To continue our celebrations of International Women’s Day and the important conversations that continue throughout March, we are delighted to welcome a guest post from author Helen Percy.
Content warning: This post contains references to child sexual abuse and sexual violence, including descriptions that some readers may find distressing.
To protect the identities of those involved, all names have been changed or omitted.
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Crammed inside this shack, the parents, grandmother, aunties, uncles and the village chief and elders wait to hear me 'counsel' the girl. Outside, the African sun glares down on the corrugated roofing sheets and, within, we are all cooking.
A week ago, a 14-year-old boy and his even younger brother lured Sechaba around the back of the shack. They promised to give her a cheap biro, its inner tube still containing a little ink. They scribbled on a piece of discarded cardboard caught blowing across the yard. See? She would be able to draw a picture with it. Some stick-people. A donkey. A camel-thorn tree. But first she must let them lift her ragged dress, pull down her panties and stab at her with their little pricks.
Sechaba is five. She has no comprehension of the value of a pen, nor of the virginity of which she has been robbed. She knows only that there was sudden searing pain. A terrible soreness still lingers. She cannot sit. Her dark face seems old, crumpled and stricken. The grandmother pushes her over to stand in front of me.
They are expectant. Of what, I am unsure. That I should admonish the child? That I should advise her that a few years hence she will be sold to a man – that the 'lobola', the bride –price due to her uncles, will be less because of what she 'allowed' the boys to do to her? Do they think I shall scold her for accepting a pen, in exchange for something that would have increased her worth by two whole cows? I do not know. I am no expert in this culture and they are horrified by what has happened.
I take her small hands in mine and say, 'O mntle tata mona.'
'You are very beautiful. You are so precious, my little one.'
It’s two decades since I returned to Scotland from the Kalahari but I have never forgotten Sechaba. Lambing season is almost here again and, after a full day in the fields I shall kneel late into the evening, in a tin-roofed shed, tending to young and vulnerable creatures. And I shall think of her.
Helen Percy was a Quaker Peace and Social Witness volunteer in the Northern Cape, South Africa. She worked with child survivors of rape and sexual abuse. This is a true story.
