Eswatini (swaziland)

weeding the flowerbeds

by sarah mkhonza

Set in the 1970s, WEEDING THE FLOWERBEDS is a fictionalized memoir about a teenage girl, Bulel0 and her friends, Sisile and Makhosi, who live in the hostel at Manzini Nazarene High School, a Christian boarding school in Eswatini.

The Kingdom of Eswatini—previously Swaziland, (its english language name,) and officially renamed Eswatini in 2018—is one of the smallest countries in Africa. Completely landlocked, the country is surrounded almost entirely by South Africa with a short north-eastern border with Mozambique.

I grew up in South Africa, and was a teenager in the decade following the period in which WEEDING THE FLOWERBEDS was set. I began the book curious to discover if any similarities existed between the life of a Swazi teenage girl and my own, but also to understand if Apartheid cast its shadow over their lives.

Growing up in South Africa, our childhoods were artificial in ways we did not fully understand. Every aspect of society was segregated by color. Black and White South Africans lived different lives in the same country. We lived in different neighborhoods, went to different schools, and travelled on different public transport. Under Apartheid, black South Africans were unable, by law, to watch a movie in a white cinema, to sit on public benches or use public toilets assigned Whites Only, or to swim at the same beaches as Whites. Apartheid effectively cleaved the country in two and throughout my childhood, I never had the opportunity to meet, mix with, or form normal friendships with black children my age. Once, when I was about 16 or 17, as democracy approached and desegregation was on the horizon, my state (public) high school in Johannesburg organized an afternoon visit by girls from a high school in Alexandra, a Black township a few miles from where we went to school. The girls arrived in the familiar school uniform worn by most black students in those days—black pinafores, white-collared cotton shirts, and yellow-and-black striped sashes, and joined our year for a few classes at the end of the day and into the afternoon. At the end of our time together, one of the girls asked me for my home phone number. I gave it to her full of trepidation that she might actually call me. I had no idea how to navigate a friendship across the artificial color-line that we had been raised to uphold. All our lives, we were told we were different, and I had no experience in seeing the girl behind the skin-color.

So I looked with interest to find similarities with my high school days in Bulelo’s story, and there were many. She and her friends were concerned with the same things that preoccupied me and my friends. They had close friendships and encouraged one another to success, as well as having moments of disagreement, jealousy and competition. They wanted to succeed in sports and be on the winning team. They worked hard to do well in class, to get good grades, and make the most of their opportunities. They longed to be seen and liked by the boys, but also acknowledged as independent people with their own ideas. They struggled to uphold the expectation that girls should be ‘good’, while wanting to push boundaries and break the rules. They giggled in class, made fun of their teachers, enjoyed their free time together, and laughed about the “Dear Abby” letters in their magazines.

Apart from these enjoyable, if repetitive, insights about growing up in southern Africa in the early 70s, WEEDING THE FLOWERBEDS is not a great read and there are problems a good round of editing probably should have caught. The book is neither memoir nor fiction and hovers unsatisfactorily somewhere in between. The author floats over bigger issues such as the political impact of living in a small independent country surrounded by apartheid South Africa, skin whitening, gender inequality, corporal punishment, inappropriate teachers, and the inadequate education offered to black communities by church-run schools in Africa in the 1970s, but never takes a deep satisfying dive into any of them. Rather it skims inoffensively above anything substantial, focusing instead, in agonizing detail, on the shallow preoccupations of day-to-day life in the boarding house.