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boy and begins mistreating her. He will justify himself:
    â€œI have been begging for too long. The begging is out of me, I cannot beg any more.”
    Mamafa is what we call a “chomi ya bana”; he keeps female company only to revel in it. We make him feel like a general in the military. He has loads of girl friends just for the purpose of being friends and nothing more than that. He knows his way around schoolbooks and of all the pupils in my community he is the only one with an interest in books other than just schoolbooks. He has a big love of poetry and inspired me to express myself in poetry because he can write a poem so simple and naive that I will reread it over and over.
    Mamafa likes to think that he is gifted with great wisdom and knows everything in this world. Soft speaking, he is choosy about the words that come out of his mouth, so choosy that he can tell somebody shit without ever using foul language and they will only understand him long afterwards.
    The funniest thing about Mamafa is that he always fails to have a private conversation with a girl. We can have a conversation in the street and no one will hear what we are talking about, but let a girl who has a crush on him try to talk to him and his voice will suddenly go very high, so that everyone can hear him.
    I tried to set Mamafa up with some of the girls who had a crush on him. He talked to them and held their hands and as long as a third party was around he was comfortable, but if the third party left the scene he started talking in a high tone, getting very uncomfortable and nervous.
    James says that if Mamafa ever has sex he will ejaculate all his intelligence and that’s why he will never lose his virginity, but the truth is that he is abstaining for reasons that only he knows. It is true, though, that he is still a virgin and his mind has not ventured much into sex.
    Mamafa’s bedroom is like a palace – he has a computer, a television and a DVD player – and we often spend time there, James illegally downloading music while Mamafa and I get lost in this or that.
    If there was anyone who was going to deflower me it was going to be Mamafa; he could have done it long ago because at times I just lose control. He will hold himself back and comment:
    â€œNo, Mokgethi, no. You are losing yourself now. Regain your senses.”
    Though I will deny it to his face, the fact is that sometimes I call Mamafa without really knowing why. I see too much sex on television. I hear too much sex from my friends. And sometimes it just gets to a girl and I feel like I am losing out, like I need somebody to hold me and do all the things that I have been doing virtually in my mind to me physically. When this power takes over, that is when I call Mamafa. I know that if he can just ... Then I go over to his place, still hoping so much that he can just ... But he never has and I am always very angry when my real self comes back and thankful that he didn’t just ...
    The last time I was very obvious. We were sleeping in his bed; he was in his pyjamas and I was in my underwear only, my leg was touching his leg.
    â€œMaf, don’t you think that this is the right time for us?”
    I was getting all hot.
    â€œThe right time? Right time for what?”
    â€œYou know, the right time.”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    He didn’t respond.
    I paused, not knowing how to transmit my thoughts to him. (We are seventeen and everybody is doing it and we, too, are going to have to do it someday, so why not let that someday be today and let us just live it.) This was my thinking.
    In silence we fell asleep.

The Guardians
    My township is not that big and it is surrounded by the trust land of a king. We all look at him as our king, though we are part of a municipality. The township was started in the early 1960s. The stands are much bigger than the average South African township stand, but the houses were originally very small two-room