It was the second time someone was screaming out on our door late in the night. The first time, it happened with this young girl from our neighborhood, Fanta, who run away from her uncle’s home the day before he was to send her back to the village.
– “They will kill me. They will kill me, teacher Tanga!”, she kept shouting in tears.
With my eyes half open, it took me a moment to understand what was going on. My day had been very busy at the university and I was exhausted. Fanta was a sweet girl, very quiet perhaps, but a real beauty for only eleven years. I was wondering what she could have done to see her life threatened. When my mom took her inside the house and poured her some water, she began telling how she learned that she was to be returned to her parents at Mootenga. Against all my father’s attempts to soothe her with the idea that she was just going to spend her holidays with her mom and grandparents, she said her day has arrived, and was begging him to save her.
It did not take long before my mother raised her eyes on my father, and they anxiously looked at each over. Mother knew this was going to be burdensome again. I also understood how tired she was of throwing away the carrions of cocks with black feathers left in the night on our doorstep or the old pots with strange objects inside. My mother was the gentlest woman I have ever known, a lady held in deep respect by all the women of the neighborhood. All this came to an end, at least figuratively, when my father first made known his views on TV about how girls were treated traditionally. I used to look across the hedge and see how she was teased by others in the street, and several times, I overheard them speaking of her as the cursed man’s wife. I did not know what to think about it, nor did I understand why my father publicly claimed his views, while others kept theirs. Nobody speaks of that. He never spoke of that at home. He always remained in the kind of silence revealing a long history behind, and I was sure it was one of suffering. But he never told me when, why or how.