I was twenty years old when I had the first real taste of life. It was not the scientific and biologic explanation for existence, where one inhales and exhales in order to receive oxygen to keep all bodily systems going, but the breathtaking, heart-racing, fire-burning burst of life, youth and love that flowed through my veins. The day Robert and I had our first kiss, it felt as if my entire world had been knocked off of its axis.
I remember what his lips tasted like and the warmth of his large, calloused pale hands holding onto me as if I was the totality of all of his worldly possession. His eyes were bluer than the sky above us and they seemed to sparkle as he looked down at me and smiled so tenderly at me that I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry because of the awe and the fear he incited within me and how at that moment, it was the first time I'd felt something either than the perpetual and blinding rage and fear that had followed me for as long as I can remember.
Before Robert Hearth and the Nandos in Pretoria CBD; before South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, there was 1991 - the year of Nelson Mandela's release. It was the year I turned thirteen years old and the year the darkness made home within me and never quite left.
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February 1991, Soweto, South Africa.
I remember the walk home from school with my sister, Portia who was two years my junior. We took the kilometre-long trek in the sweltering summer sun, with our pitch black dungarees and our pitch black socks making our pitch black skins burn even faster. She was telling me about the geography lesson she'd had and some new gossip about a teacher in the same way she did every day. This was our routine. We would then get home, change out of our uniforms and help Mama around the house.
We lived a simple existence, though it was hard in a place like that. Mama tried her hardest to keep us away from the places where it was easy to get into trouble. Things were better then than in '76 and the State of Emergency, but not by much. I knew this. Portia was a little too young to fully grasp it then, she was only eleven years old in body and much younger in mind. Mama liked it that way and so did I.
I remember the celebration that awaited us when we reached our street. Children were yelling "Viva, Mandela, Viva!" while women sang praises to God and men were sitting in compounds drinking their beers in their kilos.
At home, Mama gave us note money to go and buy many bottles of cold, Cocoa-Cola and two kilograms of beef and some biscuits and she'd warned us to hurry back as she suspected the local spaza would be busy with excited youth and energised policemen.
