The School of Afrika with Hmaster.

01/06/2025

I’m a Girl in South Africa, and I’m Afraid…

Olorato Mongale did everything right.

She told her friends where she was going.
She planned her safety.
She promised to send her location.
She was on her very first date.
With a man in a white VW Polo.

She never sent that location.

Two hours later, her friends used a “find me” app.
They found her phone.
Her bag.
But not her.

Later, in Lombardy, a community watched that same Polo drop a parcel.
Suspicious.
Wrapped.
Heavy.

Inside was her body.
Olorato was gone.

Unalived. Murdêred. Tossed away like she meant nothing.

And yet she was everything.
A Wits student. A dreamer. Someone’s daughter.
She was careful. She was smart. She was hopeful.
And now she is gone.

But Olorato isn’t the first.
And that’s the part that chokes us.
Because her name joins a long, bloodied list.

Uyinene Mrwetyana went to the post office.
She never came out.

Karabo Mokoena loved a man.
He burnt her to ash.

Tshegofatso P**e was eight months pregnant.
He hung her from a tree.

Reeva Steenkamp locked herself in a bathroom.
She was shot through the door.

Sibongile Zenzile went to work.
She never made it home.

Leighandre Jegels.
Namhla Mtwa.
Boitumelo Rabale.
Naledi Phangindawo.
Nosicelo Mtebeni.

How many more, South Africa?
How many candles must we light?
How many vigils? How many broken mothers?
How many girls must whisper goodbyes as they close the door, not knowing it’s their last?

We are a nation of blood-stained sheets and silenced screams.
We are taught how not to be r***d before we are taught how to love ourselves.
We are told to shrink, to whisper, to pray.
But we are not the problem.
They are.

The men who love like fists.
The boys who believe consent is negotiable.
The uncles who smile too long.
The pastors who preach then prey.
The cops who laugh and lose dockets.
The courts that delay.
The politicians who tweet condolences and do nothing.

This is not a poem. This is a scream.

We scream for Olorato.
We scream for Karabo.
We scream for every woman whose last words were “Please don’t.”

We are not safe on our streets.
Not in our taxis.
Not in our homes.
Not in our own skin.

To be a girl in South Africa is to live with a target on your back,
To carry pepper spray like lip gloss,
To pray that the Uber driver doesn’t lock the doors,
To text your friends “Made it home” like it’s a miracle.

We are dying.

And even our deaths become statistics.
Hashtags.
Slogans.
Then silence.

But we are not silent anymore.

We are angry.
We are broken.
We are loud.
We are terrified but unafraid.

Because we are tired of being careful.
We are tired of burying our sisters.
We are tired of watching the same story written in fresh blood every week.

Say her name: Olorato Mongale.
Say all their names.
Let them haunt this land until justice shakes this country to its knees.
Let the earth feel the weight of our rage.
Let the men who hurt us hear our footsteps—coming not in fear, but in fury.

We don’t want your pity.
We want change.

Until then, remember this:

We are girls in South Africa.
And we are afraid.
But we are not going anywhere.

Even if it kills us.

© Harrison Ncube 2025.

18/05/2025

I buried you in the parts of me that don’t heal

I didn’t cry at the funeral.
The wind did.
It howled like it lost you too.
Like it loved you louder than I ever could.

The priest said “ashes to ashes.”
I thought,
No—
Skin to silence. Breath to bruise.

Grief doesn’t knock.
It breaks the damn door down.
Sits in your chest like a drunk uncle
And says
Remember that time they smiled with their whole face?
And suddenly
You’re bleeding through your eyes
In a Pick n Pay queue
Holding milk.

I tried to write about you.
But every sentence ends with
“I wish.”
I wish you stayed.
I wish I said more.
I wish I wasn’t so human.
I wish God wasn’t so hungry.

There are days your name
Tastes like home.
And days it tastes
Like rust.

I buried you
In the parts of me
That don’t heal.

And maybe that’s
How I keep you.

Alive.
Still.
Mine.

11/05/2025

Unspoken: A Mother’s Day Story

By Harrison Ncube
I never celebrated Mother’s Day. I don’t even know what it means. It’s not flowers and breakfast in bed. It’s not glitter on cards and little fingers painting hearts. For me, it’s a Sunday in May that tastes like blood and silence.
My name is Thembeka. I’m twenty-three. I’m a mother. Not by choice. Not by love. But by force.
My daughter is six. Her name is Zinhle. I named her that because I wanted something in my life to carry beauty, even if it came from something so grotesque, so unspeakable.
Zinhle thinks I’m the strongest woman in the world. She says it with her missing front teeth, with the gap-toothed joy only a child can carry. She doesn’t know her smile is built on a grave.
People think I’m quiet. That I’m shy. That I don’t talk because I’m reserved. But silence is not always gentle. Sometimes silence is a scream you were forced to swallow. Sometimes silence is survival.
Let me take you back. To my childhood. Back to a four-roomed house in Tembisa where the walls were thin and the secrets thick. My mother died when I was eight. Stroke, they said. I think it was despair. My father didn’t cry. He didn’t hold me. He told me, “A woman must be strong.” I was eight.
He started coming into my room when I turned eleven. At first, it was just sitting on my bed. Then he touched my hair. Then my thigh. Then I stopped counting.
You see, people believe pain must come with bruises. But how do you show them the scar that splits your soul? How do you prove you were broken in the one place no eye can see?
He said I was his only girl. That I reminded him of Ma. That he was lonely. That I mustn’t tell. That if I did, no one would believe me. That I would be taken away. That the ancestors would be angry. That I was special. That he loved me.
He said all of that with whisky on his breath and the belt he used when I flinched.
I was pregnant by fifteen. I didn’t even know it at first. I thought my body was trying to kill me. My breasts hurt. My back hurt. I was tired. Always tired. Then I missed my period. Then another. Then I vomited. Then I knew.
I didn’t tell anyone. How do you say it? How do you form the words? “My father r***d me and now I am carrying his child?”
The only way to keep living was to let a part of myself die.
He died before Zinhle was born. Heart attack. Neighbours say it was sudden. I say it was late.
At the funeral, people said he was a good man. That he loved his daughter. That he never remarried because he cherished my mother so much. That I was lucky to have had such a father.
I stood there with Zinhle’s feet pressing against my ribs, my belly heavy with a child I didn’t ask for, and I said nothing.
Why didn’t I say something while he was alive? That’s the question they’d ask now. It echoes in the spaces between my ribs. It sticks like marrow in my bones.
Because trauma isn’t a press conference. Because shame clogs the throat. Because we are taught to protect men, especially if they are our blood. Because I was a child. Because I was afraid. Because I still am.
Zinhle doesn’t know who her father is. One day she will ask. Children always do. I don’t know what I’ll say. Maybe I’ll lie. Maybe I’ll say he died in a car crash. Maybe I’ll say he lived far away and we drifted apart. Maybe I’ll say nothing and let her imagine someone better than the truth.
Or maybe, one day, I’ll say it. I’ll look into her soft brown eyes and I’ll tell her she was born from something horrible, but that she herself is not horrible. That she is light. That she is love. That she is my reason for not hanging myself with the curtain string when I was sixteen.
I tried to get rid of her. Once. I found a girl in Katlehong who said she could help. I had R250. She took me behind a shack, laid me on a cold table. Gave me pills. Told me to wait. I bled for two days. But Zinhle stayed. She clung to my womb like she already knew I was her only hope.
The pain of carrying her was nothing compared to the pain of knowing where she came from. Each kick, each turn, each ripple under my skin was a reminder of the night I stopped being a child.
They all think I kept her out of love. That’s the lie I live with. The truth is more complicated. More violent. More quiet.
She was born in a government clinic in Kempton Park. The nurse said, “Push, mama.” Mama. That word struck me like a slap. I wasn’t a mama. I was a girl broken open. But I pushed. I screamed. I cried. And then I heard her cry. And in that moment, something shifted. Not love. Not yet. But something. Maybe the first flicker of a fight to live.
I didn’t breastfeed her. My milk came, but I felt sick. I couldn’t let her near my breast. It reminded me too much of him. I gave her formula. The nurses judged me. “Natural is best,” they said. They didn’t know I was trying not to vomit every time she latched.
When she turned one, I started calling her my joy. Not because she was. But because I wanted it to become true. Like naming something could change its nature. Sometimes, it worked. Most days, I still felt like a vessel with cracks too deep to ever mend.
I see my father in her. The shape of her ears. The gap in her teeth. The way her eyes narrow when she concentrates. I hate it. And I hate myself for hating it.

Today is Mother’s Day.

She brought me a drawing. Crayons on A4 paper. Stick figures. Her, holding my hand. A sun in the corner. “I love you, Mama,” in her handwriting.
I cried in the bathroom. Silently. The kind of cry that doesn’t need sound. The kind that hurts behind the eyes and beneath the lungs.

She knocked.

“Mama, are you okay?”

“Yes, baby. Mama’s okay.”

I will never be okay.

But I will keep going.

For her.

Because being a mother is not the same as wanting to be one. But sometimes, the child you didn’t ask for becomes the only light you know.
Zinhle doesn’t know the truth. But she gives me reasons to live with it.
This is not a happy story. There is no redemption arc. No Hollywood climax. No magic forgiveness. There is just a girl, now a woman, learning how to live with what was done to her.
Learning how to mother the child she birthed from her father’s crime.
Learning how to breathe when her lungs feel like graveyards.
Learning that silence can be survival, but also, slowly, maybe one day—freedom.

Today is Mother’s Day.

I do not celebrate it.

But I survive it.
(c) C**k and Bull Story 2025.

27/11/2024

The Art of Falling.

I wasn’t always like this.
The blood on my hands wasn’t mine—at least, not this time. It dripped onto the cracked concrete floor, pooling in dark streaks that caught the dim glow of the flickering bulb above me. My chest heaved as I stared at the body, my pulse racing louder than the silence in the room.

I didn’t mean to kill him.

But that doesn’t matter now, does it? Dead is dead, and no amount of regret will bring him back.
I wish I could say this was the first body I’d ever seen. Or the first mistake I’d ever made. But that would be a lie.

Six months earlier.

The first time I saw Lihle, I should’ve walked away. She had danger written all over her, from the sharp curve of her smile to the glint in her eyes that promised nothing good. But I was already too far gone by the time I realized.
“Why are you staring at me?” she asked, her voice cutting through the noise of the bar like a blade.
“Because I’ve never seen a train wreck up close,” I shot back, smirking.
She laughed—a sound that felt more like a dare than amusement. “Well, hold on tight, stranger. It’s about to get worse.”

She wasn’t wrong.

Lihle wasn’t the kind of woman you dated; she was the kind you survived. She lived fast and reckless, and somehow, I became her favourite passenger. She dragged me into her world of poker games, unpaid debts, and whispered threats in back alleys. But I stayed, because Lihle made me feel alive in a way I hadn’t felt in years.

Until the night everything went to hell.

The night that changed everything.

Lihle had a plan—a big score, she called it. Her ex-boyfriend, Sibusiso, had a stash of money he’d been hiding from his business partners, and she wanted it. “It’s easy,” she said. “He’s too drunk most nights to notice anything missing. We’ll be in and out.”
Against every shred of common sense, I agreed.
We waited until midnight, the streets silent except for the hum of electricity in the air. Breaking into his house was easier than I expected; the lock gave way with barely a fight.

But Sibusiso wasn’t drunk that night.
He caught us in the act, his face a mask of confusion and rage. Lihle didn’t even flinch. “It’s not what you think,” she lied smoothly, stepping toward him with that disarming smile of hers.

He didn’t buy It.

I still hear the sound of the gunshot in my head sometimes—sharp, deafening, final.

But it wasn’t Sibusiso who fired.

It was Lihle.
“Grab the money,” she hissed, shoving the gun into my hands.

“What—what the hell did you just do?” I stammered, staring at the lifeless body slumped against the wall.

“Focus!” she snapped, her voice cutting through my panic like ice. “We don’t have time for this!”

I wanted to run, to leave her there and pretend none of it had happened. But my feet moved before my brain could catch up. I grabbed the bag, and we bolted into the night.

The money should’ve been enough to disappear, to start over somewhere far away. But greed has a way of ruining even the best-laid plans.

Lihle wanted more—always more.

“We can use this to invest,” she said, sprawled across the cheap motel bed where we’d been hiding out for weeks. “Double it. Triple it. Think big, babe.”

But I couldn’t think big. All I could think about was the blood on my hands and the weight of the guilt pressing down on my chest.

And then came the knock on the door.

I thought it was the police at first, but it wasn’t.

It was Mandla, one of Sibusiso’s business partners.

“Where’s the money?” he demanded, his voice low and menacing.

Lihle didn’t hesitate. She pointed at me.

“It’s all him,” she said. “He planned the whole thing.”

I froze, the betrayal hitting me like a punch to the gut. “What the hell are you doing, Lihle?”

She didn’t even look at me. “I’m sorry, babe. But it’s you or me.”

Mandla’s men grabbed me before I could react, dragging me out of the motel room and into the waiting car.

They didn’t kill me right away. No, that would’ve been too easy.

Instead, they wanted answers. They wanted the money. And they didn’t care how much pain they had to inflict to get it.

By the time I finally told them where to find the stash, I was barely conscious. But it didn’t matter.

Because when they opened the bag, all they found were bricks.

Lihle had played us all.

She’d switched the money before the robbery, stashing it somewhere only she knew. She’d set me up as the fall guy, leaving me to take the heat while she disappeared into the night with everything.

Now, sitting in this cell, I can’t help but admire her.

She was right. It was me or her.

And she won.

12/05/2024

“You have never told me the whereabouts of my mother. Each time I ask about her, you change the subject.
“What happened to my m-o-m?
Who is my mother?
Where is my mother???
I want my mother.”
She screamed as the color drained from her face. Kimba abruptly went to her aid and held her arms, as he was mute with horror.
"It's okay Zen. I'm so sorry. It's okay to feel this way…."
Kimba responded with a thick and unsteady voice.
"No-oo…where is my mother? Did she die? Did you kill my mother? I want my mother…"
Zendaya pushed her father away as terror stole her words.
"Where is she? Did she abandon me? Huh?"
Her defiant words masked her fear.
“NO-OOOOO, I’ll tell you everything. Calm down, Zendaya, please,” panic flared in his eyes.
“When? When, da-d-dy? I want to know. Please tell me,” Zendaya stood, hands on her hips, with tears re-emerging on her dotted face.
"I don't know how to say this. I haven't told you this for all these seventeen years because I wanted to protect you".
Kimba muttered as fear clawed up his throat.
“Protect me from what? From the truth?”
She felt like she would throw up.
“I never lied to you, Zen…”
Kimba answered in a shaky voice.
“I have been abused… r***d…”
Zendaya freaked out with a scream.
“What…?”
Kimba’s face turned crimson red. His heart slumped, and his mouth went pear-shaped. He went cold slowly, like someone was pouring cold custard over his head.
“What… when… where… Zendaya?” Kimba’s shaky fingers reached up to rub his dry lips. His fists oozed sweat as he simmered with livid anger. “Who? Who did this?” Kimba seethed with resentment as Zendaya broke down. “Zen, you never told me.”
Anger spiked in his voice.
“I want my mother. Where is she?”.
She looked at her father intently. The bitterness on her face faded to weary sadness. The weight of despair settled upon her like an unyielding boulder; each step felt like an uphill battle against the gravity of her melancholy.
Kimba felt his soul leave his body. Zendaya ran to him and shook him like a maniac.
“Did she die?”.
Fury roared through her mind, now more tenaciously than ever. She let go of a breath she didn't realize she had been holding.
Zendaya lowered her eyes and swallowed hard, choking back a sob, and blinked away the tears that welled in her eyes. She gradually let go of her father and threw herself to the ground. She stared into space as if she had seen a ghost. Her mouth remained numb. She crossed her arms across her legs and heaved a breath.

"I can't tell you."
Kimba broke the silence.
"Why?
Her edge of irritation had returned.
"Don't I deserve to know her?"
She demanded answers as acid roiled in her stomach, threatening to exit her esophagus. She let out a sarcastic chuckle and rolled her eyes in a scathing way.
“You know me, and I’m your father and mother,” Kimba explained. “I want my mama.”

09/05/2024

The Nightmare.

Days blended together, a blur of monotony and listlessness. Each moment seemed devoid of meaning, as if time had lost its purpose in the face of her depression.
There was nothing left of her happiness. Everything was gone. It wasn’t anger that took it. She did not feel anything at all, but her face said otherwise.
She could hardly keep herself together; she was shaking. Sadness, a word that could be expressed in a thousand different ways, but she did not have the energy anymore to choose the appropriate way. Not today, even though it was her birthday. She just let go.
The world's colors dulled as if a veil had been drawn over the vibrant hues of life, leaving her trapped in a monochromatic existence. For her, the world had fallen apart. Her heart was filled with melancholy; her fists clenched in anger.
Trouble had been her only friend; she had lost her only friend - Linda. They had tried dating, but it had ended acrimoniously since her father never approved of their relationship.
She was shattered beyond repair. She had been used and abused. There was no love left in the world for her. There was only one thing she saw now: death.
As she inched her way towards the cliff, her legs shook uncontrollably. She could feel the coldness of the rock beneath her feet as her toes curled around the edge in one last futile attempt at survival.
Her heart was racing like a trapped bird, desperate to escape. Gazing down the sheer drop, she nearly fainted; her entire life flashed before her eyes. She could hear stones breaking free and fiercely tumbling down the hillside, plummeting into the dark abyss of the forbidding black water.
The trees began to rapidly close in around her in a suffocating clench, and the piercing screams from her father did little to ease the pain. The cool breeze felt like needles upon her bare skin, leaving a trail of goosebumps.
The threatening mountains surrounding her grew more sinister with each passing moment; she felt herself fighting for air. The hot summer sun began to blacken while misty clouds loomed overhead.
Trembling with anxiety, she shut her eyes and murmured one last pathetic prayer. Zendaya gathered her last breath, hoping it would last a lifetime, and took a step back…
A heavy fog enveloped her mind, shrouding her thoughts in a gray haze, distorting her perception of the world, and casting a pall over every interaction.
Having seen skydivers maneuvering in free fall, she managed to position herself so that her feet were below her, and as she reached the final fifty feet, she thought,
All I have to do is jump before I make contact, and I will be okay.
Kimba stood helplessly miles away as he watched his daughter ponder taking her own life.

05/11/2023

R160 pre order today,

29/09/2023

Pre order my debut book,coming soon.

10/07/2022

📌Monday At 9 PM UK🇬🇧 time/10PM CAT
We bring you "The School of Love" With
The Handsome Hmaster Harrison Ncube (Umfana omuhle kunabobonke) From our South African Studios. Be a good student tune in on Radio54 APL App or
www.radio54africanpanorama.com
Just press play ▶

19/06/2022

10pm
www.radio54africanpanorama.com

08/06/2022

06/06/2022

📌At 9 PM UK🇬🇧 time/10PM CAT
We bring you "The School of Love" With
The Handsome Hmaster Harrison Ncube (Umfana omuhle kunabobonke)
From our South African Studios.
🥳🥳🥳🎉🎉🎉♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️
http://www.radio54africanpanorama.com