We Are All the Same: The Life and Death of Nkosi Johnson

Daphne's second baby occupied so little space in her womb that strangers in the village might not have noticed she was pregnant at all. Even by December of 1988, when she told her mother, Ruth, and her sisters and friends that she thought she was probably in her eighth month, they all laughed at her, found it hard to believe she was that far along, teased her mercilessly about her size--or, more precisely, about her lack of size.

Her younger half sister, Cynthia, remembered such moments.

Like her mother, Daphne was a small but solidly constructed woman with an almost perfectly round face. But while Ruth seemed congenitally dour, Daphne had a quick smile and a sunny disposition, and most of the time she simply laughed off the steady stream of jibes about her pregnancy, accepted them as just a bit of fun being poked within the bounds of friendship and family.

Yet, as Cynthia would later remember, there was a limit to her Daphne's patience.

That question, which seemed invariably to follow the others, was different for Daphne. She resented it, and it always seemed to set her teeth on edge--though if she'd heard it once, she'd heard it a hundred times, so often in fact that her daughter, just learning to talk, had eagerly enlisted in the interrogation.

"Mummy?" Mbali would ask, splaying her chubby fingers against Daphne's abdomen. "Where you get baby?"

Daphne always answered softly, "Just like you, this baby comes from God."

To the others she offered not a word, for she knew that the question was unrelated to biology, to where babies come from and how they're made. They were not sophisticated teenage girls, not by Western standards, but there had been no mystery about sex and procreation for them since soon after they had entered puberty. Many of them knew exactly what intercourse entailed and understood its potential for both pleasure and pregnancy. Some had experimented with the enjoyment, while others, like Daphne, had experienced both--and in the nameless village where they all lived, neither was taboo. In fact, both in their small world and in the larger swath of rural South Africa, there were few if any role models for chastity, including Daphne's mother.

Ruth seemed rather proud of the sexual choices she had made in her life, did not regret them at all or regard them as any different from those her own mother or her peers had made. She defended them as customary, and as evidence she declared that offhand she could not remember any marriages at all between the members of her extended family. Nor could she identify a genuine couple among any of her acquaintances--that is, a man and woman living under the same roof, committed to one another, regardless of their legal status. I once asked if she could explain why marriage or the tradition of couples seemed so unimportant to her and in her community. She shrugged and, after a moment's thought, turned the question in on itself. "Because it is not important," she growled, increasingly irritated with my prying. "And it never has been," she added. That would be her final word on the subject.

For Ruth this was simply the way it was, and just as she had incurred no condemnation, neither would Daphne face any cultural or moral indictment for having had her first baby at sixteen--"out of wedlock," as the Western euphemism would describe it--or for being pregnant again three years later and still unmarried.

So if the question was not about biology, neither was it about deviating from the norm. Daphne was conforming to the standards and customs of her time and place, of her family, of her mother. She might be teased, but she would not be criticized.

It wasn't a question of morality or cultural values. Her sisters and friends simply wanted to know the father's name--and her stony silence on the subject, as Cynthia recalled, served only to sharpen their probing.

Only once did Daphne drop the veil, and then only on her own terms.

No, she told Cynthia, the father of her new baby was not the father of Mbali.

"Do I know him?" Cynthia had pressed.

Maybe, Daphne had answered.

"Tell me," Cynthia insisted, sensing a breakthrough. "I won't tell anybody else."

Yes you will.

"No I won't. I promise."

Cynthia was forced to admit then and later that her half sister probably had a point.

Daphne's classroom education may have ended after the eighth grade, but she clearly grasped the sociological dynamics of their village. Primarily, the village lay within the economic sphere of the small town of Dannhauser; then, slightly farther away there was Dundee, which was a bit larger, and, beyond that, the city of Newcastle--the smoky coal-mining center named by the British for its counterpart in England--and the nearby black townships of Madadeni and Osizweni. Compared to them, Daphne's nameless little village was utterly bland and boring. In such a place, so compact and so insular, privacy was minimal and gossip compulsive--which was why she had told Cynthia she would be unable to resist passing along her secret, if she knew the secret.

"We all loved to tittle-tattle," Cynthia would later explain. "All of us except Daphne. For some reason--I don't know why--she hated it. Just hated it."

Yet she could not escape it.

That previous winter--summer in America and Europe--when Daphne had returned from a brief stay in Johannesburg, having left Mbali in Ruth's care, she confessed she was disappointed not to have found either a job or a more promising life. Like so many black South Africans before her, she had discovered that her reach exceeded her grasp. Still, she said, she had not regretted the experience, and what she appreciated most about the big city was the anonymity it offered. She had simply vanished into its masses, and because no one had known who she was, no one had cared who she was. Everyone had left her alone, and she had liked it a lot, she said.

She told Cynthia she sometimes felt invisible there.

"But weren't you lonely?" her half sister asked. "I mean, sometimes?"

Yes, sometimes.

"Ha!" Cynthia chortled. "It's somebody from Johannesburg."

Who someone?

"This baby's father."

Uncharacteristically, Daphne snapped at her sister.

Her attitude puzzled her peers. As Cynthia would explain, a certain candor about such matters was an integral part of their fellowship in a place where they had so little else to entertain them. Besides, as her friends often pointed out, hadn't Daphne willingly identified Mbali's father even before she was born--and afterward had she not given her new daughter his surname? So why was she constructing and maintaining such a deep mystery about her second pregnancy?

Even all these years later, it remains a question--one of those to which I found no answer. Was she, like any other adolescent craving attention, simply encouraging more questions by refusing to answer any? Or had she simply had enough of people poking around in what she considered to be her business and hers alone? Cynthia did not regard Daphne as promiscuous--not in the context of their culture, at least--but she did admit to having entertained the possibility that Daphne would not say who the father was because she might not know who the father was.

Or could it have been that in December 1988, even in such a permissive time and place, Daphne suspected that she had somehow managed to cross a forbidden line into a social or cultural or family territory that was taboo?

For whatever reason, she kept the name of her new baby's father to herself. She had told Cynthia that he was not the father of her daughter, and Cynthia had believed her, had thought that was probably logical, since she had not seen that fellow around since long before Mbali's birth. The truth--whatever the truth was--would forever remain Daphne's secret.