I grew up in the Cape Flats, a place where skin was a map of worth, and mine was written in the darkest ink. My hair, thick, untamed, spiraled toward the heavens—was branded as a curse, the emblem of poverty. From the beginning, my parents whispered warnings: “You will not look like the rest in your class.” They tried to prepare me for the jeers, for the loneliness. But nothing could shield me from the sting of small fists and sharp words, the daily crucifixion of a child whose only crime was to carry the color of her ancestors.

In our streets, light skin was worshiped like a fragile god, and straight hair held the throne. The children around me were already disciples of a history that had brainwashed their families into self-denial. Teachers tried to remind us that we were all Africans, yet their words fell into soil already poisoned. Parents hissed back: “Our children are not African—they are coloured.” And the lie continued to blossom, strangling truth like weeds in dry ground.

By the time I entered high school, my body itself had become a shadow that boys recoiled from. None dared to walk beside me, as though my presence would stain them. Some spoke their cruelty aloud, saying they could never bear children with me, for their offspring would look like “Bantus”—their word for black, wielded like a blade. Their rejection, strangely, became my refuge. Where others sought affection, I found sanctuary in silence, pouring my exile into journals. Line by line, I began to stitch my own destiny, my eyes fixed on the faraway gates of the University of Cape Town.

From Grade 1 to Grade 7, my childhood was a battlefield. The blows of classmates carved wounds not only in my skin but in my spirit. There were mornings when I begged the heavens to release me from school, when despair wrapped itself around me like a shroud. Yet my parents armed me differently. My mother, warrior in her own right, would say: “The  weak fight violence with violence. The strong fight with the Word of God, and with words on paper.”

And so I chose the weapon of the unseen. In secrecy, I became a soldier of ink, fighting not with fists but with sentences, waging war in silence. My scars became my scripture, and my journal, the altar where I laid down every pain.

Story by: Lendy

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