Peeling off the layers to get to the skin she’s in
● Women don’t understand their worth because they have been raised to be submissive to men.
That’s the message Isibaya actress Ayanda Borotho wants to get across in her debut book, Unbecoming to Become, a memoir about reclaiming her identity and worth as a woman.
“We are surviving patriarchal narratives that we didn’t write and a lot of this has to do with not understanding our worth,” she says.
The release of Borotho’s book, which deals with the expectations that society, culture and religion have placed on generations of women, comes in the wake of widespread protests against gender-based violence.
“As girls we are born into a disempowered environment … We are first born belonging to the father and then we are handed over to the husband, so we’ve been taught to believe that our worth is defined by the man,” said the former model, who has also starred in Generations and the Leon Schuster film Mr Bones.
“Through my story, I’m trying to help young girls form an identity for themselves and help us reclaim our identity.”
Borotho is also fiercely passionate about her own children staying true to their identity, which is the reason she has a “no-English policy” at home and prefers people speak to her children in Zulu or Sotho.
“I’m black, I’m Zulu … my husband is Basotho and my children are black, with parents of African descent. What other language must my children speak? Black people in this country think they have identity, but a lot of them don’t. They don’t understand how big of a part our language is of our identity.”
In her book Borotho opens up about what it was like dating a gangster at the age of 15 in KwaMashu, Durban, where she grew up.
She says dating a gangster exposed her to cheating, as well as physical and emotional abuse that conditioned her to accept that sharing a man was normal.
But her own journey of “unbecoming” began when she realised she had lost her voice.
“I was overwhelmed by motherhood, I was overwhelmed by marriage and I felt so lost in the life that I was now living and I couldn’t recognise myself any more.”
That was when she began “peeling off the layers” of what she had become through societal, cultural and religious expectations.