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At a Franschhoek Literary Festival event sponsored by News24, Africa Melane talks to Olympic track champion Caster Semenya about her powerful memoir, The Race to Be Myself. It's an inspirational account of her commitment to her gift, her defiance of institutional hostility, her gratitude and her unshakeable self-belief. The session is on Saturday, 18 May, at 10:00 (session 49).
Click here for the full FLF programme.
Runner Caster Semenya shot to fame on the global sporting stage at age 18. Her speed on the racetrack was phenomenal, but her victories – including two Olympic gold medals – were marred by disputes about her gender. Ultimately, she was banned by World Athletics, unable to defend her Olympic title in 2020 – but has since become an icon in the struggle for human rights. Now, she is ready to own her story and tell it in full. In The Race to Be Myself (Jonathan Ball), Semenya speaks openly about growing up in a loving family and community that never regarded her as different and about understanding her agency, sexuality and athletic ability. Told with conviction and humour, The Race to Be Myself is the story of a life lived in the spotlight, a manifesto for acceptance and change for all.
In this excerpt from the book, Semenya insists that her "story is not one of pain and torment, but rather about hope, self-confidence and resilience".
BOOK: The Race to Be Myself by Caster Semenya (Jonathan Ball)
I am Mokgadi Caster Semenya. I am one of the greatest track and field athletes to ever run the 800m distance. I've won two Olympic gold medals and three world championships, along with dozens of Diamond League meets, and went unbeaten for almost four years. Unfortunately, it is not what I have achieved on the track that has likely brought me to your attention.
Much has been written about me in virtually every major international outlet in the world since I came into the public's eye in 2009, and most of it is outright lies or half-truths. I have waited a long time to tell my story. For more than a decade, I have preferred to let my running do the talking. After what has happened to me, it felt easier that way.
In 2019, the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF, now World Athletics) banned me from running my favoured 800m event, along with the 400m and the 1 500m distances. My last IAAF-sanctioned 800m race was on 30 June 2019, when I won the Diamond League Prefontaine Classic at Stanford University.
I was not banned because I was caught doping or cheating. Rather, I am no longer allowed to run those distances because of a biological condition I was born with and that I refuse to take unnecessary drugs to change.
I have what is called a difference in sex development (DSD), an umbrella term that refers to the varying genetic conditions where an embryo responds in a different way to the hormones that spark the development of internal and external sexual organs.
To put it simply, on the outside, I am female. I have a vagina, but I do not have a uterus. I do not menstruate and my body produces an elevated amount of testosterone, which gives me more typically masculine characteristics than other women, such as a deeper voice and fewer curves. I cannot carry a child because I don't have a womb, but, contrary to what many people think, I do not produce sperm. I can't biologically contribute to making new life.
I did not know any of this about my body until soon after August 2009, when I won the gold medal in the 800m race at the World Championships in Berlin, Germany. I was only 18 years old and had been subjected to invasive and humiliating gender confirmation tests without my consent just prior to the race. What followed was a media firestorm that continues to this day.
People believed all sorts of insanity about me – that I was a boy who managed to hide his penis all the way to the world championships; that I was paid to have my penis removed so South Africa could bring home a medal in the women's category; that I was a hermaphrodite forced to run as a girl for political gain.
Journalists descended into my village and every school I'd ever attended. My parents and siblings, friends and teachers were harassed with calls and by visitors, day and night. I can still hear my mother wailing desperately as she tried to explain to perfect strangers that I was born a girl and that I was her little girl, and why was all of this happening?
I have never spoken in detail about what happened during this time of my life, but I am now ready to do so. It is said that silence will not protect us. From the moment I stepped onto the track for the final meet in Berlin on 19 August 2009, I have been vilified and persecuted. My accomplishments since have been celebrated, yes, but it is hard to think of another athlete at the elite level who has endured as much scrutiny and psychological abuse from sports governing bodies, other competitors and the media as I have.
It has affected me in ways I cannot describe, although I will try. And while I have faced significant hardships throughout my life, I want to make clear that my story is not one of pain and torment, but rather about hope, self-confidence and resilience. I am still standing; I am still here. What has been said about me in the media is not who I really am.
I've heard myself described as "surly", "rude", "shy", "stoic", "dignified" and "superhuman". All those things may seem true at times. I'm also quite charming and funny, and I've been said to have a biting wit.
Like every human, I am many things – a proud black woman from Limpopo, a rural province in the northernmost part of South Africa; a daughter, a sister, a wife; and now I am a mother to two baby girls: Oratile, who was born in 2019, and Oarabile, who was born in 2021.
I feel and I hurt just like a regular person, although I am not considered by science or some people to be a regular woman.
The scientific community has labelled my biological makeup as "intersex", and I am now one of, if not the, most recognisable intersex person in the world. The truth is, I don't think of myself that way. I want everyone to understand that, despite my condition, even though I am built differently to other women, I am a woman.
Of course, growing up, I knew I looked and behaved differently from many of my peers, but my family, my community and my country accepted me as I was and never made me feel like an outsider. The beauty of my childhood was that I never felt othered or unwanted – this is the source of my strength. I have never questioned who I am.
And I am a runner. I love running with all of my heart. It is one of those things that just makes sense to me. Runners at every level know what I mean when I say running makes me feel free, but also grounds me. It is like meditating for me – it centers me.
There's this thing that happens every time I get to the starting line of a race. My mind goes completely silent. I hear nothing except my own breathing. I see nothing except the track in front of me. Some people call this "the zone", where the line between nothing and everything no longer exists – we are simultaneously in and out of our bodies.
I think it's important to talk about lines. We humans are obsessed with them. There are starting lines and finish lines; there are the lines we draw around ourselves that tell others where to stop, where they are not wanted; and there are the lines that define what kind of human we are – our race, our gender, our sexuality.
Most people are content to walk the line as it is drawn, to be defined by it, to stay in their place. I am not one of those people. I never have been. The biological makeup of my body, the way I look on the outside and the way I live my life is a crossing of lines in many people's minds.
The way I look may be what brought me to the IAAF's attention in the first place. According to Sebastian Coe, the current president of the IAAF, there is no line more important, no line more worth protecting than the difference between men and women in sports competition.
As you will see in my story, that line is hard to define, and it keeps moving depending on who is doing the defining. I have been banned from running because women are a "protected class" in athletics, and women with differences in sexual development are considered a threat to the line between genders.
I sometimes remind myself of how blessed I am to be where I am today. Not that many years ago, the sports governing body of my own country of South Africa wouldn't have allowed me to run in the Olympics because I am black.
I was born in 1991, just a few years before the first democratic elections in 1994 would finally begin to unravel that insidious and dehumanising system of government that defined people and even ripped families apart based on the colour of their skin and other physical features.
My parents, older siblings and extended family lived through this time. They were not allowed to travel or live where they wanted; some were forcibly relocated. Black people didn't have access to higher education. And, unlike me, so many great black athletes never got a chance. There is still so much trauma in our communities from the brutality of apartheid. I carry that history of discrimination and resistance and the yearning for freedom within me; they are there in everything I do.
As a young girl, I heard Nelson Mandela, the beloved leader of our country and icon of freedom and resistance around the world, speak about sports as having "the power to inspire ... the power to unite people in a way that little else does..." And I loved sports. I knew from a young age that I wanted to be known and appreciated for my physical talents. My siblings thought I was crazy when, as an eight-year-old girl, I would point up to the skies and say: "One day, it will be me on that plane."
Of course, in those days, I believed I was going to be a famous soccer player and travel with our national team, Bafana Bafana. No notable athletes had ever come out of our small village, and people were more concerned with surviving than dreaming. I had no real reason to believe in my eventual success, but I was sure I was going to make it.
Well, this girl child ran so fast that people insisted no girl could possibly run that fast. Unless, the rumours went, I wasn't really a girl. Or maybe I was a girl, but one whose coaches had pumped her full of drugs that turn women into men anyway. After all, the media said, I had "come out of nowhere" to win. The point seemed to be that I did not belong at the world championships and that my win had to be because I was cheating in some form or other.
Sports and entertainment commentators discussed my facial features, the size of my arms and legs and breasts, the muscles in my abdomen. They would zoom in on pictures of my crotch and wonder what could possibly be going on between my legs. I would say I was being treated like an animal, but I grew up tending to my family's livestock, and we treated them with more respect than that.
I'm aware that black women's bodies, in general, have been objectified and treated as spectacles. The most well-known historical example is Saartjie Baartman, a fellow South African brought to Europe, where she was put on display in circus-like exhibits for a paying audience in the 1800s. Her body's proportions were considered abnormal by Western standards. After her death in 1815 at the age of 25, her genitals were cut from her body, preserved and displayed along with her skeleton in a French museum until 1974. The circumstances of her death aren't clear, but it is said she died of disease, far from the comfort of her people and homeland. Nelson Mandela had Saartjie's remains repatriated once he was in power, and she was finally laid to rest in the country of her birth in 2002.
At times, it seems not much has changed from Saartjie's days. We only have to look at the way women such as Michelle Obama and Serena Williams have been treated by today's media and parts of society. They have been called monkeys, accused of being men. Every part of their body – their musculature, their facial features – has been openly derided and insulted. Black women have always been held to some standard of beauty and femininity that makes us something other than women.
I am a tall, dark-skinned African woman with well-defined muscles, a deep voice and not a lot up on top. I know I look like a man. I know I sound like a man and maybe even walk like a man and dress like one, too. But I'm not a man. I've made no secret of preferring to play soccer and baseball and basketball with boys and hanging out with them when I was growing up. In my village, boys were playing the sports I wanted to play, and my parents didn't stop me from doing what made me happy. I was accepted, but it didn't mean people didn't see that I was different.
Like I used to say to would-be bullies: "You think I look like a boy? So what? What are you going to do about it?"
One thing about me is that I've never tolerated bullying – of myself or others in my presence. If the situation escalated, I'd let my fists do the rest of the talking. Playing sports and having muscles and a deep voice make me less feminine, yes. I'm a different kind of woman, I know. But I'm still a woman.
Caster Semenya talks to media and communications consultant Sias du Plessis about her career, her battles and her new book at https://iono.fm/e/1374826
The Race to Be Myself will be launched at Crystal Court, Mall of Africa in Midrand on 18 November at 11:30 for 12:00. Caster Semenya will be in conversation with broadcaster Robert Marawa. If you wish to attend the launch, email events@exclusivebooks.com.
