Augustine Forest

“That black whore killed my brother. She did.”

The man’s American accent cut sharply through the noise of the courtroom as people rose from their seats and began to depart. His voice was reckless across the chamber, thick with fury and disbelief.

“She slept with that judge too,” he continued bitterly. “That’s what I cannot understand. What do they even see in her? She is scarcely even a woman.”

The woman walked freely towards her motorcar before pausing briefly before the crowd of journalists waiting beyond the courthouse steps. Cameras flashed relentlessly against the grey afternoon light as reporters hurled questions over one another.

For a moment, Augustine stood motionless, her dark glasses shielding the exhaustion in her eyes.

“Yes,” she said at last with cold composure, “I am a whore. A black whore. Ambitious, greedy, sexually wild, improper, and ungovernable in more ways than one.”

The crowd fell strangely silent.

“But I am not a murderer.”

Her voice neither trembled nor rose. It retained the weariness of a woman long accustomed to judgement.

Without another word, she turned from the reporters, entered the waiting car, and disappeared into the restless Cape Town traffic while the cameras continued flashing behind her like distant lightning.

***

At the precise moment when the sun disappeared behind the vast blue mountains, she would run behind the hut and climb onto the low wall of stone and red earth, where she began her daily ritual. There she watched the sky surrender its ordinary blue to shades of rose and amber—an occurrence the scientists might explain, though never satisfactorily to her young mind. She longed to understand why it happened at all, and why correctly at that hour of the day.

No one else in the village seemed moved by the golden evening light. They had perhaps witnessed it too often for it to stir them any longer. Yet to her, it was never merely a matter of repetition. It was what the sight awakened within a person: a strange calmness, a serenity that descended with the changing clouds. Unless she alone possessed such feelings.

“Mosili, it is getting cold! Come and fetch your jersey!”

Her mother’s voice drifted from the cottage.

“I am coming, Mother.”

Her mother considered the habit foolish. She saw no value in staring at the sky. She herself had once been a beautiful woman. She had married Mosili’s father as his second wife, though she had long been his mistress beforehand. He was forty-three years older than she was. The two wives lived separately, each with her own house and fields. First, she bore him a son, and afterwards Mosili—an awkward, dark-skinned child whom the village never considered beautiful.

Mosili’s father was a respected farmer and businessman. Whatever his hands touched prospered. Though he possessed little formal education, he had transformed humble village fields into thriving commercial enterprises. He was decisive, sharp-minded, and gifted with uncommon instinct. She admired him deeply and wished to follow in his footsteps. He often called her “my son,” for he found little promise in her brother, attributing all his idleness and vanity to the lightness of his complexion.

“Once a man is born with yellow tights,” he would say bitterly, “you may be certain he shall amount to nothing respectable.”

The remark was cruel, born not merely from prejudice but from disappointment. To the old man, his son’s appearance, foreign mannerisms, and foolish ambitions seemed evidence of a spirit already corrupted by laziness and imitation.

Her brother worshipped American culture. He wished to become a rapper. His trousers sagged absurdly beneath oversized shirts and glittering belts; he wore flat caps, heavy chains, expensive trainers, and listened to foreign music no one in the village understood. Their father regarded him with disappointment.

From childhood, Mosili knew only two professions: farming and teaching. Of the two, only farming stirred her imagination. She questioned her father endlessly, and he answered each inquiry with patience and seriousness. He was old enough to have been her grandfather. Indeed, his children from his first marriage were all older than her own mother.

When Mosili entered Standard Seven, her mother tasted the bitterness she had once inflicted upon another woman. Her father began a public affair with the village chief’s wife—a lean, ageing woman with fifteen children and an austere manner. In the evenings, he would meet her beneath the pretence of discussing village affairs. Soon afterwards, Mosili’s mother threw herself from the cliffs beyond the village. Life, however, did not pause to grant the child enough time to mourn before hitting again; barely five months later, her father died of a heart attack. And thus, within that span of a single terrible season, childhood was severed from her life as cleanly and mercilessly as though by the stroke of a sharpened knife

Her uncle—her father’s younger brother, assumed responsibility for the business and for the children. Of all the men she had known, he was the gentlest. Affectionate and generous, he cared for her with genuine tenderness. She loved him more than she had ever loved any man. But peace never remained long in that family. Her brother, together with a friend, shot the uncle during a dispute over business affairs; the old man scarcely understood himself. They spent only three nights in police custody before returning home. Shortly afterwards, her brother stole the remainder of their father’s fortune and vanished into Gauteng, chasing fame and superstardom.

“I cannot imagine marrying a brother like you,” he sneered before leaving. “Good luck finding a husband, lil homie—oh, little sister. Excuse me, miss.” 

Those were the last words she heard from him.

Her father’s first wife took Mosili into her home. The woman treated her with distant politeness, though Mosili never understood why such kindness had been extended to her at all. She made herself useful: attending school, cleaning the house, washing dishes, preparing meals, and retiring each evening silently, for she had no friends. One winter evening, they sat around the fire inside the hut when the woman’s son arrived unexpectedly with a companion.

“You remember Mosili?” his mother asked warmly.

“Yes, Mother. I should have recognised her without your help. Look how she has grown.”

His companion, Letlama, was an older man—wealthy by the look of him, though she could not guess his exact age. Outside stood an enormous motorcar unlike anything she had ever seen. Though her father had enjoyed material prosperity, he had never seen a need to own one. Such a lifestyle belonged to another world.

By the time Mosili reached her final year of high school, tragedy visited again. Returning home one afternoon, she found strangers gathered outside the house. It was then she learned that her father’s first wife had died. The grief struck harder than even the deaths of her parents. For the woman had once spoken to her with a brutal honesty no one else dared offer. One winter evening, as they sat beside the lava-like fire in the hut, the old woman spoke with an honesty so severe that Mosili would remember every word for the rest of her life.

“You are a beautiful child,” she said, “but you are not pretty. Beauty belongs to the spirit; prettiness belongs to the eye. And this world, my child, worships what it can see far more readily than what it must discover.”

The flames crackled between them.

“This village never considered you pretty,” she continued. “Nor, I suspect, shall the world beyond it. Things will not be handed to you because of your face. Men will not pursue you for beauty as they pursued your mother.”

Her voice conveyed neither cruelty nor tenderness—only truth too harsh for such a young age and brain.

“Your mother was a striking woman. Her skin glimmered with a splendour capable of awakening sight in the blind themselves, and her lips were red as though prepared to set the village aflame. She boasted the kind of beauty that unsettles wise and foolish men alike. Such women move easily through life while the world opens doors before them.”

The old woman stirred the fire with a stick before continuing.

“If a man ever claims to love you, he will do so because he believes you capable of loyalty, labour, and endurance. Women like you and me are not chosen for ornament. We are chosen because we can build homes, survive hardship, plough fields, lead cattle through drought, and keep a family standing when beauty has faded and desire has grown restless. Women like us survive through usefulness, not admiration.”

Mosili listened in silence.

“Do not allow loneliness to govern your life,” the woman said. “Rise above longing, and you shall discover freedom. And by freedom, I mean peace of mind. A woman at peace with herself is a woman no misery can destroy.”

The firelight trembled against the mud walls.

“You have an opportunity I never had. Seek education. Seek knowledge. Become the woman you choose to become, not merely the woman others demand you to be. There are gifts within you greater than prettiness, though the world may fail to recognise them at first.”

For the first time, her voice softened.

“There are blessings and curses hidden within every human being. I lived through the curse. You must search for the blessing.”

She fell silent for a long while before speaking again.

“I never wished for your father back after he chose your mother over me. Not once. Yet even now, after all these years, I find I have never truly released him from my heart.”

Her tired eyes rested upon Mosili.

“Had you inherited your mother’s beauty entirely, I might never have worried for you. Beautiful women are forgiven much by this world. But that privilege did not pass to you.”

A faint smile crossed her face then, weary and humourless.

“Your brother inherited it instead.”

When the matriculation results were released, she was awarded a golden trophy for academic excellence. She then applied to study Crop Science at the National University of Lesotho with little understanding of the discipline itself. She chose it because she was told no woman was expected to.

At university, she was the only female student in her department. Her closest companion became Manana, a girl so extraordinarily beautiful that Mosili found herself studying prettiness as though it were another science altogether. The pretty girls moved through life differently on campus. Men purchased them gifts, drove them through the campus gates in expensive cars, and carried their shopping bags. Meanwhile, Mosili spent her weekends knee-deep in soil, labouring in the university gardens for extra money. Still, she was content. Knowledge, she believed, was the only inheritance truly available to her.

During the Christmas holidays, she returned home, longing for the familiarity of the village despite all its ghosts. Her father’s first wife’s son had also returned, accompanied once again by Letlama.

“Mosili,” he said gravely one evening, “I need to speak with you.”

She sat opposite him.

His friend was in the car.

“You have met my friend before, right?” He asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“My friend has paid the full bridal price. He is here to take you home with him. Your studies will continue as before. Nothing shall change.”

She stared at him, unable to comprehend his meaning.

“You are sixteen without kin, without—”

He paused to clear his throat.

 “Without beauty—this is the best thing that you will ever experience in your lifetime, and you should be grateful that this man has chosen you with all your dark, shiny skin, dipped hips, a huge, manly waist, and featureless face,” he continued impatiently. “Your husband is waiting outside.”

He talked to her as if she were a village puppy up for sale, and walked to join his friend in the car. By dawn, she found herself in a great house in Maseru, dressed in a new seshoeshoe gown, and wrapped in a woollen blanket gifted by the man who was now her husband. The house could easily accommodate all people from her village. Letlama stood tall, cinnamon-skinned and proud, wrapped in a blue Seanamarena blanket bejewelled with maize motifs, just like the one her father wore day and night. He was a man of few words, but never cruel to her.

Three years later, she was the mother of two children—a daughter and a son—and completing her university degree whilst living in a newly developed suburb where children never wandered the streets. Gradually, she began to believe the old woman’s warnings had been foolish after all. Had she not acquired everything she was told she never could? Fine clothes, straightened hair, painted lips, elegant shoes, high-end motorcars—everything had arrived through marriage. Perhaps beauty mattered less than power. Her husband secured her a position at the Ministry of Agriculture after graduation. The work suited her brilliantly. She travelled among rural farmers, advising on crop yields, irrigation, and soil quality. She excelled.

At twenty-five, she applied to study a Master of Science in Economics at the University of Cape Town. Two weeks later, her husband was arrested. The charges included murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, and vehicle hijacking. Only then did she discover the source of his immense wealth: a sophisticated criminal syndicate stealing Volkswagen vehicles between Lesotho and South Africa using counterfeit police uniforms and forged identification. It was a major operation under the protection of both countries’ government officials. The revelation devastated her less than a trail of pretty women that came with it, kept under her husband’s belt, for by then she had learned to love him.

When she departed for Cape Town, she left her children in the care of an elderly woman from the village whom she trusted completely. Cape Town astonished her. Until then, she had lived among Basotho people almost exclusively; race itself had never occupied her imagination in the South African sense. The city introduced her to entirely new social worlds. There were blacks, whites and coloureds.

She soon found part-time employment at a wine estate in Constantia. Dismissed after criticising a bottle label as “lifeless,” she was unexpectedly rehired days later and asked to redesign it instead. In searching for an illustrator, she encountered a young white artist with bronze-coloured teeth. That evening, she slept with a white man for the first time.  Three months later, the estate sent her to Johannesburg to negotiate with a billionaire whose patronage they had pursued unsuccessfully for years. The business stood upon the brink of ruin, and desperation lingered underneath the estate’s distinguished dignity like rot concealed under painted wood.

She arrived at the hotel in Hyde Park clothed in a navy-blue suit and black stilettos, carrying herself with the assurance that had already begun to discern her from the others. Through the long evening, she spoke with intelligence and charm, and by the following morning, she departed with his signature upon the papers the estate had once believed impossible to secure. When she returned to Cape Town, a celebration was held in her honour, and soon afterwards came her promotion. The directors marvelled openly at what she had accomplished, where seasoned executives, managers, and consultants had repeatedly failed.

Within scarcely six months of joining the estate, she had fused her knowledge of crop science, her understanding of economics, and the peculiar force of her own presence into something remarkably effective. The results were undeniable, though she understood, perhaps more clearly than any of them, that the world often rewarded not merely intelligence, but the ability to move gracefully through the desires and weaknesses of others.

And that is when she reinvented herself entirely. Mosili Morunyane became Augustine Forest. Augustine was her traditional Christian name, and Forest was the English translation of her surname. She wore signature medium black braids, sneezed and coughed Lesotho’s traditional way of speaking and adopted a standard British accent, and dressed in tailored suits that were identical in style but varied in colour—never black. She avoided makeup and colourful lipstick, ran for an hour every day, and started work at exactly 7:45 each morning without fail. She

By her second academic year, she had become both the estate’s top employee and the highest-performing student in her programme. She entered affairs with wealthy white men and women alike, seeking pleasure with an almost religious intensity. Among them was Timothy Roberts, an American wine distributor married to a South African woman, residing in Sea Point. Timothy was from Washington, DC. He was chivalrous, intelligent and jostled behind the bedroom lock. The kind of man who lit candles and scattered red roses on the floor on a random Tuesday evening. He fell hopelessly in love with her. And even so, Augustine regarded love as a complication best avoided. She was poised in manners, Maluti icy, aloof, fearless, uncompromisingly decisive, commanding and focused. She radiated the spirit of a dragon and that of a savannah lioness.

With her husband, intimacy had always resembled duty more than desire. She felt less like a wife than a servant kneeling faithfully before an impossible-to-satisfy god. Sex was something a woman had to perform in bed with her husband when the night had fallen. In Cape Town, she discovered desire without obligation, and sex was not a nightly duty. And with white men and women, she experienced something altogether different: not submission, but worship. In their company, she felt attended to, indulged, almost divine herself. And from that time onward, she never again shared a bed with a black man.

She had rented a modest flat in Claremont, overlooking a quiet street lined with ageing oak trees whose branches trembled endlessly beneath the Cape winds. One afternoon, she received a telephone call from a wine distributor based in Stellenbosch—a woman named Patti—requesting a luncheon meeting to discuss business matters. Augustine welcomed the invitation with enthusiasm. She believed in the usefulness of human relationships and the power of carefully cultivated alliances. To her mind, success seldom belonged solely to intelligence; it appertained equally to those who understood people.

They agreed to meet at a restaurant in Constantia after working hours.

Patti arrived late.

She was exceedingly beautiful in the glossy and effortless manner of women who appeared untroubled by labour or inconvenience. Her eyelashes were long and theatrical, her nails refined, and her clothing so extravagantly feminine that Augustine doubted she was tied to the wine industry at all. She resembled an actress cast in the role of a wealthy man’s ornamental wife, dressed in a pink miniskirt and tightly fitted corset, moving through the restaurant with a Capetonian demeanour.

Augustine rose politely.

“I am Augustine Forest,” she said, extending her hand.

Patti did not immediately take it.

“Timothy wants a divorce,” she said instead, her gaze fixed steadily upon Augustine’s face. “I received the papers yesterday. He intends to begin a new life with you.”

Only then did she place her funny, little square handbag that matched her dress upon the table and take her seat.

“You do not resemble the woman I imagined,” she added. “I am Patti Roberts.”

Augustine resumed her seat with composure, though inwardly she felt the faint disturbance of surprise.

“Well then, Mrs Roberts,” she replied after a brief silence, “what do you intend to do?”

Patti shrugged.

“At present, nothing. Though I imagine I shall leave the marriage with a considerable amount of money.”

Her soft-looking, decorated hands were drifting sensually, rising above her reconstructed face as she spoke.

“That matters greatly to you, does it not?” Augustine asked.

Patti’s lips curved faintly.

“Does it not matter to you?”

“No,” Augustine answered, though the certainty in her voice was not wholly genuine.

That evening, upon returning to her flat, Augustine discovered a message from a number she did not recognise.

Stop it immediately.

She telephoned the elderly woman caring for her children back home. The woman informed her that Letlama had recently been released from prison. He had returned briefly to the house the previous night, collected one of his vehicles, and departed again without explanation.

Sleep deserted her entirely. All through the night, she lay awake, listening to the distant sounds of traffic drifting through the open window, wondering what calamity might already be moving silently towards her. She did not telephone Timothy. Nor did she answer any of his calls. At dawn, overcome by unease, she finally reached for her telephone and dialled his number. To her astonishment, the ringing sounded not from afar, but from within the flat.

A coldness passed through her body. Slowly, she rose and followed the sound towards the kitchen. There, upon the tiled floor, Timothy lay motionless in a widening pool of blood. For several seconds she could neither breathe nor cry out. The world around her seemed suddenly unreal, suspended in dreadful atrocity.