Rusty Rhythms and Rituals by Hleki Mabunda

So rusty is women abuse
Physical
Emotional
Financial
A stone-age practice
It would be so rusty if it were silver

So rhythmic that it happens every second, everyday, everywhere
At home, work, church, school, hospital
Even in your street
Women receiving rhythmic blows as if they are drums, and their cries=popular music
Their bodies violated
Their souls broken

Or is it a ritual
They keep hiding it, as one would, a deadly sacred ritual practiced by ancestors years before we were born
A ritual never to be tempered with
Never to be spoken about
‘shhhhh! Go back home, this discussion belongs under your roof’ they say
It’s a common secret
It happens in every house

Women in their infancy, youth, prime, even in their elderly days
All victims of the of an old evil
So rusty, yet still so common
A sad part of a compelling rhythm of the nation
A rhythm you can silently dance to
Or a rhythm, you can escape

Hleki Mabunda is a South Africa member of Public Service currently serving as Director for International Relations in the Department of Basic Education. She writes in her personal capacity of all things about and around the society she lives in.