At age 13 Malingose looked like she was 16, hips a little wider than her peers she was a replica of her late mother. Innocent and un aware she was presenting the telltale signs of puberty, her menstruation was just around the corner, the only female in the family of 4 boys she had taken the demeanor of boyish traits in her personality and this worried her widower father a lot.
Malingose had an intelligence that was striking, a kin interest in sciences and math. Her hips where wide yes but her a zeal to learn was wider, she made her father proud.
A month before her grade 7 exams ,Malingose was playing chidunune with the boys a hand ball made of plastics bound together by heat ,the gogo of the neighborhood gogo Banda called her to come inside her house ,she asked Malingose what she knew about a girl be coming of age,Malingose had very little knowledge for she seldom had played girls , and without a mother in her life ,she had no one to learn from ,her father sought the wisdom of the gogo to help Malingose prepare herself in to the lady she was becoming.
Gogo Banda labored to explain what it meant when a girl becomes of age, in their sessions she went further and taught her some practices on how to become a good wife when and if she got married. One day gogo called the other girls she had been mentoring and asked all 4 of them to undress and show Malingose what their labia minora ( malepe) looked like, all the girls had their labia scrapped off and their faces beamed with pride, Malingose eager to impress and fit in her newly found group ,she set out to her journey of scrapping off her labia minora. With a special concoction made out of herbs ,sand ashes, cow dung and Vaseline meant to aid in the removal of her labia she religiously rubbed the concoction every night on her malepe before going to bed ,soon her malepe began to swell, determined to impress gogo she kept applying the concoction each night, the more she did the more painful it was ,she was in so much pain that walking became a chore and soon she began to miss classes, because of the burning sensation and pain when urinating she started going for hours without urinating as a result on the first day of her exams she was diagnosed with severe allergies on her genitals and a nasty urinary tract infection. Malingose spent the whole exam period admitted in hospital, she was devastated and her father blamed himself.