Thabiso Sekhula
LIMPOPO SECRETS: Thabiso Sekhula went home to find closure. Instead, a whole new world opened up.
It’s been just over three years since we’ve moved to Limpopo. We packed our bags, left our jobs and moved to the village of Sekgosese. I can’t tell you what it means to move back home after living and working in Gauteng for more than 15 years, but I am grateful.
The things I have discovered about my life and my people since returning have been life changing.
We moved here so that I could get some closure after my mother passed away in 2017. I only stayed a day after the burial, bottling my grief so I could function at work.
But when I fell pregnant in 2019, not having my mother around brought it all back.
Then it became clear as daylight: I wanted to go through it at my home, the place I could be closest to my mother.
In the time after my mother passed, when we would come back during the holidays, the house would look so lonely.
But slowly, with each month that went by, each new event – the birth of our daughter, seeing my kids run around and play where I used to, all the baby’s milestones happening in front of the whole family, being able to visit my mother’s grave on bad and good days, being close to family and relatives, building on to the happy memories shared in this home – it all brought healing.
Limpopo gave me something else. A few weeks ago I found out that we are descendants of the Modjadji Rain Queens, true story.
My people have a village named after them in Bolobedu and our surname directly translates to, “when the rains stop”. The signs were always there, but I was so disconnected from my roots that I couldn’t even see the obvious.
But I’m here now and Limpopo keeps throwing beautiful love notes that everything will be okay. I get to push my baby in a wheelbarrow down the street, buy a R10 bunch of spinach from my neighbour, chase global dreams and be around for my sister who built a house one km down the road from my mother’s house to be close to her.
It’s a very simple life, too boring for some. But it’s given us so much. Limpopo is full of magic.
