Naniki Seboni

Naniki Seboni, tells us how she was teased at school for ‘wanting to be like a white girl’ because she used sunscreen and how at age 24, she was diagnosed with Stage 3 malignant melanoma. “Around six or seven, I got my first mole on my left hand. It looked like a Jelly Tot. A rough, grey Jelly Tot. It was still round and just kept growing. My mom and my uncle then decided they were going to get rid of it. So, they took thread and tied it around the mole. A few weeks later, the mole fell off at school. I was so embarrassed, picked it up, put it in my pocket and showed my mom when I got home. But a week later, it started growing again. My mom decided to wait for it to grow back to full size again and repeated the thread action. It fell off but this time it never grew back. I still have the scar,” she says. When she was 22 and in varsity, a mole developed on her left leg. “This one was different to the other one. It was black, and painful from when it was still small. Then it started growing irregular and looked like a huge fly. It was quite unsightly so I no longer wore shorts. Though, when I put jeans on, it was sore to pull them up over the mole,” the 29-year-old explains. “I hit it on a coffee table and it bled for about 15 minutes.” My lecturer, noticed the mole and advised I get it checked out, whereas everyone in the black community said, “ke koko”, meaning it’s normal as most black people have them on their necks.”

She finally decided to have the mole examined in 2015. She was being treated as a neurology patient at Steve Biko Academic Hospital due to anxiety and insomnia from the shock of her father’s death. “Before I got discharged, I asked them to check the mole.” She was sent to dermatology and the mole was removed and a biopsy was done. She waited a month for the results.