📖 Chapter 6: Nomandla’s Return
The calabash sat on her windowsill like a question waiting to be answered.
Every night, Oyena lit a candle beside it — and somehow the flame always danced toward the east, as if it remembered something she didn’t.
The ancestral cloth her Gogo had given her — red and white, old and whispering — swayed even without wind.
It didn’t speak with words.
It spoke through breath.
Through the stillness of knowing.
She had started dreaming in isiXhosa again — but not the city isiXhosa of private schools and Cape Town streets.
This one was older.
Made of drumbeats and names she didn’t yet know how to pronounce.
It tasted like earth and salt.
It called.
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She no longer responded to “Aurora.”
> “Let them speak,” she said softly once, when a teacher corrected the register.
“I will not answer to a name that is not mine.”
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But the signs only grew louder.
— Water appeared beneath her bed, with no explanation.
— The bathroom mirror fogged up with the word: “Look.”
— She began to hear voices — not hallucinations, but presence.
Like songs behind silence.
The ancestors weren’t whispering anymore.
They were summoning her.
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Her path kept leading her back to Gogo Babalwa, the elder who read amathambo (divination bones) in a small shack lit by candles and soaked in imphepho smoke.
Babalwa would sit her down and ask nothing.
Instead, she would cast the bones, close her eyes — and wait for Oyena’s spirit to catch up.
> “Your blood is crying,” Gogo said one evening.
“Your mother was a root. You… you are the branch that must rise.”
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That night, Gogo handed her something wrapped in old white cloth.
> “Your mother left this with me,” she said.
“She said you would come. She said the day would arrive when the river inside you would remember.”
Inside was a red-and-white waist cloth — torn, faded, but alive.
It pulsed in Oyena’s hands.
Tucked into the fold was a letter.
Handwritten. Old. Still scented with time.
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> “If you’re reading this, my child, it means the water has remembered you.”
“Your name is not Aurora. Your name is Oyena — the one truly chosen.”
> “I’m sorry, my girl. This world is not kind to women like us. But our blood is fire and wind and water. And you are not alone.”
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The tears didn’t sting.
They cleansed.
Because now, she didn’t believe her mother was alive.
She knew she was.
Nomandla was not dead.
She was a presence.
A guide.
An isithunywa — a messenger spirit, still working through dreams, memory, and blood.
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Back home, Martin and Lawrence were shaken.
Oyena no longer ate meat.
She no longer spoke in small talk.
She lit imphepho before bed and left saltwater in the corners of her room.
She was no longer their girl.
She was becoming her own.
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At school, some teachers called her distant.
Others said her eyes had changed.
She sat quietly, but her stillness felt… ancient.
Because Oyena was no longer simply asking questions.
She was beginning to remember.
And through her — Nomandla was returning.
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