I WAS A STREET SURVIVOR, having learnt how to steal, how to defend myself, how to find protection and how to fight off what I thought would harm me – survival instincts that had been developed in my system from the age of nine.
I didn’t mind being smelly and dirty, or having ripped clothes. I lived with street people, and on the street I’d found people that I loved.
At eighteen, I decided to give up street life, and go to Johannesburg to find a job and a new life. I contacted Ntombi, who was a university student in Joburg.
Ntombi was sympathetic when I told her that I thought there were greener pastures in Joburg. She agreed to let me stay with her in Yeoville when I arrived, until I found my way.
Two days before I left Cape Town, I called her again and she said I should call when I arrived in Park Station. She was so excited for me, she said. For me, it was that feeling of having something so exciting to look forward to – my new life. Ntombi reassured me that everything was going to be great, that we’d hang out and do stuff together.
Everything in me was just so, so excited to be taking this step. Ntombi was in Joburg to study so I knew she had great connections. I couldn’t wait to see her.
I had packed my stuff and I was ready. I had my bottle of glue, I had three zols, I had buttons wrapped up in paper. I had a pair of jeans and one tight top. I had this funny bomber jacket, roll-on deodorant, a face cloth and soap in a see-through plastic bag.
My train was leaving late afternoon. Third class.
But a whole lot was going to change.
A whole lot.
The train journey was thrilling, but long. And then I arrived at the busy station in Joburg. I was so excited as I called Ntombi on the payphone at the station. My eagerness and happiness at hearing her voice overwhelmed me. She said she would pick me up in two hours’ time. While I waited I smoked some weed, and I got high as I sat there.
Two hours later, Ntombi appeared with a male friend, her hair straightened and her face made up, which made her look more mature than when I had last seen her under the bridge in Cape Town. Ntombi always had a happy face, and her big bum rounded out her short stature. She greeted me with a big hug, smelling of perfume.
Her friend drove us to a townhouse in Yeoville, where I thought she must be staying, and dropped us off.
As I walked in the front door, I was aware of the pleasant, fresh smell of the wooden floors. She showed me to a room. It was a very empty room and so I said to her, ‘Wow, your room is so empty.’
And she said ja, but I mustn’t worry because as we went through the year we’d buy stuff and fill it up. I took that at face value. Then she told me to rest a bit while she went out to get me some food, and she walked out the room.
The clean smell gave me a sense of safety. I’d had a lot to smoke and drink on the train, so I lay down and fell asleep on the floor. I slept for about three hours.
I never saw Ntombi again.
I was woken up by men hitting and punching me, removing my clothes and stripping me naked. Before I could figure out what was happening, masking tape was put around my eyes. I was punched and kicked because in my confusion I kept asking where Ntombi was.
Eventually they spoke, they said, ‘Well, didn’t your friend tell you?’
That’s when my heart really leapt into my throat. It was the most indescribable shock. And so just lay there confused, in shock, and unable to move.
At first I thought they were going to kill me. Then I thought they were going to cut something from my body. I just didn’t know what they were going to do.
Nothing could have prepared me for what came next. They then tied me up and left. They were the first of many.
Why me, why me, why me.
That’s what I kept on saying.
And then all the other painful memories of my life came flooding back.
Why me?
And then one guy came back and punched me in the stomach. When I tried to scream, he gave me ecstasy and gave me injections on my legs, my thighs. I could only hear that the people were getting quieter and quieter, and the city outside was getting quieter.
It must be night, I thought.
Later a guy came in. He had strong cologne on.
He told me that because I am new in Joburg, I must be fresh with no experience. He was happy to teach me, he said.
I let him know that I knew nothing.
By the time he was on top of me, I was already high, and hopeless.
My vagina kept going wet and dry. I heard this guy take spit out of his mouth with his hand; he slapped me complaining about what he now had to do. Then I held my breath.
I just held my breath, that’s all I could do; I would close my eyes and try to lose consciousness. That would happen. And I would not breathe at all.
It went on for a couple of hours. And I don’t know when he left.
Every day different men would come in and do what they wanted with me. I had no way of knowing who came in and who went out.
One guy wanted anal sex.
At that point, I thought I could almost see. It felt like the tape was coming off my eyes. He held my head back, he pulled really hard.
At times one guy would be doing his thing one side of my body while another guy did his thing on the other side, and then my mind would just switch off. And that would be it.
The guy eventually ejaculated, the one at the back.
I vomited because I had got used to the technique of holding my breath.
When they were done, they left.
I could smell my own vomit. I sat in the same position until the next day. They would come back in to refresh the drugs in my body. I was never given any food or anything to drink.
One guy said, ‘You’re such a bitch, you even dirtied the floor.’
My eyes were really burning and my mouth was dry.
My legs were numb.
My body got used to the drugs.
On the last day I was there, many men came through. Probably only about six. But the forth one was really crazy. He asked me to sit on top of him. And whenever he felt like it was good, he would burn my back with his cigarette.
And so I kept focusing on not moving faster, keeping a slow pace so he would stop pressing that cigarette in my back. He was crazy. He eventually ejaculated. Then gave me a sip of Jack Daniels and told me that it was the only way my cigarette wounds would heal.
And then he poured it over my back.
That last day went really slowly. Because I kept on counting my breaths. I could hear myself breathe when I didn’t have clients. And suddenly a noise came through.
A younger girl was brought in and her screaming woke me up and made me worry, because it was the first time I had heard an outside person.
She screamed, ‘What did I do wrong? What did I do wrong?’
I could hear by the sound of her voice how scared she was. How young. I could only hear her because my eyes were still taped shut. And it really scared me because I could hear that she had no idea what was happening. She had probably just been kidnapped. It was then that I realised I was being exchanged.
They opened a door and punched her and she cried again.
And then they grabbed me and threw me out the door.
After two weeks, I was swapped with this new girl, and I was thrown out of the house and onto the streets of Joburg in the middle of the night.
And that was it.
I smelt of sperm because my body had been soaked in it for two weeks. And I smelt of the Jack Daniels. And pee from wetting myself.
And once I was in the fresh air, I tried to smell Ntombi’s perfume, hoping I would find her. I fell asleep.
But the first car sound woke me up.
And once again I was a street kid, waking up to car sounds.
Only this time it was in a city I didn’t know.
Everything I had owned was gone – my bag, my clothes. Not that it mattered by then.
When they dumped me, I still had masking tape over my face. And I wasn’t fully dressed. I was wearing these short little shorts and a lace top. Not my clothes.
From there I was on my own, left to survive on these Joburg streets that I didn’t know. Inside me, there was this huge anger at life, that I just hated life and what it had meant for me.
The only thing I wanted at that point were the drugs that would take my feelings away.
I needed clothes to cover myself and I went to look in the bins on the street. That’s where I met this old Zulu begger.
In his drunken state, he saw I needed help. He helped me to remove the masking tape that was still stuck all over my face. When we pulled the tape from my eyes, it felt like my eyelids were being ripped off. I had angry red bruises around my eyes for a couple of months after that.
At the same time as the Zulu man was helping me, he was shouting at me in his broken street-isiZulu. It was like he was warning me: ‘You young people don’t listen, you just think about of the big city lights of Joburg but you don’t know what can happen to you here …’ On and on, he shouted.
I felt love in that shouting because I felt he was caring for me, like a parent figure. I welcomed that. I asked him for clothes. He was wearing a maroon tracksuit top and boots. While he was shouting he took off his jacket and gave it to me.
I smelt his stink, his pee – and I knew I smelt as bad as him.
I went through a crying fit and he just let me cry.
Then we slowly we started to talk. He lived in one of the bins, he said. I learnt that he had come to Johannesburg ten years ago on a church outing from KwaZulu-Natal, but something had happened, somebody had cursed him, and he’d ended up on the streets. He swung his one gloved hand as he talked.
I needed to get money. I needed to get cleaned up and to get a fix. I knew I needed a guy who would give me money in exchange for pleasure.
So I left him and I walked to Park Station like this, in the Zulu man’s jacket, to where the truck drivers park their trucks to rest. One thing about Joburg is that if you are wearing an oversized, torn jacket, nobody bothers with you. They think you’re mad, so nobody touches you.
I had sex with a truck driver so I could buy clothes and dress myself.
And I smelt so bad that he then told me to take a shower. I used that money for the R5 shower and some for new clothes. Then I went back to the street in Yeoville to look for the old man, to return his jacket and give him R50 for helping me.
I was thinking like a street child again – surviving like I had survived in Cape Town. And that’s one thing the street teaches: older street people protect us, and so we younger ones must respect our elders. There is an understanding. The elders allow us to sleep in their boxes if we’re robbed; that’s how they keep us safe. If we steal from a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet and have lots of chicken, and we put it in an elder’s trolley for safekeeping, he won’t take anything unless we offer him some. Even if we hide a five-litre boxed wine in their stuff, the old people won’t touch it.
So I was paying my dues.
Another reason I wanted to find my old man was because he knew Johannesburg – Yeoville, Hillbrow, Berea – and I thought he could help me around. Playing innocent, I told him I wanted to visit the clubs ‘for a husband’.
But really, at that point my only thought was how I could get money for drugs.
That night, my Zulu friend and I walked to Berea so that he could show me the clubs. We walked silently and slowly as I regained my strength. He showed me the clubs on Bree Street, where he left me, saying, ‘Uzothola amadoda laphaya’. And so I walked into what would be my life from then on.
I have had people ask me why I didn’t go straight to the police that night after my trafficking. I answer that I didn’t think anyone would listen to me.
By then I knew my friend Ntombi had been paid to get me into that house. The money that she made selling me had probably paid for her to study at university. My dreams had fed her dreams.
And I had really thought she was a friend.
After that, how could I trust anybody?
And also, the police had never protected me in Cape Town. We street kids had always been told that we ‘liked’ the things they did to us in the jail cells. But mostly, I think, it was because my body was drugged up. And that’s what it all was about after that.
Drugs.