Reclaiming the L-Word: Sappho's Daughters out in Africa

Discovering my identity

7650, 56A07/65.*6)6 is a Project Officer at the Gay and Lesbian Network in Pietermaritzburg.  +0:*6=,905.4@0+,5;0;@¸7650,¹56A07/65.*6)6 I come originally from the rural area of Elanskop in KwaZuluNatal , where I grew up in a family of seven: my Mom, my granny and my siblings. Our family was strongly religious and I went to the Roman Catholic Church every Sunday. Because we were such a strict family we were often not allowed to go outdoors to play, so I used to spend most of my time indoors. I went to a Roman Catholic primary school, and then for high school I was sent to a boarding school in Pinetown, the St Francis College at Marianhill, which was for girls and boys, although we were sort of separated in class. At school the girls used to play “Moms and Babies”, a game where you formed a relationship with someone who asked you to be their baby and then you would play this role with them. When I was in Standard 9 I asked some girl to be my baby and we used to kiss and touch each other, and I realised then that I had strong feelings for her. But because of that incident I was chased from St Francis, expelled. So then my mother sent me to Montebello Girls’ High School which was a girls-only boarding school in Dalton. There were quite a lot of tomboys there who dressed like boys and played soccer, and there were some others who I think were truly lesbian as they had close relationships with other girls, although I had never heard the term “lesbian” then. And I also had my first relationship with a girl there. It made me feel very happy, especially when I kissed her. I liked that. This led me to try to understand myself, so I used to spend most of my time in the library, or asking some girls who were older than me, but there weren’t really any books about homosexuality or lesbianism. So in the holidays I used to spend much time in the town library searching for books and that’s how I began to find out what lesbianism means. I still wasn’t sure whether I was part of it, or whether I was still going to be like my friends, who talked all the time about boyfriends. But I didn’t have those feelings at all. ¸7650,¹56A07/65.*6)6 I did my Matric in 1996, and went to M L Sultan Technicon (now called Durban University of Technology) to study for public management. Here there were a lot of different people from different races and backgrounds. I continued to do my research on homosexuality: reading books, going onto the Internet, and talking to others who had more experience about doing research. I also now saw some other girls who I thought: Oh, she’s like me, yes, she is like me. And so I began to be able to talk to them, and they introduced me to the Compass group for homosexuals on campus. I joined the group, but wasn’t active because I didn’t know clearly what was happening to me. Although I was still a kind of tomboy, wearing whatever I liked, I was accepted, and at home people just thought that was the way they dressed at the Technicon. After three years, when I finished my course and went back home, I told my girl cousin about myself. It was raining and my mother was at school where she was a teacher. My cousin said, “I knew a long time ago; didn’t you ever notice?” So I said, “Oh, OK, now who’s going to tell my mother?” She said she would tell her at the weekend as she was going to be with us. When my cousin told my mother, she was so upset that for two to three weeks she didn’t go to school, and she cried non-stop and wouldn’t talk to me. I decided to visit my aunt about this, and my aunt spoke to my mother, who then said that maybe she would accept what I said as I was probably just in a phase. She also said that, because I had spent so long in the boarding school, maybe I...