Free Untitled by Kgebetli Moele Page A

facilities that are here have been vandalised.
    The Teyageneng Youth Club is no more. I wished so much to be part of it when Chris was still running it and generating funds for it, everybody did, but it also closed, just like everything else.
    There is nothing here any more that anyone from Teyageneng can be proud of. Why? Because the pillars of this community are the likes of Shatale and nothing can grow while they are in charge.
    Shatale once told Lebo:
    â€œWhen you are living, you have to grow. To live is to grow. When you are living you have to outgrow things. I want things, and I have them, then I outgrow them.”
    That is what happened. Shatale wanted Lebo, had her, then outgrew her in a period of less than three months. Lebo was again boyfriendless and the next in the queue came in to claim her.
    â€œGirl, a beautiful girl as beautiful as I am should enjoy all the men she can before her beauty is no more and she gets no attention from any man,” she said, proudly defending her wild ways, like a prisoner serving a life sentence.
    After Shatale had had his way with Lebo, we were kind of back together. Though my bodyguards didn’t like it much, Lebo is my classmate and sits right next to me every day. It was then that I heard all her tales of Mr LS’s tenderness and love, manipulation and sex. And I thought that if I were a good writer I would write about all of this.
    Legally, Lebo is a rape case. She was fifteen. Whether she was enjoying it, whether she was in love, she is still legally a rape case by virtue of the fact that she was under sixteen when all of this happened. Tumelo, Mathata, Tshepo and Shatale – he is the worst of all as he knew that she was underage – are all criminals.

Little Bonolo
    The worst thing in this community is that most of our male teachers are the ones teaching us, the Lebos of the community, sexual education. They do it on a one-on-one tutorial basis. One can understand a sugar daddy – I am not saying that sugar daddies are okay, but one can understand them. One can say that they are social cripples, but a teacher, a senior teacher and, worst of all, a principal ...
    I told myself long ago that none of them would ever “tutor” me. They have tried and tried but I always say no. They have their schemes, their tricks and their traps, but I know them all. My fear now is that they will rape me. After which there will be nothing I can do. Ask Little Bonolo, she knows only too well. At the age of eleven the community ridiculed and blamed her, she became a social outcast because her class teacher, a senior teacher at that, a husband and father of six, Letshele, raped Little Bonolo.
    The community said that “she wanted it”, but how can an eleven-year-old girl want to be raped? The community said that Little Bonolo was trying to extort money from Letshele, but how can an eleven-year-old girl think of extorting money from her class teacher? The community said that Little Bonolo was Letshele’s mistress and she ran to the police because he didn’t want to give her money any more. But how can an eleven-year-old girl be someone’s mistress?
    I know that most people in our country see it only on television or read about it in the newspapers but here in my community, I, we, live with these things every day. Here we do not have POWA or any other organisation for the protection of children and women’s rights. We live side by side with the crimes.
    Little Bonolo laid charges and the law took its first step: the accused was arrested. He didn’t deny the charges but defended himself by saying that they were lovers. The police did their work; they didn’t have any doubts at all that Little Bonolo was telling them the truth.
    At this point the community should have given its full support to Little Bonolo, but instead they decided that she was a criminal. They judged, found her guilty and began gossiping and pointing their fingers at