A WOMAN DENIED
The Early Years
A Biography
of
Raymond Samson Tau
A WOMAN DENIED
The Early Years
A Biography
By Rebone Makgato
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Rebone Makgato
Smashwords
Edition, License Notes
This
ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may
not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to
share this book with another person, please purchase an additional
copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not
purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please
return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for
respecting the hard work of this author.
For Evelyn, a great mother...
Bushie, I still love you, even though you are no longer with us.
In memory of Simon Bushie who passed away on Wednesday 22nd of December 2010....
And
Grandmother Selina who succumbed to old age on the 14th July 2011
01
IN THE MATERNITY ward of Verwood Hospital in Pretoria on November 30th, a new baby was born. The year was 1968. The name of the newborn baby, as officially recorded in the birth chart, was Raymond. For reasons best understood by the parents, the baby was named in honour of the mother’s former employer, and old Englishman who lived on Avondale Street in Sydenham, Johannesburg. The new baby was born to mother Evelyn and father Simon, who was for one reason or other, nicknamed Bushie. During the baby’s birth Evelyn was still staying in Mamelodi with her parents, Reuben and Selina. Although they stayed in Pretoria, they still kept a house in a little quiet village called Ga-Rafiri, in Lebowa. Evelyn and Simon were legally married. Legally meant in a Christian fashion, as well.
Evelyn’s younger sister Gladys, the last born in her family, had claimed the coveted spot of God-mother to the new baby. It was only proper that she was the relative in charge when Evelyn began to experience labour pains. Ambulances during that period were not available to cater for the township, so Aunt Gladys organized transport to take her sister to the hospital. It was for that reason, and perhaps her role as Godmother as well, that etched the events of that memorable day in mind. Thus she was able to preserve information of the events that took place that day and relay it at a later stage to her charge.
The events of that November day were recorded as recollected by loving Aunt Gladys. Naturally, you wouldn’t expect me to even know anything that happened during that important day of my life. I lay no claim, therefore, to recollection of such.
Father at the time of my birth stayed in a hostel in Soweto, from where he commuted to the Johannesburg City center for work everyday. According to the information that had been relayed to me, it was a very hot, humid November. It had just stopped raining. The air-conditioner at Pretoria’s Verwood hospital was not installed in the natives’ maternity wards, and the windows were opened to neutralize the stale, new life air with the humid one coming from outside.
Aunt Gladys said that at my bed, a few people had inquisitively crowded over my tiny form while I lay cradled, protected by my mother’s arms. Their eyes were feasting on a new tender life that had been delivered to add to the family of two sister siblings.
My records showed that I was a healthy 3.10kg new life. All the other statistics entered on my Road To Health chart, issued by the City of Pretoria, indicated that I was defects free, with the exception of one factor that had been deliberately left out. According to Aunt Gladys, the mood in the maternity ward was tense.
Besides mother, father and Aunt Gladys in the ward, there was a nurse who went by the name of Frances. Frances was an experienced mid-wife assistant of about fifty years. The other two people in the ward, Aunt Gladys had said, were her parents – my maternal grandparents – who were in their mid-fifties. Reuben and Selina were strict disciplinarians who hated disorganization and praised order.
Aunt Gladys explained that the air in the ward was tense because father had upset the jovial mood of my grandparents simply by being his usual self: rude and loud. I cannot say with certainty whether he had always been like that or not; nor whether his behavior was spurred by my new arrival which made him nervous. Although he was expecting the new baby, the prospect of a new addition to the family naturally disquieted him.
But father was drunk.
He was drunk – soaked out. The condition that father had welcomed me in this world was, sadly, the condition that I’ve come to know him in since that November day in 1968. Auntie Gladys had once told me that since she knew father, he’d been sober for as many days as she could count on the fingers of her one hand. Auntie Gladys had also let me in on a little secret. This tit-bit had threatened to develop cracks in my parents’ marriage.
My parents had always debated that their next baby would be a boy even long before I was conceived. It had to be a man, as father preferred to refer to it. Which was not with fault – my parents had, already, two young children, both girls. So their desire was understandable. Doris, the elder sister, was ten years old, and Rebecca just turned four. So as soon as mother fell pregnant, father did all he could to root for the baby to be a boy. He pressed his wishes hard that the baby be a man like him. I didn’t know how he did it, but he was adamant, and certain that his third child should be a boy.
While mother saw no justification to fight over the gender of an as yet undeveloped baby, father approached the subject with a hostile difference. He made it his duty – his religion, in fact, to see that the new baby boy would enhance his sole male gender in the house. Father had his way of putting it with stinging, crude language. He’d tell mother that he’d not have his house filled with useless girls. Auntie Gladys recounted to me that father said these girls that mother was delivering would be about as useless as their mother. And of course he wouldn’t expect these women to cook his food while they were on their periods. Such a disgusting thing. It was disrespectful to his person. He was a man.
Father fancied himself a prophet. He prophesied that these girls would fill his house with children of men they wouldn’t marry. They’d neglect their duties, leave their house, their home, and take care of the bastards’ houses. Oh, how he hated women! However, he had a good, lasting solution. What his house needed, father always told mother, was a man. A strong man, like himself, who would take care of things. A strong man who would give his house an image. Whatever it meant.
Well, Auntie Gladys couldn’t say which things the man in father’s house would take care of. She reckoned he meant fixing broken chairs, weeding the garden, painting doors and generally being a nuisance and grumble in a baritone demanding yet another serving from the last of the chicken.
And Auntie Gladys had always told me that father had his way. No one was quite as assertive as father. Whatever he wished for, he’d get it. By hook or punch to the head!
To the matter at hand, Aunt Gladys recounted that as I was lying in my mother’s arms, quiet and godly, father, with that decisive certainty, asked Nurse Frances:
‘Well, it’s a man, isn’t he?’
The thick aromatic silence was broken by the spasmodic wailing of my co-babies in the ward. Their parents were chatting excitedly, contemplating about the peace and joy that the addition in their families would bring. It came to the attention of my godmother at that time that when father asked Nurse Frances that question, it was very difficult – in fact near impossible, for the mid-wife to answer. By all accounts it was a simple question, one that every proud father was entitled to know without even hesitation of an instant. It was a question so innocuous that every nurse would jump to announce the answer after successful delivery. But that day of my birth, the exception was Nurse Frances.
‘It’s… it’s a…’
Nurse Frances was stammering. Sweat streaked down her face as she struggled to find the correct word. Just by the act of the baby’s birth the confident, experienced nurse was reduced to a nervous wreck. Nurse Frances mopped excessive sweat off her white-capped face with the half- sleeve of her blue maternity overall. Aunt Gladys enacted her experiences. She looked from father to mother, and then slowly at me. My auntie told me that she had never in her life seen the gender of a baby wreck the jovial mood of a successful delivery. She’d never seen it confuse the parties involved, ignite tensions and cause strife like mine did. Gender to her was simply gender; it had no hidden clefts. Irrespective of a favorite gender, a baby would always be cause for celebration.
However, in that hot hospital ward, the tension was nearing breaking point. It seemed that in the light of the revelation of my gender, father’s madness could not be contained. Mother then saw that this was the opportunity to clear the medicinal-heavy air.
‘Why don’t you take a peep yourself…’
It was mother’s attempt at relieving the cramped atmosphere in the ward. Father looked at my grandfather slowly, and there was a hint of respect that battled to surface in his drunken nod. His father-in-law kept quiet, as he wisely did sometimes. Perhaps he was fearing that father would explode as he was unpredictable. Father seemed to push heavily through the aromatic dabbed air of the ward. Not that he was reluctant. He must’ve guessed that something was amiss. Aunt Gladys said that he was feeling it. When he reached the bed, he put his hat on the sheets and gazed at mother. Mother, perhaps studiously, perhaps in an exaggerated gesture, removed the warm shawl that covered my tiny body, and put it aside on the bed.
Father’s labored breathing intensified. He stood next to me, saying not his thoughts, his wishes.
Then mother proceeded to remove the small soft woolen napkin that had covered my abdomen. And after she had exposed me, she closed her eyes shut, tensing unfairly the tiny muscles of her eyelids.
I lay there, naked, the hot air of the hospital ward caressing my new body. No one said a thing.
Father was said to move an inch closer to the bed. From where he stood he consumed my fresh, lower tiny body with his red eyes. Close up, he seemed to open his bloodshot eyes wider and wider to inform his curiosity. His eyes went over me, goggled, searched, penetrated my abdomen as he sought to see that which would decide who I was, and in what category of being I fell into. After feasting his eyes on me, Aunt Gladys explained that his turn to stammer like Nurse Frances came. The assembled company watched as sweat built up in tiny unhealthy beads on his puckered forehead as he looked at my nakedness. Father gawked at my nakedness, frozen suddenly in the hot ward, trying to make sense of it all. He was bending over me, perhaps feeling without warning dizzy to the stomach as the shock enveloped him. His hands were resting on the thin mattress. When he spoke, his voice turned out coarse, rattling his dry liquor-abused throat.
‘It’s a… it’s…’ his voice trailed and he stopped without finishing.
His red eyes, which had suddenly become enlarged and scared like a caged mouse’s, darted quickly to mother, and in the same spirit to my grandparents. He felt afraid that they would question what kind of an in-law they had on their hands.
Father’s red eyes came to rest on me again. Not on my face, but on my nakedness. His hot breath spewed forth in drunken confused intensity this time, traveling at break-neck speed, and stroked my cheeks, and my new tender nostrils. Mother, feeling that the poisonous fumes were not welcome to me, nudged father gently away so I could breath easy. Father straightened and took a step or two backwards.
Aunt Gladys explained that what happened next was time for bewildered looks, for explanations, for finger-pointing, for witch-hunting, and for generally feeling guilty. It was time to hunt the real sorcerer. No excuses were welcome. Because my parents had a problem – a monster of a problem on their hands. Father mustered his courage and looked at me again. Sure the baby he was looking at was sound and healthy. But the monster of the problem was this: his baby had a small, neat vagina – which was all fine and lovely for a little new-born baby girl. But what caused all the brouhaha and murderous confusion was that right there, on the urogenital ridge, protruded a tiny job of a penis.
Auntie Gladys related to me that the tiny baby penis sat slumping over to one side, resting idly on its tiny scrotum. The two testes formed a rather crafty impression in their sacks. Everything was clear and unambiguous – it was not a case of a deformed vagina, or a deformed penis. These two organs were not bound together in an abnormal growth of intersex – each one could be clearly distinguished. Each one of them existed on their own.
No one around knew how to explain this… this phenomenon.
The doctor who was in charge of my delivery had left the building – conveniently – leaving the stressing job to Nurse Frances to explain to my parents. Mother, the woman who had successfully delivered me into this world, was the most anxious of all those present. As her sister Aunt Gladys knew her, she had a strong will. She had immediately, simply and quietly accepted that it was by the dictates of nature beyond mere mortal’s control that such double gender happened. However, this was all lost to father. In his mind reigned one thing only: disappointment.
His chances at a boy had been shattered.
‘What… What have you done to my little boy!’ father was said to lament in this fashion to mother.
Mother was by makeup a quiet woman who disliked talking back. Helpfully, Nurse Frances was wise to step in at the right time, before all hell broke loose.
‘Mr Tau…’ she stepped forward, unsure if she could handle the problem professionally. In all her years as a hospital mid-wife, she had never had such a frightening episode through her wards. This was the first, and God help her, the last until she retired.
‘Mr Tau,’ she continued, ‘What we have here is a kind of an unusual deformity… a rare…’
‘I want to talk to a doctor! I want to talk to a doctor about my son!’ father curtly interrupted Nurse Frances. ‘He must tell me what this means!’
Father, I was told, was on the way to his usual histrionics. The attention he received spurred him on. A moment or two later, he’d snap.
‘You’ve got a lovely baby… girl, Mr Tau…’ Nurse Frances continued to attempt to explain. ‘The appearance of the penis on the ridge was probably exacerbated by the excessive amount of suprapubic fat…’
Aunt Gladys said that she and both my parents knew that this was peppering talk, an attempt at window-dressing a deformity. They could see, and they knew that the penis was the real thing. Worse, they knew and were frustrated by the fact that at that condition I could be neither a boy nor a girl. I was caught in mid-air, a thing that defied, in father’s opinion, classification. I was genderless. Father right then believed that as I was a genderless thing, I should also be loveless… unworthy of being loved; I should be incapable of receiving the energetic warmth a parent is supposed to give to a baby.
A nameless thing. To paraphrase father’s thoughts frankly, something that deserved no life.
Nurse Frances, seeing the look in my parents’ eyes, attempted to revert to a more serious, credible explanation.
‘I want to know what this is!’ father kept on repeating this. His internal clock was ticking rapidly.
‘It’s a phenomenon we call masculination of the female,’ Nurse Frances explained in much more sober terms. ‘It’s caused by the XX chromosomes. I am not sure if you would understand the technical terms, but be assured now that the condition can, and shall be completely rectified.’
‘It’s got to be a son… a man!’ father’s cry reverberated across the maternity ward. Then in a frightening about-turn he exclaimed, ‘This is not my baby!’
As he uttered that father gestured with his hands, pushing the imaginary, filthy genderless baby away from his person. While father was concerned with his ruined chances of a boy, mother, battling to keep the hurt, fright and disappointment under the surface, was more concerned about rectifying the situation. She wanted to know what category of gender the baby she was holding would be. Understandably, no mother would want to be kept hanging with a baby that had an indecisive gender.
Mother did not want to be anguished over my gender. A mother, all over the world, wants what falls within the normal, acceptable bracket. She more than anyone else wants to be proud of the gender of her baby. She does not want anything to go wrong, and she constantly dreads that something could inevitably go wrong, for she had agonized for these whole nine months praying to have a healthy baby like every other mother. In the old days when the technology was in its infancy, and barely accessible, a mother had to wait, uncertain, for the duration of the pregnancy before she could know what gender she had carried. Rightly, it'd be the first thing she’d ask the nurse when the baby was presented to her.
Is it a boy, or a girl?
Likewise, friends, neighbors and relatives would be concerned about the gender of the baby. They have to be informed because of two-pronged reason. The first is partly because they had to know what type of gifts, if any, they could buy for the baby. The second is to welcome the baby and relate to it in proper acceptable norms based on cultural and societal upbringing. That was so because in most cultures a baby belongs to the community, and the roles of grown-ups fall under assuming altruistic responsibilities.
‘What am I going to tell everybody? What should I say?’ mother sadly asked, more to herself than to Nurse Frances. And then directly she said,
‘How is this problem rectified, Nurse Frances?’
‘You see, Mrs Tau,’ Nurse Frances replied. ‘One in a million births experience this hermaphroditic condition. There’s a procedure we follow in cases of this nature. You’d have to bring the baby back here for doctors to do a thorough investigation before they can carry on with any treatment by surgical correction.’
‘What do you mean by treatment,’ mother asked in bewilderment, looking Nurse Frances in the eyes. She continued, ‘What would the doctors do to make my baby normal?’
My grandparents still sat at the same spot on the bench that they had occupied since I was brought to the ward. They sat in stony silence, not even moving a muscle, except muttering endless disbelieves. It was a new experience to them.
‘The reason surgical correction is required, Mrs Tau, is the simple fact that you have to know the gender of your baby,’ Nurse Frances was said to explain to mother. ‘You have to accept it and relate to it in the way that particular gender would require. You have to be able to name the baby appropriately, register the birth, and more importantly, raise and clothe it in the best way permissible for its gender.’
Father had retreated to his chair. He sat holding his head in his hands.
‘It should be a man!’ father threw in his wish again. Nurse Frances disregarded him and continued.
‘In your baby’s case, Mrs Tau, surgical correction of external genitalia is imperative, as you see. It is normally performed between the ages of two and three years–’
‘Will we have to wait that long? Why wait?’ mother questioned in disbelief.
‘That’s the normal procedure, Mrs Tau. Before that, in between, you’ll have to make a compromise on the baby’s name. The most important thing during that pre-surgical period is to be careful not to raise the baby as any one of the two genders, but simply as a baby that you love, until things could be attended to…’
This explanation did not go well with father, so he grumbled his dissatisfaction. All this seemed like a sinister plot to deny him of the boy he wanted so much.
Nurse Frances carried on.
‘I advice you to have a private discussion at home as parents of a new-born baby, and decide what gender you most want for the infant. But bear in mind that rectifying the problem and giving you the gender you choose can only be done once the doctors have completed the investigation. It will be only if the doctors are satisfied that the gender you choose for the baby won’t adversely affect it in later life. It must therefore be in the interest of the baby’
At this stage, mother’s caring anguish, pregnant with the desire for an answer, cut in, forcing Nurse Frances to stop.
‘How, Nurse Frances… how would the doctors know that my baby would be best knowledgeable in the specific gender that they might decide to keep?’
‘I understand your concern, Mrs Tau. I am a mother myself,’ Nurse Frances assured her. ‘Let me make it simple by saying that if you want to rear the baby as a girl, the therapy would involve taking blood samples to determine the pattern of chromosomes. Concurrently, further surgery would be carried out by means of a biopsy taken from the gonads to determine the presence of ovaries. If these are satisfactory for a girl, it’d then again depend on the development of the sexual organs themselves. In theory, an organ that displays the weakest developing pattern would be the one removed.’
Father silently prayed that I would not have the ovaries and that my male sexual system could be the stronger of the two. He wished that my female sexuality would fail. Mother sighed. She was tired. Aunt Gladys would later tell me that mother understood the implications of the phenomenon that Nurse Frances explained very well. She was not going to go on wrangling about the gender of a newborn baby. It was only love that she wanted to give the baby. Though painful, she accepted what happened, the force of nature, unpalatable as it was. Therefore she was prepared to raise me the best way a mother raised a baby, with endless love and sober care, irrespective of gender.
Adversely, father was the dissenting voice. He was most adamant that I should be a boy. He put his wish across that whatever the doctors did, they must make sure that they left me a boy. He wanted his MAN. No one should take his man away from him!
The following morning mother was prepared to go home to Mamelodi. Father had to return to work, so he had not come to pick us up, as did my grandparents. However, Aunt Gladys was there, with all her rounded warmth to help me and mother get home safely. When we left the hospital, no doctor in charge, nor any pediatrician, had taken interest in our case. Other nurses who were concerned about me, advised mother not to get emotionally upset and let my problem drive her to despair every time she saw me naked. It was one of those things: hey, they happen, you know. Additionally, mother was given solid instruction to bring me back to the hospital – besides my regular clinic check-up and immunizations – once I reached two years so that the investigations could commence.
Well, one would have hoped that in my second day of life all would be well. But I could not choose what to be, and certainly to have two opposing sexual organs. Confusion remained, and the disappointment and endless blaming continued for the best part of my first few months.
And so it was that the great mission of hiding the truth about me, about my gender, began. In all instances, from the time we left Verwood Hospital, my gender became, by default, my father’s make-believe, wishful gender. Back at home, in the midst of the community, a new mother is unavoidably answerable to the whole sphere of normal existence. Naturally, neighbours, relatives, and my father’s workplace all needed to know what gender my parents had. So to sort himself out of embarrassment and sheer humiliation, and perhaps to spite us all at home, father stuck to his original plan. It was the wish that he had for a very long time. He had always wanted his next child to be a boy – so I became one. I was, obviously, not aware of father’s resilient attitude in those few weeks of my life, but Aunt Gladys told me that my father was stubborn to the bone and hard to please. He was not the one to compromise.
To show that he was adamant about me being a boy, father, against the advice of Nurse Frances, and to logic as well, went on to register my birth. He did that regardless of mother’s hurting pleas and all the strong advice pending conclusive decision on my gender. What’s worse was that he registered me as a boy! His reason, which of course did not wash, was that he did not want to be fined the fifty rand for ignoring the mandatory fourteen day new birth registration as stipulated in the Birth, Marriages and Deaths Act 81 of 1963. This argument, and the penalty, could not hold much water as the relevant authorities could simply be informed by the doctor’s letter to that effect.
But father did register me as his man.
Mother was all powerless to do anything about it as she lay nursing me and recovering. Had she had the chance, I wonder if she could have stood up against father. Thus from the first few weeks of my life, I had the giant yoke of the 1968 male birth certificate burdening and curtsying my innocent young life. It was the beginning of a journey into this world, and a road less wished that I would travel with father. In a way he had predetermined and set my destiny.
Mother was impotent because father was not the kind of person to mess around with. To father, her concerns and suggestions were worth less than the breath she spoke them with. And mother knew very well that you could not do anything where father had a way.
All father wanted was his promised boy.
02
BACK IN MAMELODI, life had not been rosy for my mother. There were always tensions flaring up due to my existence. I was like an invited, disliked visitor. My parents squabbled endlessly about me. It was as if my existence was not meant to be. I became, in a way, a thing that descended upon my family and wiped the peace that they enjoyed before I came. It was because of me, a bouncy, healthy baby, that my parents always were at odds as to what type of clothing they should buy – boys’ or girls’.
Although Nurse Frances had advised my parents to raise me as neither a boy nor a girl, but as a baby, this edict was eroded by father’s one sided, selfish view in registering me as a boy. Mother was always cross about that, and could not bring herself to use the name, which sadly was officially now on my records, that father gave me. Raymond. What bull! I deserved no name at that stage. Yet father had done that on purpose, and as a result, both my parents were constantly fighting and pointing fingers at each other.
Those tensions were fuelled by father’s insistence that I should, first and foremost, and ultimately as well, be a boy. It didn’t matter to him that my boyhood, or penis, could have serious defects that could cause it to be removed. Or still that there could be no production of testosterone to facilitate my smooth passage into the world of men. Mother, for her part, was more compassionate and less insistent on the gender issue. She tackled this simply as a mother, with love.
This whole problem of enduring father’s dominant behavior took a great toll on mother. To her credit, she remained strong. In reality she should’ve been the one shrieking nonstop, feeling done wrong by the elements of nature. Mother remained intrepid, especially in the face of inquisitive neighbours, and other people who wanted to be informed of my gender and bring me appropriate gifts. These neighbours were relentless in their quest. Because they saw and treated one woman’s baby as the gift to all in the community. You cannot hide a baby in the community and succeed.
And so my existence depended on a closed cocoon where everything was fairy-like and dark. Information about me, to neighbours and people my parents interacted with, was spared accordingly. It was only due to my father’s attitude and sure-fire way about a boy that most people perceived that I was a boy. So they conveyed such understanding and assumptions in their daily conversations, and father liked it. Also, they conveyed the understanding typically as well by the kind of gifts they brought me.
Father honored these people very much. Among the gifts that these people bought there were no dolls and no cute and little pink teddies for me. All the toys and clothes my parents bought me were kept dull and manly. Either in his quest to address his childhood shortcomings, or his later inadequacies, father bought me blue and black T-shirts emblazoned with such macho characters as Pac-man and Superman. As it should be expected, at my age I was oblivious of all this – they didn’t mean a thing to me. All this served primarily to satisfy father’s wish for a boy. It was rather insensitive of him to behave in that manner. Yet father did all that regardless of my bi-gender condition.
Father’s selfishness and cruelty saw him not give a toss that I was also a little baby girl who also needed to be cared for, pampered, and spoilt. I was also a little baby girl who needed to be tingled and talked to in the only colluding way a parent talks to a baby girl. Father, whenever he was around, denied mother the opportunity, indeed the right, to get lost in her inner, younger girl and talk to me in those little beautiful tones that only a little baby girl responds to. Father, in a way, threatened to sever that girlish link between me and mother – that feminine interaction that mothers are so proud of when they are rearing their baby girls.
Mother, poor Evelyn. Mother was a resourceful woman. She tried, oh, how she tried to compensate where father’s behaviour found him lacking. She would always find a little time to herself and me alone. When father had been away to work, or in the evenings when he was hanging around with his friends, it'd be our moment. She'd prove to herself, and to me as well, that no, contrary to all that, I was a girl. And that no matter what people said – no matter what father did or said, he shall never break up that girlish spirit in me.
While father was busy conditioning me to feel, relate, interact and think that I was a boy, he went even a step further and educated mother on ways of effectively raising me. He was so determined. The educational sessions that father delivered sometimes turned nasty as he deemed it to his advantage to implement them with necessary force whenever he was drunk. As these ugly sessions went on, mother would sometimes, stealthy, listen to her inner voice that told her she had a girl in her arms, and in a warm, tear-inducing moment of compassion, she’d loosen out, especially when father was not home, and talk to me girl-to-girl. Woman to woman. During those important, precious sacred times, mother would teach me little stuff that no man would ever teach a little girl.
It was such stuff such as giggling in that kind of lazy, come-on voice, the movement of the eyes, the countenance and composure of the face when talking and laughing, and the way a girl’ eyes tell unknown secrets when engaged in a girlish conversation. As happened, mother would be carried away with the metamorphosis to her younger years, acknowledging as frugally as she could that her baby was really a little girl.
The ritual turned out into a secret belief.
There were times when this fantastic, ritual escapism was interrupted in the most insensitive and unexpected terms. Oftentimes father would barge in at home unexpectedly, and find mother absorbed deep in the ritual of making me a girl, and a fight would ensue. Fights at home always erupted because father hated girls, and any woman for that matter. Father was doing all he could to mold his son into a man, and he wouldn’t have this woman corrupt his man into something that he so much despised. It was during times like these that mother would, perhaps momentarily, give up the dream of having a little girl. The experience destroyed her deep inside, eroding the very fibre of her womanhood.
One Saturday morning Aunt Gladys had passed by at home, as she related to me, while father was still at work. She did not want to cross paths with my father, so she timed her visit carefully when father was at work. She and father were not on such good terms because of father’s contempt and disregard for other people, especially when he was drunk. Aunt Gladys had brought me presents, which were a few clothes. The garments were pink and yellow shirts, dresses and baby-grows. Throughout all my life, Aunt Gladys had been the first responsible person to make me come into contact with girlish toys. That day she had also brought me a doll. It was, as she told me, a cute, anorexic Caucasian beauty with long hair and chiseled cheekbones. When the doll was introduced to me, I reportedly reacted with mirth and awe, and stroked it, not letting it out of sight. I was sixteen months at the time. Aunt Gladys told me that when I was fitted with my new clothes, I was so excited and fascinated by the bright colours. It was the first time I had seen such lovely colours on my body, and I kept tugging at the dresses and shirts as they fitted me. I was perhaps wondering why they had not attired me in that fashion before. Mother would later tell me that I’d cry when she removed the bright-coloured yellow, pink and red dress from my body.
The fascination with bright colours was not only limited to clothes, however. Aunt Gladys had said that I’d stand by the bed, using it to balance my weight, as I examined the items scattered on it. From the items of various colours on the bed, I’d ignore the duller colours and concentrate instead on those marvelous, bright objects. However, as a full-grown, I doubted whether, in my state then the obsession with bright pigments had any meaning. I had come to wonder whether any baby my age, irrespective of gender, wouldn’t have been fixated by bright colours. Perhaps I was not the exception. In later life my observation of other babies' reactions where different colours were introduced proved the same. Where no older person's involvement was registered, all babies liked the same colours irrespective of gender. It was only later, after conditioning, that certain colours were socially associated with certain genders.
To my understanding, the only difference was that in my case what happened was a grave depravity of everything feminine. That depravity was to have a damaging effect on my make-up later in life. As for mother, she was neglected and left alone to deal with her demons of taking care of a baby like me. My parents, mother particularly, did all she could to play the new addition into the family down. Of all her relatives, at least there was her sister Gladys, who had a measure of understanding and love. But Aunt Gladys was also like the rest of the people in mother’s circle: she also feared father. For that reason, on that Saturday afternoon, she had as well timed her exit from home before he came back from work
As usual, whenever he arrived home father would want to know how his boy had been doing when he was gone. After satisfying himself that his man was doing fine, they’d move on to less important matters. That day mother told him of Aunt Gladys’ kindness, and of her dropping by for a cup of tea. She told him about the clothes Aunt Gladys had bought me. She was always grateful to her sister. Without her, without her strength and support, since she was pregnant, she wouldn’t know what to do. She was a darling. Mother took out the new clothes Aunt Gladys had bought for me, and showed them to father.
It was unfair, perhaps, and asking too much of father.
Father became instantly enraged. This was going too far! He could not allow this to happen to his boy! And he had to put a stop to it. So he shouted to mother,
‘What are you doing, woman! You are trying to make this boy a girl?’
Mother knew that when father was enraged like that, her best defense was to shut up. Daringly, for once during that painful turmoil, she did not.
‘We haven’t decided yet about the gender of the baby. Remember what the hospital said…’
‘To hell with the stinking hospital! This baby will remain a boy! It will be whatever I say!’ father fired back at mother, approaching her. Mother attempted another line, softening a little.
‘But, darling – shouldn’t we at least have the baby satisfy her other side? We can’t deprive her. Don’t let’s make her suffer, please.’
Both father and mother had the nouns they used to address me. To father I was a he, and him, and mother always called me she and her. Father disliked it. So he grabbed mother by the lapels of her dress, pulling her close to him.
‘Her! I see! You’ve made up your mind to keep him as a girl! Not in my house, woman! Not when I’m alive!’
Father, the way he was so fuming, could’ve hit mother any moment.
‘There has to be a compromise – from the both of us,’ mother said timidly.
‘I’ll tell you what a compromise is! You leave my boy alone, you hear me? We are going to raise him the way I want.’
As father loosened his grip on mother’s dress, he added,
‘Don’t make me come hard on you, woman! I want for us a little boy!’
Mother, in that kind of situation, knew that it was wise for her to submit to father’s mad demand. She sat back, not shedding her anguished tears, but bottling a stream of blind questions she wanted to ask father. Why was he doing that to her, and me? What was he going to tell me when I grew up? And what if the doctors, from tests they’d run, decided to keep me as a girl? Was he going to kill me, then? Mother fought hard to be strong, but in that moving scene a sob escaped her.
‘From now on there’d be no putrid girls’ clothes on my boy! Nobody shall put these foolish clothes on him! I want him to be a man. These clothes would make him stupid!’
Mother sank back into her frustration and gave up. No one held a protest contest with father. He just loved shouting and being aggressive. He could stand and shout all week if it called for it. Father was so serious about hating a little girl and being extremely rude that he’d destroy mother. So mother watched, helpless, as father collected the new clothes Aunt Gladys had bought for me, and in his rage and hate tear them to shreds with is hands. One by one, in an unhurried kind of way, in front of mother’s very eyes. To drive the point home.
Mother sat there, subdued, amazingly stifling sobs that burnt her throat, clutching me in her arms, wondering in her pained heart that her husband, who had sired the little baby, the baby which was the source of tension, could actually hate it so much. She wondered why he’d hate it so much as to deny it emotional care, and development on its other gender. Unbeknown to Aunt Gladys, these, and other incidents to follow, were to be the beginning of mother’s constant disappointment and heartbreak.
Starkly to father, it was not a great deal. What was a little calamity when his boy was corrupted like this?
As time went on, father became dead serious in his adamant desire to mold me into a boy. He took his time to earnestly re-educate my two sisters and fill them with propaganda about my gender. Re-education, like charity, started at home. My sisters Doris and Rebecca, who were nicknamed Dodo and Rabeka, were re-engineered to believe that I was a boy. All the notions whatever that they had held, perhaps picked up from scraps of conversations or squabbles pertaining to my female gender, were duly dispelled. Father was willing to dispel them with force and cane if necessary. To show that he was intense, even made it a habit, or a rule rather, that my sisters were not allowed near me when I was naked. They were not to be present when mother bathed me.
It was obvious, even at that state that my urinary functions would confuse those who knew me. I used my vagina to urinate, so father banned this knowledge from my siblings. They were forced to believe that I was a boy and such excretionary functions were all manly. They were made, especially for the eleven year old Doris, to forget that mother had painfully, secretly whispered sweet baby talk in my ear when no on was looking. They were made to forget that mother often stole time and hope only for the benefit of recognizing me as a girl.
Father had this all planned out. He knew that kids would always be kids. Kids would always be frank, if indoctrinated. And so Dodo and Rabeka would be employed to fight the battle on behalf of father. They were the ones who’d be excited about their little baby brother out in the playgrounds and at school. That way, father would be content, knowing that everybody would know that I was a boy. Father would sit back, winning the battle with nature, and be content living a lie.
And father had always wanted to preserve his lie so badly that he constantly planned ahead. This was marked by one incident that took place when I was twenty months old. And that incident was to decisively shape my future as we know it today.
Because father was working in Johannesburg in Bramley, to be precise, in a packaging company, he had to commute to Johannesburg from Pretoria everyday. It was a long process, and a tiring one. He was boarding a train at five in the morning and returning on the evening six o’clock one. As a result father always came home around nine in the evening. But now there was a plan in waiting for that inconvenience – and waiting since I was born. In his quest to change that, father came up with a novel idea. With his extensive connections, he looked for a house in Soweto, so he could be close to work.
It was a grand plan.
Well, this was understandable, moving closer to work. It didn’t take him long to find a house. The house was a four-roomed council matchbox in Pimville Zone 4. With the standard two bedrooms, a kitchen and a lounge, the council house was about adequate for my parents and the two girls. So during September of 1971, a truck came and removed our belongings from Mamelodi to Soweto. Pimville became my home far away from my first home, the place where I spent the rest of my abecedarian childhood years.
And looking at it from this point of view, father’s idea worked.
It worked because father had taken us from Mamelodi, where all our close relatives resided, and put us in no man’s land. In this new land with its eerie hotpot of cultures, we had to learn to know our new neighbours. We had to learn the lie of the land, the set-up of this famous township. We had to learn the roads to the shops and the schools, and everybody who mattered. In this new place father’s propaganda and indoctrination continued with flourish. Wherever we went, and when the visitors came over, father was quick to jump to the opportunity of introducing me as his boy. I heard that expression so many times that “My Boy” was etched in permanent stencil on my brain. It had so much effect on me that I also came to know, and believe that I was a boy. Well, for a toddler, no one questioned that I was a little girl. Mother was permanently silenced and forbidden to raise the issue of my other gender, and she knew that dire consequences would result if she attempted to publicly promote my female gender.
In that new place, none of our neighbours could hear the loud anguish shut down in my mother’s mind that I should also be liberated to enjoy a similar gender as her. The best that happened to her silent wishes was that they were cooped up, locked in her own memory that tortured her, and her only. Surely the taunts would, come nightfall, make sure that a decent sleep escaped her.
In Soweto, the cultural melting pot encapsulating the whole of South Africa, we had many different neighbours and acquaintances who spoke every language imaginable in the country at the time. We found ourselves copying these people and wanting to belong. So as residents it was only natural that the influence, or rather the need to belong, rubbed off on us. We all jumped into the bandwagon of jumbled phonetic expressions, and caught on learning and speaking several other languages. Originally we spoke Sotho at home, but before I was eight years old I could communicate fluently in Zulu, Xhosa and Tswana. This wide array of languages reflected life in South Africa’s largest township, and it was part of what made Soweto tick.
The situation was made even more memorable by popular hit records by pioneering black groups that were played in native dance and beer halls. Father had a Blaukumpt gramophone with an amplifier that he blasted at full volume. He went to Kohinoor in town and Steve’s on Jerusalem Street in Marabastad, looking for jazzy jams. During weekends he’d line up his records and play them until sunset, reminiscing about Kofifi. Thus songs from artists such as The Dark City Sisters, The Manhattan Brothers, Lemmy ‘Special’ Mabaso, Havana Swingsters, Orlando 7, Jazz Dazzlers, Nancy Jacobs & Her Sister and Sophie Thapedi formed a backdrop of my early urban upbringing. The influence of this township jazz, kwela, swing, soul and marabi were woven into the prevailing fabric of society, and at some stage were employed to gauge the importance or seriousness of the sophistication of township residents. They were what could presently be described as the In Thing’.
As it turned out, we did not have a lot of our relatives from Mamelodi visit us at Pimville. It was all because of father’s attitude. He made it difficult for everyone. By then word had already reached a few of mother’s friends that her toddler was a freak. She didn’t know how this scandal broke out, but it always broke her heart when they referred to her toddler in such an insensitive way. More and more people began to be aware of my problem, but father still prevented mother from seeking treatment for me. Occasionally, a woman claiming to know a friend of mother’s would drift by, clearly curious, only wanting to have a look at this child who was proclaimed a freak with two private parts. The only thing such people wanted was to satisfy their curiosity and see if indeed such creature was alive and if it could be normal.
That became a huge problem indeed for mother for the following reasoning. Since mother was not working father started a home based business selling clothes to supplement his income. He sold blazers, trousers, shirts and dresses to his clients on cash and credit. He had business savvy. Mother withstood the pressure of various people coming to our home for their purchases and payments. As a toddler, these clients always queried what gender I was, and mother had to constantly be deliberately misleading.
These unwelcome intrusions mother battled to sweep aside.
But it was very late, in all those months, when mother realized fathers’ true intentions of relocating to Pimville. Father had carefully thought this out. The main reason was to disrupt the impending investigation into my hermaphroditic condition. As my parents had been informed, I was supposed to return to the hospital to see the specialists before I turned two years. Father removed us from Mamelodi when I was twenty months old. The reason he told mother was that he wanted to be close to work. But it was apparent now that the real reason behind the move was to make it very difficult for mother to honor the investigation into my gender.
The greatest fear for father was that the doctors might discover that severe defects – in my male gender – say for instance abnormal defects in my genitalia, where my prostate glands could be blocked. There could also be a serious case where my testes could not function and therefore could not produce appropriate testosterone, the very hormone that would turn me into a real man. Father knew, as Nurse Frances had explained, that in an instance where my ovaries could be located and found healthy, and that my vagina was more functional at the expense of my defective male reproduction system, then doctors would have to surgically remove my penis and scrotum.
And it was where father’s bitter nightmare lay.
Father couldn’t bear to think that if that turned out to be the case, he’d lose a man of the house he had envisaged. He’d lose a lion that he had attempted to cast out of my life, which meant that I'd be a normal girl. And following that father would be forced to re-register me as female – something he didn’t foresee happening – and give me a proper name, raise me up as a beautiful, proud girl and generally accept defeat and his bad luck. But no! Father made sure that it did not turn out that way. There would be no investigation, and there’d be no treatment. So frustrating the process was the answer.
Father made sure, under those hostile conditions, which it’d be very difficult for mother to begin afresh by exposing me and fighting the wildly misanthropic stigma of a hermaphroditic condition. It’d be difficult for mother to seek advice and medical facilities where she could get proper medical opinion and get me ready for treatment. In Soweto, the only choice of place to achieve all those was Baragwanath Hospital. But with the taboo and wizardry-like popularity of bi-gendered people, father silently boldly bet mother wouldn’t dare expose me, or even herself. Starting anew with the process was going to be daunting, and father capitalized on it.
I do not now if mother fought this with the resilience she showed in the beginning back in Mamelodi. Auntie Gladys would later assure me that she did, but failed. Mother talked to her a lot about solving this problem, but every time she devised a plan to seek help, father would intimidate her into dropping it. What I did not know at my age was what drove father to be so inconsiderate, so cold, destructive and self-centered.
What was he afraid of? What made him so insecure?
It was not possible, as it is now, to delve deep into father’s mind and find out.
03
FOR ALL FATHER’S intentions, his behavior served his purposes very well. It was well orchestrated. I remained stuck up in the present and an uncertain future – an innocent young child – in the condition I was in without treatment. I did not abide by any rules of gender classification, so I remained a thing. Thanks to father. He showed very clearly that love would be hard to come by between him and me. He was so determined that there was no turning back. Forward he was going, and he was prepared to bulldoze through all the norms and pull alone if anyone didn’t share his vision.
A point of no return in my young life was reached soon when father enrolled me at Pimville Primary for my Sub-Standard A. The year was 1975, and it would be the very first time I was exposed fully to the outside world. It was the first time I was left to my own vices, to interact with other children from various backgrounds, without being jealously guarded by father.
Yes, father had dragged me along, brandishing my male birth certificate, to school on the open registration day. Mother accompanied us, but she was under strict instructions not to say anything foolish about me. Even if she liked to say anything, she couldn’t. That was father’s business, a personal undertaking that he had to see through.
School environment, as it’d be expected with many other recruits, was altogether an intimidating experience to me. I had not before seen so many boys and girls dressed alike and concentrated in one place. It instantly became scary and unsettling. I had never been exposed to communal gatherings before. My parents had all along guarded me closely to ensure that I did not expose myself to other kids when we played. At home I had solid instructions not to relieve myself in the playing grounds or take my clothes off, no matter the situation. I followed those edicts, even though I believed that all children were like me, with two different private parts hidden in the trousers and under dresses.
My parents had never enrolled me in a crèche to acclimatize me and soften the big blows when they came. So being in the company of so many boys and girls frightened me. This, though, was by design rather than default. I had been protected, shielded away from the real world. I was hidden in the closed confines of my own home, but now, suddenly, without warning, I had to be thrust in the open, my life laid bare for all to see, to page through. To compensate for this discomfiting inconvenience, for this fear, I became defensively shy. I would not look at anyone directly. I would cast my eyes down when I talked to someone, as if the taxing yoke of sin troubled my head.
School environment is a structured place where everything is run by a set of rules and regulations. So registering me as a boy at school had its own obligations that I had to follow to the letter. Now that I was classified, no matter wrongly, or unfairly, father drummed the rule, and the belief in my head that I was a young boy in Sub A. He instructed me to handle myself like a man. He saw it necessary to issue, even for my age, a plethora of manly etiquette that would serve to separate me from the girls. What I could not understand at that time, and which irked my young soul, was how could I be able to separate myself – a part of me – from the whole? How could I look down on a part of me and hate it so bad? I was also a little girl, I knew it, and a beautiful one. So how could I satisfy father and live half a lie, while on the other hand I continued to obliterate the other half of me that father despised?
Was it possible? Was it possible to obliterate from my body that which father hated? As a kid, father instructed me to use only boys’ toilets at school. He ordered me to follow other boys around, and copy whatever they were doing. I was never ever to come near girls’ toilets. Father told me that if I were to be caught in the girls’ toilets, the teachers would beat me up. After that the police would come and take me away. The police would take me to a place where they’d cut off my penis with a sharp knife.
Children, everyone knows, tend to believe at face value what a father tells them. Whether they become inquisitive or rebellious, they’d be forced to believe that which a father, with his immense authority, instills in their tender minds. It is part of shaping their belief system, their fundamental capacity to judge and to reason, and building their discretionary views on the outlook of the world stage wherein they find themselves projected onto. Hell, I could see that I was different. That needed no questioning. But I yearned to play and associate with other girls. I had this painful, irresistible urge to be viewed as a girl. I wanted to emulate other girls in the way they dressed and talked, and it was always painful when I could not. God knew I was forbidden. Forbidden to be myself.