I AM WOMAN, the definition of family

Prodigal Daughters by Lauretta Ngcobo

by Nonkululeko Manyika

This book embodies the struggles of women exiled from their country of birth, wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters, women who chose the struggle directly or indirectly. Some were entrenched in the struggle and vowed to fight the oppressive regime whilst others simply married into it.

Many women left their children behind, fresh from giving birth with milk laden breasts; a constant reminder of sacrifice. Crossing borders moving further from your birth home to live as a foreigner in new lands bringing promise or hostility. Some women gave birth to daughters who listened to the fondness of home in the back yard or grey city areas that resembled nothing like sunny Azania. The torture and torments of not belonging because in your likeness you stand alone, through your skin tone, your stature, your sense of upheaval and sheer ignorance of what Afrika means. And all in the longing to come home, was denied access, was patience in hoping that one day you would be reconciled with burial grounds from where you loved ones lay without a word of departure from you. Without you to stay by their bedside as their last breath left, no last “I love you’s” to carry them to their resting place. The difficulty of mourning in solitude as children your birthed look at you with no concept of what a grandmother means. These women who risked their lives and witnessed friends die, and witnessed human carcases mangled by the SANDF bombs. And yet the dream persisted, the warm rays of Azanian sunshine glimmered on their skins with promise that one day you would return as you come to realise that you still remain in these cities with grey skies and concrete walls.  This is how hatred was meted out to those that disagreed and requested that no human be above another, that no human be below another, and that we share Azania as equals.

But yet in unison there was still separation as those of Caucasian descent were still treated to privileges. Because white domination required it. But yet women who share the same struggle as their very same men were raped and treated like lesser human beings because their place was not in the struggle.  Domination took on so many forms and Afrikan women though strong and agile, bore the brunt of it, because oppression is imbibed in so many of us that we expect to see the most obvious when it’s so mangled and twisted it forms the very part of our being. And yet women played an integral role in keeping the family unit, that were she laid her suitcase that would be home, that shack would be home, that hut would be home, that structure not fit for habitation would be home, because home was were her husband was and not the mere structure.

The family unit shall persist as long as there are women that give all of themselves.