Get out of the way, here SHE comes!

We’re apt to hold ourselves accountable over promises made for the new years of our lives. Mine starts not with the calendar year but my birthday. I use that to shift the goal posts of life. And boy, are they not getting more flexible? The downside is that there's a general tiredness in the air. The kind you get when you’re looking at the prize of accomplishment but there’s still a distance between you and the taste of victory, so you have to find and pull out the last reserves of energy to finish that last mile.

In this part of the world, at the end of November, most of us trudge toward the year-end holidays. Personally, the last three Friday’s have been ruminative in a manner reminiscent of a slow-motion picture. I can only hope that the reading of it, would make sense to you, because I'm telling like it has felt.

My birthday fell on the same day as the Woman for Change South Africa. Which called for systematic, structural and policy change toward the country’s state of GBVF. (gender-based-violence and femicide)

I probably subconsciously observed the15 minutes Standstill it called for from 12 pm on the day. In honour of 15 women killed every day in the country. You see, a snooze sneaked up on me. I thought (and even dreamed) of my maternal grandmother, it was weird by most accounts of what makes up ordinary.

I didn’t know what about the issues from that day, kept me circling around memories of childhood. To start with, two memories in particular assailed my mind from that Purple Day.

At the brink of teenage-hood, different political parties held their rallies just outside of my grandmother’s huge yard. It was one of the few homes in that village neighbourhood with massive trees along the fence boundary. Their shade spread wide and far for a crowd happy to find coolness under the heat of the unforgiving summer’s sun.

They brought their own chairs, loudspeakers and were not really a bother. The discourse would variably drift to our attention at intervals but, we were mostly good at shutting it out. My grandmother’s bristling energy always had her doing one thing or the other around the home and yard. The task to ferry jugs of cold water for the people befell us when the heat was at its height.

When she heard something silly or annoying and it happened without fail at every one of those rallies, she marched right up, grabbed the loudspeaker and gave them a piece of her mind. In her commanding manner, with her strong voice, she’d hold everyone’s attention including ours. And I still see how the one hand would be on the hip. Her gaze and body shifting from one end of the crowd to the other. It was a show off but she always concluded in several languages besides Tswana; Ndebele, Zulu, English and Afrikaans. She'd march off amidst applause, cheers and laughter. She was a natural.

She had a talent too for using swear words in a way nobody could keep a straight face at. From her verbose attack, waving her hands about, she'd get back in to continue whatever chore got interrupted.

The other memory was of a time she inherited her son’s Nissan truck after his death. Unmarried, he left only a small child as a descendant. I only understood years later, after my own sister’s death why she formed such a strong attachment to that truck.

I mean here was my grandmother, in her early seventies already, who hadn't owned a car for as long as I’d known her, definitely not in possession of a driver’s license and fiercely refusing to give up the truck. It was her son’s truck and her other son wasn’t going to get it. And why? He had his own and she knew how to drive, so I finally heard—wonder upon wonders.

It was in the year I was to be a legal adult myself and so was learning how to drive.

Whether we were going shopping or she was just giving me a lift into town, is not so clear now. But in I was as she put it in reverse. I panicked because I wasn’t sure how controlled her foot on the accelerator was, seemed too haphazard for my liking. Getting into the first gear was challenging but I thought... it is a truck and she was obviously out of practice. Must’ve been aeons since she was behind the wheel. At a time when it was definitely a rare sight to see such.

But the way that truck somehow swung and swerved into the tarred main road raised my heartbeat. She had a fight with the gears whenever they had to change. I watched in horror, as third gear groaned straight from the first, her foot flooring that accelerator. We were flying, she was unflinching and the truck zigzagged along the road. I clutched the sides of the seat for dear life, silently praying to God to spare us.

Nonchalant, she was busy chatting up, as if all was normal in the world. When my eyes stopped shutting on reflex, I noticed that the road seemed a bit deserted. The oncoming cars timely got out of the road, strictly keeping to the sides to flee from her.

“Get out of the way, here SHE comes!”

We later learnt from the village grapevine that the taxi men, seeing her a mile off sounded the reverberating cry along the roads that was well heeded. Nobody sane was to ever be seen on the passenger's seat again. Myself included.

She got off with light verbal warnings from the police. Or pleadings to at least hire a driver. She told them that she's an excellent driver and after all, had she ever caused an accident? She swore at and left them in fitful bouts of laughter.

Catastrophic events at bay because of the favours of living within a community and small miracles, the police had to try another way. They officially presented the problem to my mother and her siblings. Prising their mother away from that truck for good was no easy feat.

How good many a times the memories of that traumatic phase had us in stitches with my siblings! And how we felt just how perfectly that phrase espoused some core element in her.

Like most South Africans, in the last week, proceedings at the Madlanga Commission when the Police Minister Senzo Mchunu took to the witness stand, had me glued to the screen.

Something in the Commissioner Sesi Baloyi would remind me so much of something about my grandmother. Their appearance, demeanor, mannerism, are completely different. On opposite sides even at first glance. I asked my mind why it found a way to associate the two somehow. The answer- like most things, would come in time.

But I kept thinking if my grandmother were still around and she was watching Commissioner Baloyi, she’d be cheering and heaping delightful praises on her. And I could even hear what she’d say about the minister but thankfully and respectfully that can and should remain in the space between my ears.

I would think about how far women have come since the time of my grandmother. We heard all our lives, what a painful life she’d lived under the official yoke of her husband. As a woman, most of her married life, she never had the agency to start or own anything that our (beloved) grandfather didn’t have to sign for first and assumed automatic ownership over. Only, it was a fool of a husband and the one area where God pulled a cruel one over her.

Whenever Commissioner Baloyi offered apologies for interrupting and politely asked for clarity, I’d think,

“Oh oh, get out of the way, here SHE comes!”

And then it clicked! The association was precisely because of that line.

I take nothing away from the impressive Senior Advocate Mahlape Sello whose brilliance comes out shining too. Just as I take nothing away from the entire Commission itself, but hail to the women we've been watching for weeks now.

A few months ago, a landmark ruling by the Constitutional Court decreed that men in this country can now take their wives surnames if they so wished. I mean...my giddy aunt!

Of course, on the whole, women still have far more to go. I hardly see how the work of any generation is ever done until they’ve passed on and posterity builds unto what they’ve laid down and somehow given in the way of an opening.

When my niece, whose birthday is a day before mine turned seventeen and I asked her how she felt on her birthday, her answered threw me off. She said,

"I still cry a little on my birthdays."

"Why?" I asked, stunned.

"Because I feel no closer to knowing who I really am."

I was gobsmacked, because at that age, my mind didn't churn and dig out deep and profound thinking like that. I thought about partying. I’ve since realised that I’d probably learn more from her than she ever will from me in our life’s journey. I mean some people’s biological age have little to do with their soul's age.

Reflecting on yet another turn of the earth's orbit around the sun, I’m still here. I don’t think I’m any closer to finding out who I am most days. Somehow though, there’s something freeing about saying and admitting so. In fact, the freedom lies in realising that it’s not as important as I used to think it was.

If I learn to put the best of myself out there, for no other reason but the satisfaction of knowing that I didn’t come on this earth only to eat, drink, sleep and have sex—then I will inevitably get to the best version of myself.

And as usual I marvel at the power of the subconscious mind. It’s only when I was writing this that I realised why the Purple Day brought memories of my grandmother on my birthday.

The mind made the connection between that and the many years I saw her clad in her purple cape every Sunday. She was a staunch member of the St Anne’s Woman Society in the Catholic Church.

The same way it carries the knowing that some women carry a force you acknowledge if you want to stay in one piece. You just get out of their way.

"Aren’t we simply wonderful?"

Photo Courtesy of -pexels-alexandra-lavizzari-2148255542-35974584.jpg- Many Thanks!

Till we meet again.