Grade 11, Providence Academy
We all sat around the fire on our cow-skins. Our legs were stretched out and our hands were drawn to the fire like metal to a magnet. The house was dead silent and one could almost slice the tension in the room with a knife. The phone rang and my grandmother picked it up and put it to her ear.
“Yes,” she said in a stern voice, and after a few seconds she slid the phone back into her pocket. Everyone looked at her, waiting for the verdict. She wiped the streaming tears off her face and told us it was fine. Jabulani and I sprang to our feet and hugged each other, while Thabani and Thuboni ran to hug our grandmother.
Our grandfather had been sick for the past few days and was urgently taken to the home of traditional healers. Everyone was happy once again and our eyes glowed as the fire illuminated our faces. After a few drops of tears and hugs, we went to our rooms to rest. We had to get our beauty sleep, and our parents were on their way.
We opened our squeaky door, and the darkness lured us in. We found our ways to our beds through bumping, pushing each other and laughter. It was already light so we didn’t bother lighting the candles. We just slept, although for a few minutes I could not sleep, and excitement grew in me like a bush fire. I wondered how my mother’s face looked, not that I have forgotten. Then I closed my eyes and away I flew to dreamland. I heard my grandmother singing, her voice so elegant.
I remembered those days when I used to be sick and how I would sleep on her lap while we waited in a queue to enter the home of traditional healers in Kwa Mzilonkotha, but this singing was different. It was a call, my time to wake up, which I gladly ignored for a while.
After I finished my work on the farm, I went to the big tree on our compound with my goat skin and read my book, Dreaming of Light. After a few minutes I heard my cousins screaming and I knew our parents had arrived. I stood up and ran and hugged my mother; she looked at me, her face beaming, and she said, “We are going to Johannesburg together.”
I barely remember my journey to Johannesburg but what I do remember is jamming to an amapiano song “Amanikiniki” by Kamo Mphela; and how for the first time the night was not filled with darkness but only beauty and light. I had embraced darkness for years but in just one night light resided in me. It reminded me of how the Zama Zama boys felt, when they came out of the mine and for the first time in six months saw the light. We stepped out of the car and my mother said to me, “Son, this is your home.” I stood there trying to process that I was going to live not in a hut but in a flat.
We entered the flat through the electronic gate and everything was different, but it was a good different. The night went on, days went on, and January approached. The day finally came and I had to go to school, my first early morning in Jozi. The morning was busier than I anticipated, the atmosphere filled with different flavours and different languages, all interacting at the same time. It was the first time I saw a quote come to life: “Diversity in Unity is the true beauty of humanity.” My mother took me to school. I went in there and I got bullied like it was normal, but bullying is not normal and if you are being bullied, report it to a trusted teacher, or parent, or call 1-800-273-8255. Cyber bullying did not get to me because I did not have a phone, but verbal bullying was a different story. Apparently to them, I was thin, too dark, and too smart; and my family practised witchcraft. The audacity of those teenagers.
For weeks I hated the way I looked, I hated the way I walked, and I hated the way teachers loved me. I loathed myself, but in the midst of all that hatred there was one thing I loved about me, my grandmother’s voice that woke me up every day. It was at that point that I realised I was not a Mama’s boy, I was a grandma’s boy, and the only thing I learned from her was strength; she never taught us or spoke to us about how she practised it, she just showed it to us, she took matters into her own hands, she took care of the whole family when grandfather was sick, and at that moment I knew what I had to do.
Night finally came and it was time to go to my room and sit in the darkness. I lit my candle and plotted. I wrote all the crazy scenarios of how I was going to make them pay, not because I was weak or afraid but because I was raised to be a man of integrity and wisdom. I was going to report them.
No one called me names that morning; it was as if they knew the horror I had in store for them. After break the teachers went to a meeting. That demon of a prefect was supposed to keep the class quiet. He went in front of the classroom called out my name and they went dead silent. His next words were, “Your grandmother…” Everyone was silent, not even a single soul reacted to his comment, and for the first time I saw the real him, the vulnerable boy who was disappointing his whole life. A voice emerged from the back: “That was not funny.” The class roared in excitement and laughter, and for the first time I felt that these teenagers were not all demons, there were good people, good friends among them.
After school I thought he would come and apologise but he did not. He looked at me and went the opposite direction. I took matters into my own hands and followed him. I had to make him apologise. I knew I was not evil, I knew I was not bad, the world had transformed me, he had changed me. I was not born but was made a monster. He turned back as I was following him, and I looked at him dead in the eye and punched him. He started crying and I saw that vulnerable young boy, as he told me his tragic story of how his younger brother committed suicide because of bullying.
He then took me to his brother’s favourite place, a kota kitchen; and with my first bite, I almost forgave. I looked at him and beneath his scared face I saw pain, so pure, so disheartening, so vulnerable. He was not a monster, he was a victim of circumstance, broken little pieces that needed a gentle hand to put them together. All he needed was a chance.
In each and every bully there is a young boy or girl who needs love, a hug and to be loved. Report them, they need help.