Dikeledi had inherited her mother’s beauty, and it was because of this taken-for-granted beauty that she experienced a freedom the other girls in the village did not know they could even dream of. When she herded cattle with the boys and fought with them or scratched her knees and elbows climbing up trees or sliding down smooth hills, the boys did not mind because they could convince themselves that this was what the clay cattle had really been in exchange for – time with Dikeledi in the bush. The girls did not mind Dikeledi’s time in the bush because they knew (it had been repeated often enough in their presence) that she was the prettiest girl in the village, and they were therefore happy to spend hours not being silently or verbally compared to her. The adults did not mind that Dikeledi preferred boyish pursuits because they were sure that she would, one day, as all children eventually did, leave childhood things behind and embrace the softness and gentleness that came with womanhood.

None of them could have known that what terrified Dikeledi more than anything in the world was the softness and gentleness of womanhood; the softness and gentleness that reminded her so much of her mother, Daisy, who had leaned her softness and gentleness towards men so readily and so casually until one day she had leaned towards a man who, in exchange, had killed her. Brutally.

Since Dikeledi was a precocious child, she knew, almost from the start, what was expected of her beauty. It helped elucidate things, of course, that the village women often would say to her, ‘That pretty face of yours will be sure to bring you a good husband,’ and some village men would reach out and try to touch her unformed breasts; and disguising the unsavouriness of their actions with laughter and a jocular tone, they would say to her, ‘Some very lucky man is going to be made very happy by you someday soon.’ Dikeledi swatted such hands away, and had, on more than one occasion, bitten a finger that had proved to be a little too determined. The owners of the hands and fingers had laughed away her rejection, appreciating the wildness in the child, and envying the man who would tame the woman she would become.

Dikeledi had understood clearly, as clearly as she understood the pristineness of the colour white, that what those men had been reaching for were the soft places of her body, and that it was her duty to herself, even as she loathed the softness and gentleness of womanhood, to safeguard those soft places against the wanton touches of men who really should have known and done better.