The School of Afrika with Hmaster. (2026)

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.

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