My name is
Kelina, and I'm 11 years old.
What goes
through my mind is I'm scared to walk alone
because they
raped a woman in the street.
We saw the
blood she left in the streets afterwards.
You have no
choice but to see these things.
You must not
walk alone.
Miseducation. Original Title: Growing up in a still-wounded South Africa
This short film by Miss Cloete, has
stuck with me the longest, since I watched it in late May. There's something
almost surreal about how casually Kelina's singsong voice talks about sex, and
violence, and death. How she walks alone through the streets, in between
gangsters and women being roughed up, then proceeds to say this:
It's better
to walk in a group of children
because if
they kidnap you while you're walking alone
and you
disappear, who would know where you are?
No one will
know.
If you walk
in a group they'll see who took you.
Everyone
will know where you are.
If you walk
with people, you shouldn't have an attitude
because then
people won't like you
and if you
die, nobody will come to your funeral.
No 11 year old should have to think
about sex beyond the birds and the bees, or whatever insects 'we' Africans used
in our stories about sex. Whether it's the 'we bought you at a market' story,
or 'we picked you up at the supermarket,' any of that would do; but not what
this child speaks about. Not what children near Kenya's Naks Vegas go through
every two seconds, it would seem, going by Kenyan Dailies.
Not what vitriol a man who chose to
be a woman has to imbibe, if she so chooses, because losing a dick is such a
big deal that the airwaves and media-spaces have to be filled with dicks
pointing it out. Or pussies taking it in, and going one step further to protect
their own by screaming bloody murder at every other Tom, Dick and Harry.
I always found it intensely ironic
that this phrase, one that lumps together three dicks but calls them different
names, could possibly mean the same as 'all and sundry.' But we do live
in a world where man is right, and woman is left. Left behind. Where man is
right, and woman is wrong. Wronged by everyone, and left to her own devices, if
she has any.
I am scared
to walk, because
a bullet
doesn't have an address.
It doesn't
say where it's going.
The people
who shoot are gangsters
and the
gangsters' names are HLs, Americans, Naughty Boys
the Stupas
and others.
It's better
if they dies, then they won't come back
I don't like
to wake up so early but you have to because there's school.
My name is
Kelina, and I'm 11 years old.
Little boys are just about as
vulnerable as Kelina is. And I have long felt that they, too, should - in fact
MUST - be protected from the world about as much - if not MORE - than the girl
child.
Take a girl
to school and you build a community. Take a boy to school and you build an
individual. Ignore a girl's education and? What happens? Worst case scenario,
anyone? Now, ignore a boy's education, and by education I talk of real
education not classrooms; what happens? 25 years down the line, the girls you
took to school start bitching, crying 'where are the men?' Your mothers ignored
nurturing them.
25 years down the line, your daughter is raped. Raped by? A girl, was it? How many women did you see in the [K]ICC's Hague-6?
5, maybe 10
years down the line, your Member needs to be re-elected. Show me one
girl-child, on the day, who picks up a panga and slits another girl-child's
throat because the MP said so. Show me one girl-child who force feeds herself a
dick because the leader said so.
The system
we coexist in is rough. Rough for the woman; who wants to grow in her career only
to be Hudd-winked? Rough
for the man, who wants to 'hustle' every day without being hooded; thrown into
a boot and shot in the middle of a forest? Rough for the man; who wants to
help a woman only to be thought of as a bigoted narcissistic chauvinist? Rough
for the woman who wants to have a child in her 20s, but is afraid that she will
stall in her career and have to play catch-up with the men.
Utumishi kwa
Wote.
We exist, as
one Keguro Macharia said recently, in an epidemic of quotidian violence
in Kenya; by the police against young men; by young men against women; by
everyone against everyone else. And while, as Boniface Mwangi said at a Kwani?
forum recently, the police are out there waiting to pop your ass full of lead
if you dare defy them, we all do the same thing, if only with less weighty
bullets.
I am
convinced that we know precisely what is wrong with our system. Every. Single.
One of us. We are not immune to sense. We are only immune to the implications
of our role in this sense...or lack thereof it.
Talk about
sex, and talk about it like sane, grown human beings. Talk about sex like it's
a good thing, because it is. Treat it as a disease, and disease springs from
it. The real, the fetishist; the literal, the literary and the figurative.
***
I am currently about to stop putting
off reading Queer
Africa: New and Collected Fiction, compiled and edited by Karen Martin and
Makhosazana Xaba. The first story, Pelican Driver, is written by my favorite
wenchy wench from last month's piece, Davina Owombre. It begins thus:
AJ got off
his knees, licking his lips.
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