Five

FOR MANY YEARS, I MOVED around between shelters or slept on the streets, looking for my dad, and sometimes I went back to Khayelitsha.

In my mother’s community, people knew I was a street kid because they saw me coming and going from my mom’s house. As I grew into my teens, people assumed that I was already a prostitute. To me they wouldn’t say anything. But they had a lot to say to my mother. In her own way, she would defend me. She’d say, ‘Well at least she comes and brings food, you know.’

But this stigma stopped me from becoming part of the community because people had already made up their minds about who I was. I felt that if I wanted to be part of any community, I would have to be far from those streets where people thought they knew me.

In 1993, when I was twelve years old, I got involved, like other young kids at the time, in a political rally in Khayelitsha in which Chris Hani spoke against violence.

We ran while singing freedom songs, with no shoes or socks, the sand soft under our feet. It was us kids making noise, singing as we made our way to the stadium, singing and running, and then we got to this wide open space – a gathering of people with faith and hope and spirit, looking forward to change.

And everyone was talking about Chris Hani, telling us kids who he was and what he stood for. We were there for the whole day, waiting to hear him, and it was the most talked-about thing.

When he eventually spoke, I loved his voice, his activism, his presence.

He was so encouraging towards everyone and everyone was so excited to see him. By the time we heard his speech, I was in love with this guy who stood up against the things that were hurtful and painful. I felt like he knew my personal pain.

I had been uncomfortable in the dusty township after my life in Woodstock, but Hani told us that we deserved equal rights. That even if you were removed from a house with a proper toilet and you had to come to this dusty place, you could still make it. You were still worthy.

It was one of those special moments, a real moment of connection, and an escape from my life into a place where the community felt like a family, and everyone felt like they belonged. We came back late in the night, still buzzing from the toyi-toyi.

After seeing Hani, it started to make sense why I felt so frustrated at my dad and my dislocation from our happy, solid Woodstock home. And not only that, because what I saw in Khayelitsha were these people living in the wind-blown sand. The roofs of their shacks were covered with holes so that the shacks filled with sand when the wind blew, and flooded when it rained.

From Hani’s speech, I learnt about what apartheid in the country meant for black people. We wanted clean streets, enough water and electricity, and to get things right, for everyone.

This was a moment when I started to enjoy Xhosa culture. But I still didn’t want to stay in dusty, sandy, dangerous Khayelitsha. I always went back to the bridge.

Lea was a short and petite, a sometimes feisty, sometimes quiet girl of about my age, with pronounced Khoisan features – a big bottom, light skin and short, peppercorn hair. Her two front teeth were a discoloured yellow-brown, so she never had nice breath, no matter how much she brushed her teeth. She could be cheeky, but was loyal and she knew how to protect me. And I looked after her too – I always felt so protective of her, like she was my little sister.

Lea and I would often run away from the shelters and do our own thing on the streets with our boyfriends. We were both street kids, and we spent a lot of time together.

Both at the shelter and on the street, Lea became my very best friend. I trusted her to look after my toiletries during the times Freckles stole me away – so I trusted her with everything I had. We were always getting caught by the police. They would catch us for stealing food from Shoprite, things like that. Usually, we’d get caught some time in the afternoon, and then we’d be locked up. The cops were always irritated by us being there, taking up space in the cells. They would spend a few hours scaring us.

In the evening, the shifts would change, and then the new cops would come in. They would tell us that they’d take us to Pollsmoor Prison unless we gave them blow jobs.

They’d all stand in a row together while we did that. Then the evening-shift cops would let us go.

It was the cops who took us to Ons Plek shelter, where I ended up staying, on and off, for most of my teenage years. Looking back, I know that Ons Plek gave me lots of opportunities.

But I hated it when I first arrived.

Ons Plek had three bedrooms, with six beds in each room. It looked like a prison. There were noisy wooden floors and you could hear what was going on above and below you.

And there were these tiny lockers, where we kept our stuff – clothes, toiletries, cigarettes, weed, glue, buttons (mandrax). We used to ask our gangster boyfriends to get us locks to put on our lockers, but still people were always breaking into them and stealing our stuff.

Like at all the shelters, it was survival of the fittest.

When I arrived I was already a cheeky, feisty bully. I arrived there together with Lea, straight from jail. On the first night there, we were split up and put in different bedrooms. I was very concerned about being split.

The next day midmorning, we were having a school lesson from these international volunteer tutors – they would come and try to teach us to read and write. Lea leant over and said to me that her vagina was burning. When she said that I looked at her neck, which was covered in love bites. I just knew that she’d been raped. On that first night there, Lea had been molested with sunlight soap.

I learnt later how this was done. The girls would spend the afternoon shaping the big green bar of soap into the shape of a penis, which they would use to rape new girls, girls who threatened the hierarchy of the tight group that formed in the shelter bedrooms.

I was so angry. There was no way the shelter mother couldn’t have known what was going on – her room was right underneath the girls’ bedroom with its noisy wooden floors.

We coped the only way we knew how – we kept quiet. But after that I refused to be separated from her. Every night I just went to her bed and slept there holding her while holding a knife tightly in my hand. If anybody tried anything they would have to go through me.

I was so angry. She was this tiny person. She was also such a quiet person – she didn’t talk much about her life but you could see the sadness in her eyes. People always took advantage of her. I would have done what I needed to do to protect her.

These girls in the shelter, that was their home – and for most of them, it was the only home they’d ever had. We’d come without asking them, and they were protecting their territory.

I was used to the life in shelters, but Ons Plek was different because they gave me more than just bread and butter. They organised school for us. When we were injured, they’d take us to get medical care.

At the shelter we girls were very involved in the running of things. We had duties we had to do to get things done around the place. We cooked our own food. When it was our turn, we got up really early in the morning – we had to make mealiemeal porridge. But if you were the person cooking breakfast then your privilege was to shower first with hot water … and maybe you’d purposefully finish it.

The kitchen duty gave you a time to feel like you were in control. You knew everybody in the house would want to be your friend because they wanted more food. And it gave you some authority – you had to watch that no one took too much food, but you had the control to give a little bit extra to the people you liked.

The other duties never had the same impact – it was always about food. We ate a lot of expired Woolworths food. The only meat we ate was turkey pieces for Saturday supper.

During that time in the shelters, I went to Jan Van Riebeeck Laerskool on Kloof Street in town, which I especially enjoyed. I was in a special class, with shorter hours, with kids of different nationalities who struggled with language and education. My teacher, Mrs Taylor, was great. I was slow to read and write, and she encouraged me so much.

I played netball and went to a lot of netball and rugby tournaments in the Western Cape. On the tournaments I got to know Matthew, a cute guy – I had such a crush on him. Sometimes it felt like I was only going to school just for him, to deliver the love letters that I was always writing him. He was kind, and I was always so surprised that he took my cards from me.

At that time I felt like I lived in two different worlds.

I was still leaving the shelter often: Freckles would come and get me for the weekend and sometimes I’d only come back by Wednesday. But it was because of Matthew that I started going back to the shelter after every weekend – I needed to be at Ons Plek on Monday mornings so that I could get my uniform and go to school.

I never really knew how he felt about me, but at the school dance at the end of the year, I danced with him. Just the two of us in the near-empty hall, dancing to ‘All for love’ from The Three Musketeers.

That made me so happy.