AFTER MY RELEASE FROM THE house, the first thing I craved was drugs. I became a prostitute from the age of eighteen, because I needed money for drugs.
All the prostitution I did on Joburg’s streets was always for money and drugs. There was nothing other than that, no money to get out.
And there was so much anger. Your day looks like night, your night looks like day. And everywhere you look are the reflections of what has happened to you.
In the days after my violent trafficking ordeal, as I made my way on the streets in Johannesburg, I met Margaret and the Hillbrow girls.
I was so numb. But I needed to feel numb. I needed to earn money to buy the drugs that made me numb. I was so desperate for those drugs to take me away from my thoughts. When I wasn’t high on drugs, I was shy, insecure and afraid.
The first time I met Margaret, it was obvious to her that I was very new.
Margaret was from Durban, a Zulu woman, and she was tough but welcoming. She could also be quiet and kind, and she told me straight out to be nice to her and the other girls.
‘We’re not here to hurt each other,’ she told me, referring to the street girls, ‘but this is how it works.’
She knew what we needed to do to survive on the streets and she could come on quite strong. She’d reassure us girls by saying, ‘We’re OK doing this.’
And that’s how I entered prostitution; to escape from my situation.
I knew I needed to ‘learn the ropes’, learn how things worked and who was who in the business. She proceeded to mentor me in the ways of prostitution so that I too could make some money. The prostitution we did also involved how to get drugs for yourself, and how to push drugs to your clients.
‘We’re going to teach you,’ she said.
I never told Margaret or the other girls about my experience coming to Joburg.
I just told her, ‘Teach me.’
Margaret was able to get me a temporary place to stay with the other Hillbrow girls. As I built my relationship with her, I knew I had to be careful not to fall into her hands, and be pimped by her. I tried hard to keep my independence. Even though I relied on her.
She gave me some of her clients, which at first I found scary in my newness to it all, but the clients were gentle with me.
Once, she discounted a client so that I could do him favours in the car while she taught me a good technique for giving blow jobs – it was a crazy way of doing things, but also a way for us girls to care for and learn from each other. And that’s how I learnt to keep a condom in my mouth, skilfully put it on the top side of my tongue and rolling it back and forth, which is how I avoided the client’s fluids from coming into contact with my mouth tissue.
Years later, due to rot and infection, I had to get a back molar removed by a dentist. I faked pain in the other back molar and asked for it to be removed as well purely so that I had more space available for the condom I used to hide in the back of my mouth during blow jobs.
The first money I earned Margaret took from me, but I didn’t worry about that as I was still learning.
The Hillbrow girls would come back to the house where we lived at around four or five in the morning. They’d sit around and smoke, count their money, and discuss whether they’d had a good night. For the first little while I just sat around with them and listened to them describing their sexual episodes. But as I hung around the girls, I started to get more and more clients.
And bought more drugs.
I have since been back to Hillbrow to look for Margaret and the girls. I couldn’t find them. The area has changed, the buildings are more run down, but prostitution continues.
I was with Margaret for my first three months in Joburg. She was like a big sister to me. At that time, in the late nineties, we black girls didn’t get the same chance to work in night clubs as the white girls did, which is why we often had to work on the streets. The Nigerian pimps knew this, and they gave us a hard time.
Pimps make their money by selling girls and drugs to clients. A pimp could just use me as he wanted and then give me R100. Or for the whole night, I might get R300, while the pimp makes loads of cash from selling ‘his’ girls and drugs – enough cash to buy a car.
Then he’d ride around in his big car checking up on us.
The pimps had a lot of power because they also sold drugs to us girls, and that’s how we became dependent on them. What a girl gets out of the partnership is accommodation, a fake ‘boyfriend’ – who lies, manipulates and emotionally blackmails her – and maybe three meals a day. She also gets a drug addiction. The minute the pimp buys her a drink in the club, he has already dropped a drug in her drink, and that’s how it starts.
You risked violence from a pimp if you owed him money, but it was hard to avoid. When you’re dependent on the pimp’s drugs, you are trapped.
Sometimes I couldn’t pay a pimp for my drugs. He would give me clients in exchange, until I’d paid him back, and during those times I wouldn’t even have money for my toiletries – it all went to the pimp for my drugs. To get out of this situation, I would have to play my cards right – work for this pimp for the next three weeks, get high, and also secure some clients for future work. Then leave, with no cash.
Sometimes a pimp would sell me off to a client.
In those early days, while I was in Hillbrow, a pimp I was working for gave me over to three guys who had just come out of jail.
It was winter time, cold, and drugs were hard to come by. At that time I was dependent on a pimp whose typical clients were gangster types from Soweto. I owed the pimp money for drugs so these gangsters paid the pimp directly and I was never paid.
I was sold, a sex slave, to these gangsters.
I was locked up in a building and I was raped and physically abused for three days, forced to do anything they said in order to avoid them punching and kicking me. During that terrible time, the only thing I could do to find any relief was smoke weed – trying desperately to get away, to a place beyond my body.
It’s hard to describe the violence, but the closest explanation I can now come up with would be sadism, the enjoyment they got from abusing another person.
Being trafficked to these gangsters for these three days was no different to the two weeks I had suffered when I first arrived in Joburg. Once the pimp had retrieved the money I owed him, he let me go.
Afterwards, I probably didn’t look like someone who had been gang raped. I looked like a drug addict. I was dirty, smelly and I hadn’t bathed.
Traumatised, I went to the clinic and told the nurse, ‘I was just raped by a lot of men. I just want some help and if you can clean out my wounds.’
The nurse said to me, ‘You think this is Shoprite? You come here to get your stuff clean and then go back to what you were doing? We’re not here to clean you so that you go back and do the same thing again! We’re here to clean you so you don’t go back again!’
I just looked at her and felt like punching her because she had no idea what I had just come from. Or how I had got to be here.
I had no money.
All I wanted was for her to clean me.
She refused to help me and so I left. Instead, I went to the Zimbabwean and Zulu girls, who knew traditional medicine. They told me to take TimJan, which I could buy from the chemist. It is a strong, bitter health juice with a vinegar taste. They told me to drink that, and also lots of hot water.
You drink half a cup of TimJan with lots of water through the night and through the next day, and it cleans out the body. It burns badly in the stomach and is supposed to be drunk in small amounts. But after the things that happened to us in Hillbrow, we would drink the whole bottle. I always hoped, back then, that I would be OK. After what happened to me that time, the girls also told me I should clean out my vagina with Jeyes Fluid.
There were times when we had wars with the Nigerian pimps. It could happen when the girls stuck together. The Zulu and Zimbabwean girls I knew mostly didn’t take drugs so that’s why they could beat up the pimps, to prove what strong hustlers they were. The girls even carried knives. If a girl got robbed by a pimp, the other girls formed a team to chase and catch him.
The Nigerian pimps had drugs to sell to the white clients, but we black girls wanted the white clients to pay better for sex – and we were OK dealing directly with clients.
So that’s also how war might start. After we had got to know a client through a pimp, we would beat up the pimp so he wouldn’t come back to our corner. We would sometimes send out a new girl to entice him to our spot, and then beat him up when he followed her. That’s how we made sure he would stay away.
We also made friends with the drag queens. The drag queens had boyfriends who were gangsters, and the gangsters would fight the tsotsis to protect us. A gangster would come in a ‘gusheshe’, a BMW, with an electric roof and big tyres, and beat up anyone molesting us. So that’s how we girl gangs – the Zulu and Zim and Xhosa girls – owned those streets. Without those roaming pimps, we could sometimes take over the streets of Hillbrow.
But we were never safe.
I would sometimes get to a point when the more high I could get on drugs, the more clients I could handle. Then the realisation would hit: ‘Hey, I can do this on my own! I don’t need no pimp.’
But if you show that kind of arrogance, you get slapped. If you cross the line with a pimp, anything can happen.
Death lived just around the corner.
There was a way I could get off the streets: if a client liked me enough, he could buy me off my pimp. If a client paid R4000, then the pimp would release me. There were always other girls for him to exploit.
The client would then introduce me to a club that he attended regularly. I could start working there, and he would become my regular client. He could then give me a good reference: he could tell others that I’m great, I’m healthy, I’m not a junky and don’t use drugs too much, that I have incredible energy, that I don’t fight. These clients could introduce me to bigger and better clients. Girls brag about these opportunities.
But of course, I wouldn’t be any part of the conversation with the pimp. I never had the power to make my own decisions. After the arrangements were made, both the pimp and the client would tell me what a big favour they were doing me by getting me off the streets.
But even if I was working off the streets, it didn’t mean I was safe. Clients could be as brutal and abusive as pimps, and anything could happen to me when I got into a client’s car.
I was always on my own, always at risk.