#Ubuyile
UBUYILE
By Zakes Mdluli
Nolwazi Mabaso is the face South Africa wakes up to. Five mornings a week on Good Morning Mzansi, forty-one, divorced, trusted by an entire country — and extremely good at making sure nobody looks too hard at the second half of that sentence. Fort Hare's hundred-and-tenth Homecoming asks her for one favour. Come home. Interview Luvuyo Mgudlwa, live, on Freedom Square. The war correspondent. The one who left before final year. The one who kissed her at a party while she was dating somebody else, then got on a plane and stayed gone. She says yes before she has finished deciding to. What she does not plan for is a weekend in which she is never once alone with him. There is a crew. There is a producer with a headset. There is a campus radio broadcast, a screen playing her own face back at her, hundreds of students with their phones up, a table of old classmates with opinions, and a twenty-year-old Miss Fort Hare who idolises her and happens to be his daughter. Two of the most recognisable people in the country, on the one campus where every single person knows them both, hunting for a room with a door. Three days. Then the flight back to Johannesburg.
12 chapters · 1 hr 36 min
