WINNING STORY! - ANNUAL SHORT STORY COMPETITION

 

Khanya Komako placed first in the 2021 KREST annual short story competition. 

Khanya is a motivated young man at the age of 18, currently residing in Pretoria. He has hopes of getting into a degree in Political Sciences, knowing that his voice and writing will enable him to serve the country with dignity. 

Here is Khanya's winning story:

My mother is sickly.

It has been this way for a long time. I cannot tell you when it started and I cannot tell you when it will end but she has been experiencing the worst pains everywhere on her body, including her heart. I go to sleep each night, wondering if I will find her alive the next morning. I wonder what I will do. When the funeral cover pays out, I wonder what tombstone to get her. I wonder what to do with the life cover. I wonder if I will ever pick up the pen ever again and continue writing and imagining, rhyming and reciting. I wonder what I will say at her funeral when on the podium, looking out to the crowd that has come to pay their final respects. I wonder what I will say to the family members that dismissed her illnesses when she was alive. That one, that last one, I wonder that the most. I wonder… will I ever be able to forgive them?

As the oldest sibling, she has had many responsibilities on her broad shoulders. All the younger siblings ask her for money though she is not rich or wealthy. She lies neck-deep in debt, the debt she accumulated raising me through the years, making sure I have food to eat, water to drink and clothes to wear. When people see her walk through the gates of her workplace, they see a woman coated in gold and jewels, a woman made for the blessings that can only be considered heavenly. When she drives my aunt’s car as a favour, no one believes it is not hers, and they enrage themselves with resentment of why she kept such a secret, and they take more from her. I watch them take more, and I try to tell my mother to say no but she has never listened to me. I tell her to refuse all they ask for, to stand at the top of a hill and renounce all of them, but she was raised too well. She cannot turn away a person in need and that’s the problem.

When she went to the hospital, the doctors came in multitudes to understand what was wrong with her. My mother has a problem: she cannot use her legs well. They get paralysed randomly and lock while she is walking. They stop her from going to work as freely as she wishes and spending time with me outside the house. I have never seen a more depressed woman, one that rolls over in her queen-sized bed and looks at the ceiling with tears in her eyes, trickling like the water from the gutter through the downpipe. I have never seen someone that sits and wonders what she has done wrong in the world to deserve such. The medical aid is the lazy policeman, always quick to close the case and go spend their earnings on the tavern down Esselen Street. The policeman cannot be trusted to fulfil earnest justice and pay the public what is owed to them. The bare minimum is enough, therefore, the lazy policeman is the medical aid, always quick to pay the short amount and rob the citizen of what is theirs.

I hate the police.

I hate the medical aid.

I hate all of them that deny that she is sick. The boss at her workplace telling her that her illness is easily solved and that she must come to work. My grandmother that calls it a psychological phenomenon and that her daughter must renounce that she is sick.

“As long as you say you are sick; you will always be sick!”

They all blame it on mindset. I know of the placebo effect; I know God and His holiness, I know religion and its power on the world. I also know medicine and their procedures, how the doctor puts their dysfunctional stethoscope on the heart of a broken woman and tells them that they are fine and sends them to a psychiatrist that tosses pills her way and turns his own direction, going home and calling himself a medical professional in front of his admiring children. The doctors with degrees earned over more than a decade of hard work and dedication that refuse to explain what is wrong, that refuse us to search the Internet, and that undermine our intelligence because they studied for over a decade for a degree. They hate the search engines and they hate that we can educate ourselves through a little thing called YouTube, but they fail to make time to answer my questions about my one and only caregiver. Some sympathise, others call her a cry baby that cannot handle a drop of pain however most … most turn their backs on her and walk their own way, with companions that have legs free of paralysis and a mindset to “fake it ‘til you make it!”

They prefer to walk with them.

Does my mother’s story familiar to you?

Does it remind you of the disease that came to this motherland in order to justify why they were stealing what is ours? Does it remind you of Mr Van Riebeeck and his boat when he stopped on our shores saying he came here in peace? It must remind you of this. It must remind you of the nations that look at Africa and call it a starving nation with worthless darkies that cannot work to save their lives. It must remind you of those whose skin resemble the snowflakes that rather tell you that we have moved on from the times where the white boot pressed the black neck down into the soil but want you to talk like them, walk like them, act like them and speak their language, all while serving them. It must remind you of the people that saw a black man play rock but claim it for themselves, as with blues, jazz, and rap. They want our culture… but they want us to forget it.

I remember sitting with them at a table one evening being asked why I cannot speak Afrikaans, but I have never asked them why they cannot speak Sesotho. I remember them telling me to act like a poor black boy and ask for pity to advance in the world. I remember a special Dr U. J. shouting at the top of his voice, “The black man cannot succeed unless the white man gives them permission!” and I denied its existence until I had to ask for permission myself. I go back home to Vereeniging, a place I no longer know its ancestral name and I see many that are black like me imitating the white people. I hear Tsotsi Taal call people “mense” instead of “batho”. I see my South African home town swept by sheets of snow in the middle of the summer. When the loam soil is supposed to make my herbs, fruits and vegetables grow ever more prominently, I watch snow take away the chance of my eating fresh produce forever. When it melts in the summer, it turns to water and washes away with our soil to other nations by force, taking them from the port of Cameroon to the shores of New York and when our brethren that were taken there for centuries, told to labour for free under the harshest conditions were set free, they looked at us and shook their heads when asked if they wanted to return. They may have been slaves in Monticello… but anything is better than Africa. They’d rather live in a country that built itself on the backs of black slaves than come back and rebuild the foundation destroyed by their slave masters.

They repeat it to themselves every day: “Anything is better than Africa.”

My mother is sickly; and so is Africa.

The doctors deny her disease, just as the white man denies racism.

My family tells my mother her illness is in her mind, just as the white man tells us that racism is in our minds.

The medical aid pays a short amount, just as the colonisers refuse to pay back what is owed to us.

This is the life of a black man. In the food chain of the world, he lies at the bottom. He is a gangster, an absent father and a liar and no one wants to know why.

No one cares for his struggle.

No one cares for Africa’s struggle.

No one cares for my mother’s struggle.

CONGRATULATIONS, KHANYA KOMAKO

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