ONE NIGHT, I WALKED FROM Sisi Jabu’s place to a small Chinese shopping centre near the Eastgate mall, where there were a few clubs. I went to one and just hung around.
I waited for a while. At around ten, I got my first client. A guy invited me to have dinner with him.
Du-uh, I thought, I need drugs, not food!
Instead, I asked him if he had any cocaine.
Up until then, I had mostly been smoking weed and buttons. Button is mandrax – I just knew it was an acidic mixture of stuff taken from government hospitals. In my experience, among other things, it drains nutrients out of your skin. I used to drink a lot of water and used soap on my face to counteract the effects buttons had on the skin, but it wasn’t a comfortable experience.
It was time for a change in drugs.
My client told me he didn’t use coke, but said he could organise some for me. For now, he could only offer me a smoke and dinner.
At around midnight, he could see I was bored and needed a fix. He drove us towards Midrand, to a striptease club/escort house where Nigerian pimps and their girls sold drugs. I told him the coke would cost R300, which he gave me.
Inside, I breathed in the familiar smokey club smells. I was craving and I must have looked quite desperate. It didn’t take me long to spot a girl I knew. I had met her a few times when I’d gone to Soweto. Her name was Ayanda, and she helped me get the drugs.
A man sold me two grams of coke for only R100, discounted because he said I must come back – I guess to be pimped by him. Not caring, I thanked him and went back to my client in the car. I happily stashed the extra R200 in my bra.
Back in the car, I took one snort of the coke and I immediately went crazy. I went straight for the guy’s balls and gave him a blow job. I was feeling so good, sizzling. I buzzed, doing what I did best.
In the years to come, that became my package: coke plus sex. One without the other just didn’t work.
‘Are you hungry?’ he asked me later.
I told him I was finished for the night. He didn’t want to leave me, and told me he wanted me as his regular girl. He gave me R500 for a taxi home and to pay my rent.
Having a ‘regular’ boyfriend as a client was not my business. Nevertheless, we kept meeting at the club for a while.
I was still living at Sisi Jabu’s house, but now I was more out than in. I was spending a lot of time in clubs, and I had started thinking about the world of stripping.
I knew that training as a stripper would be a bonus for my profession: moving up to working in the safety of a strip club is a major goal for any prostitute. It offered better income opportunities and was a way of avoiding the abusiveness of street pimps. Over the next few years I would come to learn that it had its own dangers, but at the time I thought it was a good option for me.
Near the shopping centre in Eastgate, a new strip club had just opened. I had been meeting this white guy about every other night at the reggae/hip hop nightclub downstairs and I was getting what I needed – drugs and clients. I was familiar with the place so I thought why not join this new strip club. It was a classy club, part of a chain that had branches in other towns in South Africa.
I didn’t know how to strip, but when I went to talk to the club management they said they would train me on condition that I lost weight.
At the club there were skinny girls, fat girls, older girls and younger girls, but mostly white girls for a crowd of mostly white men. From the outside, the club was advertised just as a ‘strip dance’ club, but inside there were various rooms for various activities. The cigar bar would attract the rich businessmen and foreigners, who paid up front, and they would get certain girls the whole night.
I had been going back regularly to the Midrand club for my coke, and had been seeing my good friend Ayanda, as she was still working there. Ayanda was shy and quiet and liked tagging along with me, and I wanted a girl around as a friend. I told Ayanda that she should join me and stay in my room at Sisi Jabu’s house, and work as a stripper. She agreed.
The drama came when her pimp caught up with her for leaving the club. He would find her in Eastgate and beat her up, and she would have to come to my room during the day to fix her wounds. This went on for three weeks until the pimp found out that Ayanda was working for white people. Nigerians couldn’t tackle whites at that time – it was too risky.
Now I had a steady job and was learning to strip, and I had my own clients and was getting my stash of drugs. And after that drama with the pimp, things started going well for Ayanda and me.
There were professional strippers from Asia and Russia at the strip club, as well as Afrikaans girls. Ayanda and I were the only black girls there, lifting our legs and jumping up and down on the poles with the other strippers.
And I was proud of my African body – it looked good, and my boobs were a real double-D. Those of the German girls were big and fake – they used silicon to enhance their breasts. The guys would take their brandy shots off my body, laughing and applauding Ayanda and me: ‘Hey, these black chicks are real!’
I felt like an African lion queen! Money started to just fall around me. My first few months at the club were great.
This was now 2002, and I was feeling encouraged.
I had designed a candle-wax strip show, and I was becoming more creative with my work as a stripper. In the show, Ayanda would take two lit candles and drizzle the hot wax on my body as I writhed about, allowing it to pour onto my spread legs and private parts. I started improving my moves as well as my lingerie by wearing new G-string panties, which I bought with my extra earnings.
With my upgraded lingerie and suggestive movements, I was becoming a better and better stripper and dancer. Clients who knew the club and my work started hiring me for outside events, and I began to travel from town to town doing my act. Ministers – both of government and of the church – organised private parties and invited us strippers to attend, and I began visiting more places around South Africa. And as we visited other clubs, we learnt new techniques and innovative ways to strip.
Also, more black girls were starting in the profession, and the more black girls that started stripping, the more we challenged the international white girls who were also performing at these small clubs.
With lots of baby oil on our skin, we black girls glittered and shone like stars, and people loved it. We didn’t copy the old moves either – we weren’t going to just climb those poles. Rather, we became creative on the floor, inventing new moves and techniques.
The guys howled.
For our own safety and the success of the strip club’s business, there were rules and regulations we had to follow. In the club, we only dealt with clients on the floor, and weren’t supposed to sleep with them – otherwise, the authorities would come in and close the place down for being an illegal brothel. We had our own arrangements though, and we slept with clients anyway. So while not all of the girls could strip, all were engaged in sex because some clients would pay to see a girl in private. Also, we were not supposed to mix with clients after hours, because then they wouldn’t come back to the club and support it.
The club also had ways of dealing with the drugs we were taking. The heart always races when on drugs – when a girl takes a bunch of ecstasy tablets, and half a bottle of Jack Daniels, the heart will be racing. So the club had a cold room with a box of ice where we’d be forced to go to cool down if we overdosed. This helped avoid heart attacks.
Between midnight and two in the morning, if your boss liked you and gave you the space, you could make around R8000 a night in the lap dance rooms. A client could touch me in these rooms, whereas on the strip floor touching was not allowed – he just had to pay for it. Clients paid R200 for fifteen minutes, R280 for half an hour, and R360 for an hour in these rooms for touching only, with club management occasionally peeping in to make sure all was in order. Of the R360 hourly rate, I would receive R120, and I was paid every night in cash.
In the lap dance rooms, when it was just us, I could slither my body against the client’s body, give him what he wanted, and get extra payment. If a client wanted a blow job, the cash would be an extra payment for me alone.
For organising all-night bachelor parties outside, the club received R1500, of which half went to me and included an escort. The lap dance money covered my security escort to and from my residence, and my first three drinks of the evening.
As long as the money was good and the clients came and enjoyed what we were doing, everything was fine. I was making good money, so I didn’t want problems or to get kicked out. I kept a clean slate. My good health meant being disciplined about my drug use. And I felt that I was safe: I even had a bodyguard to escort me by car to and from my accommodation at Sisi Jabu’s. The hours were fine – our nights ended around seven in the morning, and we had the rest of the day to sleep and prepare.
I also didn’t have to rely on outside clients for extra cash any more – I could earn more cash to pay for my drugs by servicing a client in the club’s lap dance rooms.
With the money I was earning, I had my basic needs covered. I had my drugs, which was the most important thing for me, because I had to make sure I had enough drugs to get me through every day or evening, while making sure that I didn’t overdose. Just keeping pace with cocaine would cost me R4000 a day. If I was taking cocaine, I wouldn’t drink much alcohol, but drugs were key to my work: the more drugs, the better and more professional the strip show performance, plus the lap dance, plus the ‘illegal’ sex.
Competition between the girls over clients sometimes led to violent bashing of each other, and that was quite entertaining. I enjoyed watching the break-up fights with the girls in the dressing room.
And I also took part in these fights sometimes. I knew I was popular with the guys. I had regular clients, but I was sometimes also booked for a lap dance by other girls’ clients after my shows. To get back at me, sometimes a girl would lie to a regular client of mine, saying I wasn’t available so that he could book her. Their jealousy made me feel more desirable. Ayanda and I drifted apart though. Drugs do that to you – you become very close to people when you’re high.
Did I feel good about myself?
I felt sexy, crazy, happy, high, the best stripper in the whole country. I felt that I could get anything I wanted.
This Eastgate mall club became very popular and opened branches in other towns where I also sometimes worked. I stayed with stripping for a couple of years, despite facing the occasional abuses by clients.
The original club was eventually closed down because it was raided by police, who arrested undocumented foreign girls from Japan and China, and South Africans who were stashing drugs.
But I stayed on in and around Johannesburg, and continued to strip in small clubs. After the club closed down, I spent some time working at clubs in smaller cities and towns in the strip club’s network.
Getting hired in a ‘white’ strip club around that time was a long process. The club would thoroughly examine you to make sure your health was good, that you don’t look like a druggie. Club owners always asked about my health, about what alcohol and drugs I took, what sex techniques I knew and so on.
Often, when I went for a new job, I’d get checked out by a doctor, and the girls had to go every three months for tests. A blood test would be taken, but I never got my results. After stripping, plus private lap dancing, plus sex, how would I know my infection status? The answer is that I never knew if I had an infection. I just knew that if the club owner came back to me, I was fine. If the owner didn’t contact me, it may mean there was something wrong. They never said if we were sick or had HIV.
We never bothered to know more because we thought the greater danger was a drug overdose. We didn’t know anything about ethics and responsibility. We didn’t want to know our HIV status; we weren’t told, and we didn’t ask.
It would be club management who decided what work I would do each night; I didn’t get to choose. To impress the management, my skin needed to be baby-soft and smell nice, and so I always spent money on baby oil. The boss would check my flexibility, which was important for stripping on the pole. In this business, you get clients if your body looks good, not if you have a nice personality.
The condition of my body dictated whether I would be a stripper, a lap dancer, a nude waitress, and so on. These days it’s different – workers have become more independent now in what they want to do at clubs. But I knew back then that these decisions were not up to me.
What we had learnt as black escort girls in the late 1990s, was that we had to be very careful and survive, because it was hard to find clubs that wanted us back then. And we needed the security of the clubs because those girls who were working for the pimps on the streets were often left desperate.
After a while working the clubs I decided that I needed to look for something more permanent.
Lisa was an agent for girls like us. She was a mature lady; her face was wrinkled, and she had blonde hair and green eyes. She was introduced to me as someone who could help me find new work. Lisa was obviously strong in the sex work networks operating at that time, recruiting girls like me – I knew that if I arrived somewhere new, I could use her name to get me through the door. It was like a recommendation.
I was twenty-two when I first moved from Joburg to Port Elizabeth, before my route took me back to Joburg, then on to Pietermaritzburg, then Durban and other small towns in KwaZulu-Natal, back to Joburg, and then to my final club in Port Elizabeth until I was twenty-six. Those were years lost in a haze of drugs and emotional dislocation.
Back then stripping was the only life I knew. Drugs were really all that mattered to me. Lisa said I should try a small club in Port Elizabeth where she had once worked.
I hitchhiked to Port Elizabeth using this method: I found a willing truck driver at a truck stop, gave him favours for the ‘free’ ride, arrived at the next truck stop, got cleaned up, got my drugs, found another trucker, gave him favours, and on it went. After I arrived in Port Elizabeth, I freshened up at the last garage, and then proceeded to the club Lisa had recommended.
This club was just stripping and lap dances. Regular guys could come and pay at reception to watch a show and go for a lap dance. I started working there as a stripper.
As I soon discovered, the other girls at this club were really young – some as young as sixteen. The youngest girls didn’t do lap dancing, but only strip shows and pole dancing. For these girls, stripping was just an extra job, something fun they did in front of their boyfriends for drugs and smokes. They danced as if they were doing school gymnastics!
There were games in this club, and it was the pole dancers who competed for the most clients. Six girls would each dance on a table with a pole, performing her best moves. The guys would watch and cheer, moving around until they’d found who they thought was the best pole dancer. Then they’d shove cash into her panties. So one of the six girls would receive the most money, and then another six girls would start a new dance competition.
Then there were other girls, the older ones, walking around the floor, checking out which guys wanted a lap dance. Unnecessarily, in this club the girls would go nude in front of the clients.
I really didn’t like this place because the client base was generally made up of white Afrikaans men, who were quite racist. I had to learn how to deal with their attitudes, and not act hostile or angry towards them, even though I hated the way they treated me. There were also always these crazy raids, with the cops coming into the club. Then everything would stop. Two hours later, everything would be back to normal again.
I soon knew that this club, with these young, inexperienced girls, just wasn’t my scene. When a client told me I was too mature for the place, I returned to Johannesburg the same way I had come: via truckers on the prostitution route.
When I was back in Joburg, Lisa suggested I join a popular escort club in Pietermaritzburg. Getting there meant using the same trucking-prostitution strategy.
I eventually arrived at this club, where about eight of us girls had our own rooms in a quiet private house. The girls were all white, mostly from other countries, but they were friendly, and we all shared our drugs.
But this was another place whose crowds of white male clients didn’t like black girls. In Joburg I had learnt to dance, to writhe on the floor and do various suggestive moves around a pole. But the clients here preferred the white chicks, apparently. I wondered why they had invited a black girl to perform there, when clearly the place was very white. The club and clients didn’t like my style. It was also not very busy and I wasn’t getting much money. I became a bit bored, so I decided to leave.
I spent the next few months travelling from one small KwaZulu-Natal town to another, finding clients, hustling rides with truck drivers, and keeping my drug habit going. I was gaining more experience as a hustler and a prostitute on the street again, a stripper in clubs and escort agencies when I could get that work, and a survivor on drugs.
If I needed more clients, I would ask a client in one club to refer me to other clubs. If I ended up getting a job at the new club, I would have to give the original client a service free of charge.
Trusting my client could also be risky though, and I could end up in the wrong hands. The client could take me to their own drug pimp, who would then make ‘a deal’ to use me: the pimp could claim that the client had brought me because he owed the pimp money. Then I was essentially ‘bought’, and I wouldn’t receive any money for services I rendered while working for that pimp.
Escaping from a club I was not comfortable with sometimes meant moving to other towns and cities, and travelling was always risky. I always got into trouble going to unknown places. If I had a client, I could ask to be dropped at a club in Durban, but if I didn’t know anyone there, I’d end up on the street. Or I might be dumped, and have to find my own way around in the middle of the night.
If I didn’t have a client and was on the street late at night, a man could approach me and ask, ‘Who’s pimping you?’ That’s how you get into the wrong hands. There are pimps looking for girls like me on the streets, and I wanted to avoid them.
So I learnt to prostitute myself for transport with the truckers. After I had left a club, I’d walk the highways, hoping to get a ride to the nearest garage. There, I’d find another lift to the next garage, until I found a trucker who could take me further, sometimes all the way back to Joburg, in exchange for favours.
At the garages, I would change into my normal jeans and clothes. I would buy a gram of coke, some ecstasy and weed – enough to last me for a couple of hours on the highway. If I was going to get high, I had to be inside the truck, because being on the road was too dangerous.
Communication with the truckers was very easy: they knew what I needed, and vice versa.
‘Where can I drop you?’ a trucker would say, and we both knew that meant sex.
Sometimes it meant physical abuse as well.
It was a risk I took over and over again.
And I was feeling quite lonely and lost. I never had time to make friends in these places I was in. I was never anywhere for very long. I decided to return to Johannesburg to find work there. I would be less lonely there.
It was now 2003.
During this year on the streets and in the clubs of Joburg, I struggled on, feeding my drug habit. In the classier strip clubs I learnt how to dress nicely, knowing that I should not wear short skirts as this was the dress of the street girls.
At night I still preferred the safety net of the clubs, but in broad daylight I would hang around in malls, bars and restaurants, looking for clients. If you look like a prostitute during the day, in Midrand or Kempton Park, even your fellow prostitutes don’t care that you are there. Instead of being in competition, the girls would challenge each other, because it was only the blow-job guys who wanted us during the day. It was money we earned to pay for our smokes.
But even so, it wasn’t safe being a prostitute on the streets during the day. It was better, and safer, at night, when everyone was working: cops were out, pimps were out, girls were walking the streets, and ambulances were roving.
It could be dangerous during the day, when no one from our world was around. A guy could drive me far out of town, beat me up, then violently do his thing with me. I kept as safe as I could during the day by not dressing up too much, or exposing myself too obviously.
I just never understood how people could be so brutal.