MAPEI by Moso Sematlane
He comes to my house at midday after I have taken a bath; we are at that age, where our days start with a bath and ahead of us lie playtime and sun. Two boys in clean shirts, we go down a list of games we could play that day —mapei, sekotche, khathi, ‘mantloane, mokou. We want to play all of them, and perhaps in a way, we do—boyhood has this effect, where a single day carries weeks, maybe years—a timelessness marking its end only when the sun sets, the cycle beginning again at sunrise. I do not recall how we came to know the rules of these games; the feso you need to flick the marble through in order to score a point in a game of mapei, the tower of bricks you must build to win a game of mokou, whilst dodging a ball made of discarded Shoprite and Pep plastic bags that your opponents standing on either side of you try to hit you with.
At least, I don’t recall learning the rules of these games in the way I learned, say, the rules of a 30 Seconds game or a game of Monopoly. The knowledge, even then, seems to have been resting in our bones, waiting for the right moment to appear. And it does. It appears at sunrise, as we kids rush to a big tree at my grandmother’s house in Thaba-Bosiu, where me and my cousins are visiting for that weekend. At the tree we use bricks and various thrown-away items to construct a make-shift house, assigning domestic roles; the father, the child, the wife, to each other in a game of ‘mantloane. It appears with me and him, alone at my house now, drawing a grid on the ground, with a finger or a stick, and hopping on one leg in order to kick around an empty Kiwi Polish container through the various boxes, sekotche.
When he comes to my house, we carry the knowledge of how to play these games inside of us; it is singular and unquestioned, a fact of life as sturdy as the sun against our skin. We play until our clean shirts become dirty. Although we are the same age, he is bigger than me. At this age, I am used to playing alone. Even then, my introversion is something I am aware of, the silences that I can so easily slip in, but this doesn’t seem to matter to him. It doesn’t seem to matter, too, that we are two boys playing sekotche, which is traditionally perceived to be a girl’s game.
My parents assign to him the label of friend, as ferociously and hopefully as people who have been secretly worrying about my tendency of playing alone. But the label is true, he is my friend, and yet somehow, in the same place children hold wisdom about death, love, and divorce, I know our friendship is not forever. Boys like him don’t stay friends with boys like me for too long; feminine boys, boys who are called sensitive. Boys like him grow into men who create these labels in the first place.
But for now, we play. I recall us building a feso for our game of mapei, him looking down attentively to make sure the bricks left a wide enough gap for the marble to go through. I do not recall the moments leading up to the kiss, how it happens, who initiates it first, but it happens, an event as singular and unquestioned as our knowledge of these childhood games.
I cannot tell you when the last time I played these games was, or even scarily if I have seen children playing them now as we did then. I don’t know if he remembers the kiss, days after it, we had played together as if nothing had happened. I met him recently, and he told me he is struggling to find a job. He has a slight stutter, and is earnest in the way of someone who views the person with whom they are talking to, me, as trustworthy. I find comfort in this. I find comfort in the way that, all these years later, we are still able to maintain a kind of camaraderie. I don’t have the urge to ask him about the kiss though. Somehow, sharing its memory, even with him, would dilute its bright colours. Or maybe I’m just scared to find out he doesn’t remember.
Moso Sematlane is a writer and filmmaker based between Maseru, Lesotho and Johannesburg, South Africa. Winner of the Writers Guild of South Africa ‘s Best Unproduced Short Film Script 2020 , shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2021: he has work published in The Kalahari Review, Nat Brut, among others.
