Thirteen

I WORKED AT NGILONGILO UNTIL I got pregnant.

I was twenty years old, and it came as a shock.

I hadn’t used condoms during any of my exploits. Trying to prepare for sex by taking condoms with me to work, giving them to clients or trying to use them in the middle of a session simply didn’t work. When I was with a client, I was too busy trying to earn my money, and the guys were too busy trying to get their groove on. I also never had any contraceptive injections, and we girls didn’t know about the woman’s condom. While the condom was important for preventing infection in the mouth, I rarely used one for vaginal penetration. But this did not occur much anyway since clients preferred other positions.

It was the combination of alcohol and drugs that made the decision, and pregnancy was not on my mind.

So I was surprised by my pregnancy, and it frustrated me.

It interfered with my job security and my living arrangements. I had got used to this routine of mine.

The father of my baby was a client, but a loving one. I thought I maybe saw a relationship developing between us, and he didn’t think I was a prostitute because he didn’t know about my other clients.

When I told the father of my baby about my pregnancy, he ran away and I never saw him again.

Hilmanton was Shona-speaking, and he became attracted to me because I was pregnant. He used the expression, ‘Ukuthandwa kwesisu’ (the symptoms of pregnancy make you attractive to men).

To men like Hilmanton, pregnancy is very beautiful, indicating that a woman is fertile and can have children. What it didn’t mean was that he wanted this child; he didn’t want people to think he had made me pregnant with this baby I was carrying.

‘If you have an abortion, I’ll marry you,’ he tried to convince me.

Hilmanton would pick me up in his nice BMW and drive us to a bar to chat. We had a lot of sex in his car. It was all an adventure for him. He was tall, dark, handsome and very well educated.

And he felt sorry for me.

I knew I was developing feelings for him. I was comfortable with him; he treated me nicely. I thought he was worth it.

We looked everywhere for a clinic to perform the abortion.

Hilmanton wanted to do everything legally so there would be no mess-up. But the clinics refused because I was too far along with the pregnancy.

So Hilmanton left, he disappeared and never came back.

For several months I tried to hide my pregnancy from Sisi Chuma.

One day, she asked me straight out, ‘What are you going to do with the baby? I can’t keep you here like this.’

Since abortion was by now out of the question, Sisi Chuma eventually decided to let me stay and work at the bar until I delivered the baby. She then offered to help me and suggested that I give the baby up for adoption. She arranged for me to go to an organisation in Parktown that provided a shelter for abandoned babies or babies being given up for adoption.

It was a nice place. Their house policy was that I had to write a letter to the baby, who would receive it at the age of eighteen, and I did that.

I was angry, hurt and confused, but I decided that with my way of life, I couldn’t keep a baby.

I delivered my baby boy on 14 December 2001, seven days after my twenty-first birthday. I only saw his tiny face for a split second, right after his birth, before he was whisked away.

He was adopted immediately.

I named him Z.

After that, I got my job back with Sisi Chuma, and lived in the bar’s storeroom again for a while. But Sisi Chuma and I weren’t getting along, and I was afraid of meeting my baby’s father at the bar, which would have been very painful for me.

Eventually, I stopped working at NgiloNgilo because everyone there was asking me where my baby was.

I felt the walls were caving in on me.

When I left NgiloNgilo, I was still hurt from having what I had thought was a caring man walk out on me because I couldn’t have an abortion. It had also been very painful trying to get over the fact that I had given up my baby son.

I needed to find myself again. I needed time to heal.

And I needed my own place to stay.

I met someone in a Benoni tavern, a man called Madoda. For R300 a month, his chubby aunt, Sisi Jabu, rented me a back room in their big house, which she ran like a guest house.

Sisi Jabu was a Zulu lady. She would gamble at the street corner, playing cards, smoking and sniffing tobacco with the men folk. She was very kind to me, and I grew very close to her family.

I paid up front for three months of rent and when I first arrived I wasn’t looking for sex work.

Madoda had a crush on me. I was only twenty-one, and he was much older. He took the time to help me fix up my room, putting up black cotton fabric to cover the ceiling. Then we painted the walls orange! I wanted the room to be a dark place where I could smoke my weed and feel safe.

I had a single bed and a small table. Outside my room, there were rabbits in the garden, breeding like crazy. While I was smoking weed, I would just watch the rabbits bonking and laugh my head off – unlike so many clients I had met, the rabbits clearly didn’t need Viagra! I had not had a pet since my cat, Ginger, back in Woodstock, and they reminded me of my life and childhood home, which now seemed so long ago. So I would go out to buy them cabbage and feed them. I really loved those rabbits.

At Sisi Jabu’s place, I learnt how to live with a Zulu family. I learnt how to make this amagayo porridge, which was really nice, and I started getting comfortable in the kitchen. Every morning I would make a pot of porridge for everyone, and I got to know the other people in the house. There was a church lady, and a man who collected greyhounds. He trained them to run and race at the Benoni lake, and was always travelling to Durban, making big money.

The house felt to me like a real family environment. This Zulu family did everything together, and I found everyone very accommodating. I learnt isiZulu through speaking with the family, and I enjoyed their culture.

There was also no pressure on me: I didn’t need to talk about my family, and they never asked about my past. Because they saw me smoking weed, they just thought I was this quiet Rastafarian girl. They didn’t mind me smoking. I think they liked me – I made their house come alive.

As time passed, I started to need money, and so I started working again. If I had clients, I would mostly go to their place, but there were a few special clients who liked my small, hidden, quiet place, and I let them come to my room at Sisi Jabu’s. Those clients would knock on my door at one in the morning, do their thing with me, then leave.

I just told Sisi Jabu they were my boyfriends. No one minded.

Madoda had a girlfriend in KwaZulu-Natal, and one time he brought her to visit. Unlike everyone else in the house, this woman wouldn’t greet me. She stayed for two days.

A week later, I was infested with pig fleas in my arm pits, my private parts and on my head. I was itching all over, crying in pain, and I was smoking more and more weed in order to tolerate the discomfort. I was in agony.

‘You got cursed,’ Sisi Jabu said. Somebody had put something at my door, she told me.

Sisi Jabu took me to a traditional healer, who gave me a tenlitre bucket full of an awful liquid made with herbal leaves. I had to bath in it and also drink it and vomit it up. I had never believed in these healers before, but this treatment worked: the fleas disappeared the next day.

‘What caused this?’ I asked Sisi Jabu, mystified.

‘You were probably given this muti by Madoda’s girlfriend. She was jealous of you.’

What horror I had gone through! Madoda and I had never had any kind of relationship – sexual or otherwise!

I didn’t like this thing that had happened to me – it really shocked me. I was also angry with myself, as I had promised myself years before that I would never get close to anyone. From my first experience of sexual violence at the age of nine, I had trained myself to rely on people only for money and drugs. Other than that, I just didn’t trust people. Period.

But now I had got close to this family of Sisi Jabu’s.

I was physically exhausted from the sangoma’s work on me. Now I had to deal with the fact that I had been cursed while staying with this family, and so soon after the pain of losing my baby son.

These disappointments finished me.

I had to find my escape.

I decided at this point that I would stay in the house, but that I needed to create a daily routine away from this Zulu family I had come to love and adore. I had got too comfortable with this family arrangement.

I needed more clients.

People have different ways of escaping. While living at Sisi Jabu’s in Benoni, I started working as a waitress at the Circus Roadhouse restaurant in Boksburg. Opposite the roadhouse was a club, which had pool tables to hide the fact that there were rooms upstairs for having sex with the girls. Clients from the escort club used to come to the roadhouse to eat.

I met a white guy there one day and we started chatting. He asked me to leave the roadhouse with him. I wondered what an older white guy was wanting with a young black girl like me. We negotiated my fee and what he wanted to do with me, and then I went with him to his car.

As soon as we got in, he rolled up the car windows and started slapping me in the face.

‘I’m about to rape you,’ he said as he punched me.

And he did.

This is not what we had negotiated, but I knew I needed to treat him carefully. I couldn’t fight back.

Then suddenly he said to me, ‘I like this – it’s like a fantasy. Please can we do this on a regular basis? I’ll pay you.’

I thought, Wow. OK. If this guy is going to pay me, then …

‘No problem,’ I said.

He asked me how much I wanted.

‘A thousand?’ I answered.

‘No problem.’

So after that we met up regularly after my shifts at the roadhouse. We would make arrangements to meet in his car, or in the bush, or at his house. Or we’d drive to a motel, and he’d make me act things out there. I’d wear young girls’ clothes, and he’d make me do strange rape scenes – funny ones, crazy ones, all sorts.

Is this the kind of thing that happens to girls like me?

Yes. You can tell your potential client how much you charge and you can negotiate your terms, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that things will happen the way you have agreed. And some people have strange, sordid needs. This is part of the cycle of repeated abuse.

Should I have resisted the violence done to my body?

I felt that if I was being paid, I should put up with the abuse. I did not have much self-esteem at that point in my life, and I didn’t feel that I deserved better. And so I only resisted the violence when I was acting as a character in one of this guy’s crazy scenes, not in reality.

Then the guy disappeared for a while. I started calling him on his home phone since the money had been good – R1000 every weekend. I also had bad bruises and wounds from him, which I knew he needed to take care of for me.

I started to threaten him, saying I knew where he lived. He finally came back and gave me some money.

He would have carried on, I think. But in the end I got tired of him.

Looking back at my younger years, I think I always wanted a real friend, and a nice partner to fall in love with. I wanted to have kids and find a good job. It’s always been in the back of my mind.

But here I was in this life where I was paid to connect with people, to satisfy their needs but not my own. And it was all driven by this desperate addiction to drugs – the addiction that kept the cycle going, and which took away all my confidence as a person. The drugs took away my dreams for a better life.

Every now and again there would be a client who didn’t want sex, but who just wanted to talk with me. I eventually became weary of this, though, wondering what his real intention was – because in all the time I did this work, I never found a client who really wanted to be my friend. Even the gentle guys.

And there were gentle clients. Clients who were having sexual difficulties with their partners, clients who just wanted to talk or cuddle. When I was very high on drugs or weed after a sexual encounter, I would enjoy a client’s gentle words. Words like: ‘You’re so beautiful. You make me so happy, so comfortable …’

Pillow talk.

But if I ever told a guy what I wanted, what I was feeling, he wouldn’t answer.

There’d always be some sort of emotional tension with my regular clients – tension because at the back of my mind a voice would be saying, ‘Don’t become his friend.’ Yet I also didn’t want to lose them.

These are the contradictions that emerge from this lifestyle, because even with the drugs in my veins, I was still a woman with a beating heart.

Even if I was heartbroken.

Did I learn anything along the way? I never really felt anything: I just wanted my drugs. I lived in desperation for them. And even being prostituted seemed an escape from the overwhelming feelings of neglect, abandonment and disappointment that had tainted my young life.