder who wanted proof that she was ‘unspoilt’.

There was tension in the air. The girl chosen by the traditional leader, who was old enough to be her grandfather, was carrying a load on her shoulders. She didn’t want to be married to the old man. She was in love with a young man her own age and she had willingly given herself to him. How could anyone call her damaged? She was in love. If she had been raped it would be a different thing.

She didn’t try to hide it, she just lay there and let the tester spit on her and insult her. Then she began to wail. It was humiliating. After the test the girl walked away towards the railway tracks, where she lay down and let the train damage and kill her.

Mvelo fainted that day. She was upset and confused by everything. She woke up at home, with the dot of pride still on her forehead. She wiped it off and told Zola that she was never going back.

Most girls in the shacks were damaged from rape. These young girls had trouble on their shoulders. How could they tell their mothers that it was people they trusted, family members, friends of the family and their ‘uncles’, their mothers’ lovers, who were molesting them?

Mvelo began to resent the whole affair of testing, because they weren’t questioning why the girls were ‘damaged’, except when the girl was very young. The rape epidemic was so rampant that some mothers brought in extremely young children as a safety measure against abuse. The ‘uncles’ avoided children that were being tested. They did not want to risk being discovered.

When Mvelo stopped going for the tests, her peers thought she must have been damaged. Why else would she stop going? But she was determined not to let the gossip upset her.