IAAF World Championships. Berlin, 2009. An 18-year-old Mokgadi Caster Semenya stretches her body in lane four, just a few steps behind the turn of the curve on the blue track. In the heats she blew past her competitors with ease, having just qualified to compete in her first senior trial. 30 seconds in and she’s already breezed to pole position. But she slows on the bend, falling into the huddle on the interior lane as Kenya’s Janeth Busienei takes the lead. Lap two and Caster breaks out of the pack with a speed that can only be described in hyperbole and superlative. She turns her head, checks over her right shoulder. No-one. She’s a little anxious. A little confused. She checks again. Nothing and no-one. No-one still as she skips over the finish line. She’s barely even broken a sweat. On the other side of the globe South Africans gather closer to their screens. The cheers cut abruptly. Excited anticipation. Rapt – we wait for it. She brings her arms up at her side in celebration. Hands turn it, out and in again y’know, to brush the dirt off the shoulders.

Time: 1:55:45. Two and half seconds ahead of the other 800m athletes.

When she watches the footage later will she notice, maybe, the arms and legs flailing and thrashing behind her, desperately willing their respective bodies forward while she seemingly sails to finish. Steady. Secure. Sure.

“I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me – to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks. I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and to be entered – to leave and to be left – to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving. I would like to drive forward and at other times to rest or be driven.” Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.

Before she can collect her gold medal in Berlin, the rumours, toxic, begin to infect her surrounds.

“Is it true,” reporters ask, “that she is really a man?”

In a clip of the race online, someone has drawn a red circle around her stomach. “Look at that six pack. Man???”

Another video. Another red circle. This time around her genitals. Highlighting a “very obvious” bulge that no-one else but that particular commentator can see.

The IAAF confirms the rumour: Yes. There have been concerns. They confirm the other one: yes, she was tested both in South Africa, and in Berlin. ASA’s disgraced former president, Leonard Chuene, denies the allegation. Later he’ll cop to deceiving Caster into signing off on the tests.

“Oh, man, I don’t know what to say. It’s pretty good to win a gold medal and bring it home.” Her face is measured. So is her response. A classic post-match interview from a consummate athlete, still a teen. “I didn’t know I could win that race, but for the first time in my life… the experience… the World Championships. I couldn’t believe it, man.”

Gold looks good on her. She wears it well. On a YOU Magazine cover, September 2009, gold drips from her neck, from her arms. Pours out of her skin.

Caster beams off the face of it. Her hair a full afro, day 3 curls falling and framing her face. A gold chain-link necklace hangs past her shoulders, down past her chest and rests heavy over her breasts, stopping some millimetres shy of her manicured hands, nails a burnt red purple hue. Bracelets coil from forearm to wrist and the cover announces loudly its self-appreciation. It pats its own back in caps lock and bold. “WE TURN SA’S POWER GIRL INTO A GLAMOUR GIRL – AND SHE LOVES IT! WOW, LOOK AT CASTER NOW!”

The 18-year old 800m World Champion. “Power”. “Girl”. “Glamour”. “Wow, look at Caster now!”

She tells the journalist, “God made me the way I am and I accept myself”.

In other articles, writers feel pressured to describe her body. The sinew of her arms. The breadth of her shoulder. Her jaw. Her chest. Her frame which apparently makes other runners seem “diminutive” in contrast.

Hijra (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal) – Transgender, Intersex and non-binary people’s who perform a specific societal function, normally making a living as entertainers, performers and sex workers.

Recent studies show how in the 1800’s, Britain began to systematically oppress and eras non-binary people. Children were taken from their parents. Non-binary people were criminalised, forced underground, murdered, assaulted and prohibited from earning a living.

The message was clear: conform or die.

It still is.

An image from the Rio Olympics 2016.

Three women on the track. Two white, one black.

Mokgadi in green, gold and white. In profile. In solidarity. Thin cornrows that climb to the crown of her head. Her arms outstretched to comfort another athlete who has her back to us. Her hair is… somewhere in the spectrum from a kind of brown to a kind of brown. The number 422 in green pinned to her back. The faceless woman cries into the arms of British runner Lyndsey Sharpe. Sharpe, with the scowl on her face. With that look in her eyes. What is it? Irritation? Disgust? Arrogance?

I don’t have the word for that word, but I know that look too well. On the faces of white teachers in school. In the eyes of white women in lifts. White women white womening, their faces saying always, “No. Not you. You don’t belong here”.

"Hermaphrodite, what is that? Somebody tell me, what is hermaphrodite in Pedi? There's no such thing, hermaphrodite, in Pedi. So don't impose your hermaphrodite concepts on us.”

"You are either a woman or a man. When a child is born you say it is a baby girl or a boy. We have never heard in the village a child being announced, 'we were given a hermaphrodite'." Julius Malema, October 2009.

“I was coming down the home straight, we were not far away and you can see how close it is. That is encouraging. We will work hard and aim to come back even stronger.” Lyndsey Sharpe ran a personal best that race, placing in 6th position, almost an entire 5 seconds behind Caster.

“For me, she is not a woman. She is a man.” Italy’s Elisa Cusma. She too finished five places behind Caster Semenya at the World Championships in 2009.

If I were wittier, I would say something about the confluence of white mediocrity, the courage of entitlement and tears, and always ending up in 6th place. But I am tired. Black women are tired.

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On Google this name doesn’t come up in relation to Caster’s. But it does many black women’s minds.

Born somewhere in 1789 near the Gamtoos River and orphaned before adolescence, Sara Baartman was sold into slavery at the age of 16 after her husband was murdered by Dutch colonisers. She was then moved to Cape Town to labour as a servant belonging to Hendrik Cesars, the brother of the trader who took her as a slave.

William Dunlop was a Scottish military surgeon at the Cape Slave Lodge who used his interest in African animal specimen to supplement his income. The popular narrative: the surgeon meets Sara and tries to convince her to travel to England with him. She declined but the good doctor persisting, seeing a money-making opportunity that would benefit them both. Failing to win her over, he turned his efforts to Cesars, her owner. A free black man, Cesars had occurred a lot of debt buying himself and his family to freedom. He agreed, and together with Dunlop, Baartman and two unnamed black boys, they travelled to the empire.

The rest we know.

A phenomenon. A creature from the interior of Africa. The Hottentot Venus displayed first in Piccadilly Circus and then in Paris where she was displayed in laboratory to an audience of scientists, academics and the society’s upper crust. They could pay more to finger and probe at the genitalia. After her death, her genitals were displayed in a jar at Musee l’Homme in Paris, until the government of South Africa called for repatriation.

Dutee Chand, an athlete from Bangalore, described in detail the procedures performed on her during her gender testing. Chromosome analysis. An MRI. A physical exam to measure the effects of testosterone on her body including measuring and palpitating her clitoris, vagina and labia. And grading her pubic hair and breast size according to a graduated scale.

Was it February, 2013 when Handri Walters, an undergrad at Stellenbosch University opened a cupboard in the University’s Sasol Museum and found a human skull, and instruments used to measure hair type and eye colour. Engraved on one of the instruments, the name of leading Nazi Eugenicist Eugene Fischer.

In that weird museum in Makhanda with the camera obscura in its skull, I found a book on phrenology.

To research: Fischer’s experiments on mixed-raced children and black women in Namibia.

To research: The role of science and the institution in killing black women.

To research: What happened to the family of Henrietta Lacks?

1966: The IOC requires all female athletes to undergo centralised gender-testing, checking the genitals of every female participant in what they termed the “nude parade”. After international outrage, the committee introduces a more “humane” verification tool. A chromosome test that many scientists and geneticists find inaccurate. They argue, the scholars, that the committee is forcing science to make delineations that nature itself refuses to draw.

2018: The IAAF reintroduces an antiquated regulation that requires female runners to chemically alter the levels of testosterone in their bodies.

April 2019: Caster takes gold running 5000m at the SAAC, the second runner-up trailing over 100m behind her.

May 2019: The courts uphold the IAAF’s ruling, effectively confining Caster to two options: quit running, or alter your body to meet the IAAF’s arbitrary standardisations.

Later that day she’s bent over the start line at the Doha Diamond League, her hair slicked in a ponytail. The first lap looks bleak. We’ve seen this before. How they prod and prod and prod at her until she cracks, gives in, runs fast enough to win but not enough to illicit more abuse.

Her celebration is muted. She applauds with the audience, poses for the cameras with a thumbs-up, no smile. Behind her five runners are bent over, hands on knees, spent and struggling for breath. Another sits on the polyurethane tartan, reclining backwards into her arms. All of them, heaving chests. All of them, wet faces and shortened breath. Caster with the cameras, thumb still accusing the air, still unsmiling. Her eyes darting unstill. Unsure. She mouths something unintelligible to herself the entire time.

That scene in Pulp Fiction. Quentin Tarantino and his love of “niggers”.

Jimmie: Did you notice a sign out in front of my house that said "Dead Nigger Storage"?

Jules: No. I didn't.

Jimmie: You know WHY you didn't see that sign?

Jules: Why?

Jimmie: 'Cause it ain't there, 'cause storing dead niggers ain't my fucking business, that's why!

Who was it who said that there’s nothing they love more than a dead nigger.

Project Coast - The much denied apartheid biochemical warfare project. Supervised by Dr Wouter Basson, the projected experimented with undetectable methods of “neutralising the enemy”. The incidents included the poisoning over 200 SWAPO members (bodies dumped into the Atlantic), and the recruitment of young boys by infamous askari Joe Mamasela. He would later lace their drinks, and detonate a bomb in the minivan the boys were traveling in.

Some noted techniques: forced sterilisation, birth control in the water supply, poisoned envelopes and stamps, and walking sticks and umbrellas that shoot “undetectable” poison pellets.

During the TRC hearing on apartheid chemical researcher, he admits to attempts at a bacterial strain that would only kill black people. He claims that they succeeded. Basson denies everything. In 2002, he’s aquitted of 54 charges. Today, he runs his practice from a cardiology healthcare organisation in Durbanville, Cape Town.

22 May, 2019, two days after her Doha win, after the IAAF ruling, Caster posts this on her Twitter: We’re all in the same game; just different levels. We’re all dealing with the same hell, just different devils.

Or, as scholar and poet Fred Moten puts it, "The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognised that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognise that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”