Kimberly Burge on Writing with the Girls of Gugulethu
By Kimberly Burge
To me, writing is soulful. It helps me to throw my emotions into paper. It relieves my pain. It also helps show my happiness and life experiences. How wonderful writing is now ever since I started at writing club. I’m starting to love writing. Just keep my hand moving. Writing keeps me thinking. It challenges me. I did know that I had so much so much in my mind that needed to be put down. Sometimes we need a bit of inspiration to get more encouraged. To me, writing is a drum waiting to roll. — Phola, 17 years old | Gugulethu, South Africa
From their birth — from the names given them — words matter to girls in Gugulethu.
On the first day of our writing club there, I asked each girl to write, with brightly colored markers, her name and its meaning on a nametag. Most of these girls are Xhosa, the second largest ethnic group in South Africa, which claims Nelson Mandela among its numbers. Xhosa parents give their children names with significance attached. When I met each one, I learned the girl-child’s place in her family, what dreams or healing she brought along when she entered the world, what hopes and expectations lie ahead for her.
Olwethu. Ours.
Sive. Listen.
Xolelwa. Peace.
Keneuwe. Given.
Nompumelelo. Success.
Anathi. They are with us.
Mandlakazi. Power.
I came to Gugulethu as a Fulbright Scholar in 2010 to lead a weekly creative writing club for teen-aged girls, based at J.L. Zwane Presbyterian Church and Community Center. Ten miles from the city center, Gugulethu is one of Cape Town’s oldest townships, and South Africa’s racially segregated areas. During apartheid, the government passed the Group Areas Act in 1950, assigning parcels of land where people would live based — as everything was — on skin color. Black South Africans were rounded up and transported out from the City Bowl to the Cape Flats, a place of scrublands and sand dunes and a newly declared blacks-only area in the early 1960s. In Xhosa, Gugulethu means “our pride.” Locals shorten it to Gugs.
Colors saturated the walls in the room where the writing club gathered at J.L. Zwane. Purple along one side, orange on the opposite, anchored by yellow at each end. On Saturday afternoons for a year, anywhere from 4 to 22 girls, ages 13 through 20, gathered. At our first meeting, we brainstormed together for a name. They settled on Amazw’Entombi, “Voices of the Girls.”
