📖 Chapter 12: The Gatekeeper

(Umgcini-Mnyango)

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Cape Town isn’t gentle.

Not when you’re Black.

Not when you’re broke.

Not when you walk alone without whiteness beside you.

Oyena quickly learned:

Without Aurora’s accent, her card, her fathers — she was just another girl from nowhere.

A “vagrant.”

A “runaway.”

A “messed up black kid.”

She learned where public toilets stayed unlocked the longest.

Which benches were safe enough to close your eyes for fifteen minutes.

Which tourists looked at you with pity — and which ones looked through you like you were dirt on glass.

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One morning, she bathed in the icy waters of Clifton.

A man — white, shirtless, sunburnt — yelled at her.

> “This isn’t a township beach!”

She looked him dead in the eyes and said nothing.

Because she knew what he was really saying:

> You don’t belong here without us.

You don’t belong here unless we let you.

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Later, a group of girls her age walked past her near Sea Point.

They laughed loud, dressed in school uniforms just like hers used to be.

One of them stopped, looked at her.

> “Wait… are you that girl? From St. Cyprian’s? Aurora?”

They didn’t even recognize her fully.

Just the ghost of the girl they used to follow on Instagram.

She nodded, weakly.

> “Damn. What happened to you?”

No one waited for an answer. They walked on, laughing again.

She stood in their shadows.

And just for a moment, grief almost pulled her under.

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That night, the wind howled.

She had no jacket.

She hadn’t eaten in two days.

She curled beneath a closed surf shack.

And that’s when she saw her.

An old woman.

Dressed in rags.

But her eyes — golden, sharp, burning like fire behind wet wood.

She sat beside Oyena and didn’t speak for a long time.

Then she said:

> “You carry a flame, but the world will call it madness before they call it prophecy.”

Oyena said nothing.

The woman pulled out a piece of bread from a cloth bag.

> “They will not feed you, child. Not yet.

But the land knows you. The sea sings to you.

You are not forgotten — you are forged.”

Then she stood, as if pulled by wind alone, and disappeared.

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Oyena slept for the first time in a week.

And in her dream, a gate stood before her.

It was made of bones and vines.

Behind it, voices whispered her name — her true name.

A deep voice said:

> “Before you enter, you must bury the last fear.”

> “What fear?” she asked.

> “The fear that you were not meant to survive.”

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She woke with a new hunger.

Not for food.

For answers.

For roots.

For home.

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