Braids & Migraines

"This amazing novel looks at the complexities of Black girlhood, mental health, and the legacy of racial exclusion in post-apartheid South Africa. The protagonist, Nomandla, comes from an informal settlement and is awarded a prestigious scholarship to attend Cameron House for Girls in Durban. While she initially views this as a path to a better life, the reality proves to be a source of profound struggle. At her new school, Nomandla is treated as a token of “transformation” and is expected to show constant gratitude for her position. In addition, she battles poverty and racism while experiencing terrifying and sometimes heartbreaking visions that eventually lead to her hospitalisation. The novel is painful, funny, beautiful. Braids is the kind of novel that I would like all South Africans to read, regardless of race. I think, too often, there is ignorance about how people from different races and cultures experience certain situations. In Braids , Nomandla is given a scholarship to a private “white” school and is asked, for example, to dress in traditional Zulu clothing and perform a traditional dance in the school concert. While the school authorities might see this as a way of including her, she sees it as being asked to showcase her difference in an attempt to make the school look inclusive and welcoming. She views the request as exploitative and false. This is simply one example, but what it does, as all good literature does, is give readers an opportunity to experience, learn and understand from a different point of view. Andile and I are more or less the same age. We grew up in the same country. Yet her sister died of malnutrition. Her family lived without many of the opportunities my family had – even after the end of apartheid in 1994. These are things we must remember. Apartheid is over, but what has it meant for different people, and what are the consequences of it that still hang over us to this day?"

"I first started writing it in 2016. It was always about an older brother and a sister, navigating the education system. I submitted it for a prize in 2016. It wasn’t ready at the time, but I was paired with a mentor, and I worked with her. Then I moved to Cape Town and worked at a university in communications. It’s not that I forgot about the book, but I parked it. While working, I was also studying creative writing. Then I left my job at the university and joined an NGO. I had a really difficult time there: I experienced bullying, and I really needed some form of therapy. That’s when I remembered the book I had been working on. I was excited to get back to Braids & Migraines— it helped me process what happened. So it’s probably part scriptotherapy for me as the writer. But it’s also fiction. It tells the story of a girl navigating the education system and her older brother, who takes care of her. In a way, it’s like black tax for him, because he is already working. The sister comes from a township school but gets a scholarship to a very elite school. She’s a confident girl when she’s in the township. She has challenges—she’s neurodiverse—but she’s also very brilliant. So she moves to the city to live with her brother and go to this very nice high school. That’s when she experiences some form of culture shock. She’s negotiating with identity and who she is in the world. But she also finds joy in doing her hair and finding the type of style that she likes. It’s her journey of becoming and being in the world. As much as she’s faced with difficulties, she finds herself in all of that. When she’s in matric, her final year of high school, she gets into trouble. It’s really not her fault, but she’s expelled and has some kind of mental breakdown. That’s when you really see her rise up, and she decides to go back to the township to finish school there. I don’t know how other people will read it. They will find different metaphors in it, like I find in other books. But it’s really a story of Nomandla becoming and being and finding her power in braids, and deciding the kind of braids that she likes. Because the first time she does braids at this elite school, she’s not allowed to have beads, for example. I think because of what education has done for me. Education has done a lot for me. Particularly in South Africa, I don’t know where I’d be if I had not pushed through. When I did my grade one, it was in a farm school, overlooking a graveyard. It was a very sad-looking place with gum trees. Even now, I don’t really like gum trees, because I associate them with the graveyard and that school. I failed my grade one, and the irony is that I failed it because I did not want to write! My mom says I would literally throw myself on the floor if they gave me a pen. My teacher could not even help me. She had to fail me, and I had to repeat the grade. I am grateful for their patience. I repeated the grade, and the second time I did it. I was very happy to be there. I’ve enjoyed my education journey ever since, but I have had difficulties along the way. When I moved to varsity (university) in Pretoria, I was 19 and I lived in res, which is student housing. I was fortunate that I got a NSFAS, which is a government scheme that supports you financially to study. I got that because my mom was earning around 1000 Rand. They looked at my mom’s payslip and said, ‘We’re definitely paying for your studies and your res and your books.’ But at the time, they did not pay for food. So I would go hungry. I got money from home—it just wasn’t enough. But I knew how to do hair, so I braided people’s hair, and that made the difference. That varsity education is what got me the jobs and the opportunities that I’ve had. That’s where I was introduced to a big library and all those books— Nervous Conditions , Things Fall Apart. I was introduced to very, very nice things there. I think that’s why I’ve always had it in my mind. I have a protagonist who struggles through it, but eventually she makes it out and she finishes her matric. I don’t know if I’m telling myself or if I’m telling people who are growing up in the township that if you push through, there is light at the end of the tunnel. There are difficulties along the way. You’re not going to know everything. There are people who come from better backgrounds who will know more than you, who have read more than you. But you have a chance to introduce yourself to those books. Yes, I think so. The feelings, definitely. When I was discussing it, someone asked me, ‘Oh, you grew up on a farm and the main character’s dad works on a farm and she works there during the holidays. Is it based on lived experience?’ And I was like, ‘No, it’s fiction.’ We were raised by my mom, she was a single parent. But I’ve seen other dads working as gardeners at the farm. It’s based on those feelings and some of the conversations that I’d have with those dads. There’s also a domestic worker in the book. Every woman in my family has been a domestic worker: my grandmother, my mom, my aunts. Cameron House is the elite school in the book. Even though I didn’t go to a Cameron House, I had my time at res for those four years, being introduced to different people coming from different backgrounds. Some were rich middle class, some, like me, came from farms. Those feelings that you get from the book are definitely familiar feelings. So it’s really nuggets from all these places."