Harare — I WILL never forget the day my daughter let it be known that she wanted to be treated as a person in her own right, capable of fighting and winning her personal battles fairly and squarely.
She was all of seven years old. She had been playing a card game with her older sister and cousins when she caught me signalling to the older girls to hold back or make the wrong moves to allow my "baby" to win. But rather than welcome being allowed to have an unfair advantage, she made it clear she was smart enough to win the game on her own wits. After stressing that she no longer wanted to be mollycoddled, she declared that from then on, she did not want to be accompanied to the busy and crowded bus terminus where she caught a bus to school. She would henceforth find her own way to school and back home.
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