The gangster in silver bangles

Mpundu Valerie

DISCLAIMER: This story is shared for cancer awareness purposes and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional for any medical concerns

U-AUNTY Hle wore very heavy jewellery and you would swear lightning would strike her, she was a good point of contact. Her hands and feet were decorated with lots of silver. Some she hid in her dustcoat while others she made visible. She loved showing off more flesh and replacing it with heavy leg bangles.

Outspoken and unafraid, she was a gynaecologist and always had her own way of making her presence felt. I was always that one favourite nephew, Moses, whom she loved and often joked that I should marry so she could hand over all her jewellery to my wife.

Suddenly she started removing her most prized possessions and giving them away, jokingly telling me that if I were a girl she would have left it all for me.

From the lot she removed, I noticed a purplish patch on her leg. Because she was light-skinned, I assumed it had developed from wearing the bangles and that it would eventually fade away.

Taking you back a bit, U-Aunty Hle had assumed responsibility when my mother reportedly died of HIV/AIDS, so I had stayed with her all my life.

When her boyfriend broke up with her, she stopped taking her meds and just decided to give up on life. She was never negative about being positive. She openly talked about her status and from that I learnt a lot.

The moment she stopped her meds the patch started to develop an even darker colour. I asked her to seek medical advice but she refused. She said it was a reaction from the bangles. She would not heal. She knew what she had but did not want help.

She abandoned her heels for flat pairs. All this while, she kept soldiering on. "Nxa ndifa ubani ozakuncedisa mntanami? (If I die, who will take care of you, my child?) Let me do it for my own sister. I won't rest," she would always say. I became accustomed to her words such that I was so deaf and blind to reason. This is something she had often said to me all my life, and I had anticipated a life without her.

In all she did, U-Aunty Hle was trying to convince me by convincing herself. Yet she was an old pot boiling to crack.

I had come of age but convincing her was difficult. U-Aunty Hle was pure gangster and took no defeat. But this man had wounded her. It was then I realised even the strongest have their weaknesses. Umlenze wakhe wakhula ngobukhulu (her leg grew in size). I tried so hard to convince her but she had an image to portray.

"Angiguli!" she would always say in that gangster voice you could see she was trying to put up a show. She stopped meeting people, started acting weird, living each day like it was her last. Because she didn't want people around, I had to start working from home as I was the only one she trusted.

She was in pain and would struggle to walk. She needed aid walking. U-Aunty Hle ubethanda ukuphikisana (she loved to argue). We could never reach a compromise on this. She knew the extent of what she carried and didn't need anybody telling her.

One day she sat me down and told me she had stopped taking her ARVs and that had caused the swift reaction to the cancer which had reached stage 3. She staunchly opposed being amputated and said she would rather go meet her family intact than with an organ missing.

She had Kaposi sarcoma.

Efforts were futile. She didn't want to be helped. Whatever she said had to go. She lived shortly after confessing to have stopped taking her meds and that she had KS.

It was a double confession to learn she had stopped taking her meds and had accepted her "fate" to cancer. It broke her more to tell me than it broke me to hear it. I was shattered, bruised, and torn. Yet just like her, I had to gangster love at the news.

Neither of us could come back from this one. We were neither here nor there, yet lived each day like it was all good yet the moment we turned our backs on each other, we would all grieve for the unknown and known. It was heavy, yet we both had to carry the burden.

Her death stung and left me with unfathomable pain. To date, I still blame myself for her death. I could have acted differently had I known earlier. In righting my wrong, I now advocate for cancer awareness and have left my Filabusi memories dead and buried.

Perhaps her story can encourage someone else to look at a changing patch, swelling, persistent pain or other unusual symptom and say:

“I need to see a doctor.”

U-Aunty Hle was a gangster.

She was strong.

She was stubborn.

She was fiercely protective.

She was my aunt.

She was my mother in everything that mattered.

And she was loved.

In memory of U-Aunty Hle — nguMasibanda wami.

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Kaposi sarcoma awareness