Written stories
Kamohelo Ramaipato
I grew up in Khayelitsha with my mother, grandmother and younger sister. My grandmother used to tell me lots of stories. She couldn’t read, but was really good at telling stories, it made me imagine these places and it was almost as if I was there! There was one story in particular that I particularly enjoyed, it was about a child who lived with his grandmother, just like me so I could make a connection:
“In the village where they lived, there was a wolf that wanted to eat the child. When the grandmother left each day to do her daily chores, like farming, the child would lock the door. The grandmother told the child ‘when I come back, I’m going to sing a certain song so you know it’s me and then you can open the door’, it was like a secret code. One day, the wolf tried to sing the same song in order to trick the child and make him open the door. However, the wolf’s voice was different from the grandmother’s and the child said ‘you’re not my grandmother!’ The rest of the story involved the wolf trying to change his voice to sound like the grandmother and make the child open up so he could eat him.
I liked that story a lot, especially the way my grandmother told it!