I grew up in a village outside Polokwane in Limpopo. At school and in the community we would always hear older boys talking about lepanta. As a young boy, I knew lepanta to be a Sotho word for “belt”. I soon learnt that it was coined by boys in the street corners to mean “when two or more boys have sex with one girl at the same time”.
These older boys would say with pride: “Ka weekend re bethile ngwana o mongwe lepanta.” (Over the weekend we took turns having sex with a certain girl.)
Whether the girl agreed or not we didn’t know. But it was the way these boys would proudly say it that, as a young boy, made me and other younger boys aspire to engage in lepanta.
It sounded like a cool thing to do. So cool that some of the older boys would ask each other after every weekend if they scored a lepanta session or if they just had “boring sessions” with their steady girlfriends. And it created such pressure on some of these boys that when they were asked, they would lie just to fit in.
At the time, I thought it was a cool thing to do. It was fashionable, and I wanted to fit in. I started wondering about how to engage in lepanta. Do I get a girl and then tell her that my friends and I would like to have lepanta with her? Do I recruit my classmates to go look for a beautiful girl (or any other girl even if she is not attractive), and ask to have lepanta with her? Or do I actually force a girl on her way from school, lock her in my mother’s house and call my friends…?
As it happened, I never asked anyone how it was done. I chose not to ask, because I didn’t want to be seen as stupid. And no, I have never engaged in lepanta. I was toying with the idea because the peer pressure was mounting to give it a go. But before I could, I was already starting to mature and differentiate between right and wrong.
I realised as I was growing up that most of these mapanta happened after drinking sessions in the tavern. A boy would talk to a girl, propose to go home with her that evening, and buy her lots of beer until she was drunk. Then he would take her home and call his friends from the tavern to take turns sleeping with her. That’s how some of my school mates told me it was done. The girl may or may not know that she actually slept with the whole village’s soccer team. And in those days, girls, even if they knew, didn’t have much say.