Your Favourite Cousin

I played tennis because I used to follow Phumzile my cousin, to the  clay tennis court the city built below the bus rank. She looked so lovely and confident in her Wimbledon white dresses and tennis racquet.

Phumzile also taught me how to play chess and how to pack my suitcase tight for boarding school. We grew up together because her mother and my mother are sisters.

Cousins are the same blood (igazi in the Zulu language) through their mothers. You also call your mother’s sister ‘big mother’ or ‘small mother’, depending on age. The term auntie came with British colonization. My uncles’ kids are also my cousins. When you visit South Africa, you’ll hear people saying:

Gaz’ lami, kunjani? (My blood, how are you?)

Older cousins consciously or unconsciously raise younger ones: relay what they know about the world; what Ma would not tolerate; clothes to wear for different events; guide them through changes in the body; explain customs and religion; walk them to school and help them with homework or give them clothes that no longer fit them.

The young ones emulate older cousins in how they walk and dress. They also love being known as the cousin of someone admired or feared, which brings us to destructive cousins.

The adoration makes it is easier to recruit cousins into bad life choices. In the movie American Gangster, Denzel Washington played a drug lord that brought his cousins from the south to run his business.

Bad blood is quite traumatic for parents for one reason: broken trust, the realization that your own blood can lead you to death, injury or prison.

By:  Nonqaba waka Msimang.