Exit!

by Grizelda Grootboom

  She never asked me where I had been. I kept quiet, and when it was over I went to clean the plates. I didn’t eat supper, just licked the plates with leftover gravy still on it.

  I was so angry with my mom. This was the final moment – I knew I had to leave this place. All I could think about was getting back to my dad.

  In the next few days, the playing came to an abrupt end. At the tap we girls ignored each other.

  Ice cold.

  We couldn’t even meet each other’s eyes.

  For me, not knowing isiXhosa so well, it was all about the body language. Now it was the girls’ body language and the look in their eyes that told me our brief friendship was over. So we never spoke or played together again. I guess we felt that if ever we spoke about our rape, something bad would happen to us, someone would harm us. It was partly the shock, but it was also the girls not wanting to bring shame to their families.

  We just stayed afraid.

  We knew that our community and parents wouldn’t care. The community knew this happened regularly. No big deal. So we girls just split from each other.

  After our ordeal, one of the girls got pregnant. She stayed inside her house, and we only saw her a few times after that when she came out to fetch water. A few months later, to avoid embarrassment, her family sent her back home to the Eastern Cape to have her child there. She was ten years old.

  In the time to come, when I heard that the ‘efoli’ boys had attacked some other girls too, I kept quiet, never telling anyone about my experience. Even now, communities protect the boys and young men who commit these crimes. But they don’t protect their daughters. Blame is still cast on the girl for ‘misbehaving’.

  These cocky ‘efoli’ boys continued their rampages. They would wait to catch the girls to ‘play’ with after school. They bragged about their various exploits. As time went on, they got bigger, stronger and more violent, and began hijacking cars. No one was really settled in Khayelitsha then: people were still taking over the land, minding their own business and building their shacks, and there wasn’t much leadership. These vicious, arrogant boys ruled the township.

  At the age of nine, to me all this suffering felt like a huge plot to ruin my life.

  Everything was taken away from me when I was raped.

  Looking back, I think this gang rape introduced me to the idea of being the kind of female I became in order to survive – it introduced me to the feeling of being exploited because I am female. But then, it made no sense. Nothing in my life in Woodstock had prepared me for this.

  Khayelitsha was not for me. Three days later I left.

  I told myself I would hate men forever.

  Four

  SO I LEFT MY MOM.

  For several years after that, I lived on the streets of Woodstock, searching the area and asking people if they knew my dad. I missed him so much and I needed to find him again. I thought he might be working at the docks, and so I returned again and again, hoping perhaps that someone there would know where he was living.

  Somehow, I kept alive the fantasy that my dad still loved me and would care for me.

  In the years to come I was rarely in school. Instead, I moved from one shelter to another, or slept with my friends under the bridge. Of course there were drugs there – we street kids planned our lives around weed and the glue that we sniffed. That’s one of the things we used to survive.

  It was there that I met Freckles; I was eleven years old when I first met him. He was much older than me, in his early twenties. When I arrived on the streets I didn’t know him but everybody would tell me about him. He used to date the fresh girls, the new girls to the streets.

  On the streets and in the shelters, all of us girls felt we needed to have a boyfriend on the street. This worked for us: if you didn’t have a boyfriend, you were considered an outcast, and you were not strong, and you would not survive this street life. You had to be tough.

  If you had a gangster boyfriend, then you were automatically a member of his gang. This meant there was gangster violence and competition even among the girls in the shelters. Girls would beat each other up, and proudly announce their gang: if yours was the 26s or the 28s or The Americans, you’d have to tell me what your gang stood for and how much authority it had. For our own protection, it was good to be able to say, ‘I got a boyfriend and he’s the leader of the 26s, so what do you want?’

  I knew I needed that protection.

  Bruno, my light-skinned, freckled boyfriend, whom I nick named ‘Freckles’, was in the 26s. He was my way of manoeuvring through the hustle within the shelter.

  Our relationship had developed fully by the time I was twelve. That’s when he began taking me seriously and protecting me on the streets. Although it was an off-and-on thing, our relationship lasted a long time; I didn’t date anyone else for years. I took him as my shield and my protection. Because on the streets it was all about that: dating the greatest and strongest gangster meant you were protected even if he wasn’t around.

  I wasn’t even a teenager yet, and I didn’t have any sexual urge, just childish crushes and a cockiness at being able to flirt and play with the boys. The girls who dated these kind of guys had told me what to expect. They told me that Bruno would expect to have sex with me but that I could avoid that by giving blow jobs. I liked being with Freckles but I was still so raw from my rape experience in Khayelitsha. I told Freckles I was a virgin and he seemed to accept that.

  So Freckles didn’t shag me – he just played with my body, kissed me and made me give him blow jobs.

  Freckles lived on the street, but he would get locked up in jail sometimes for a few months. Always when he came back from jail he’d come and look for me. He wanted me with him all the time. He’d come find me in the shelter and keep me to himself for two or three weeks because he needed that comfort.

  After a few weeks on the street with him, I’d come back to the shelter, and get cleaned up. Sometimes he would come to the shelter every weekend and just take me out, by literally unscrewing the gate.

  The mother caretakers weren’t very protective: when they saw what was happening, they would just let me go. When he took me away with him, the shelter would always blame me for ‘misbehaving’.

  But I never felt like Freckles was doing anything wrong. Moving around with Freckles was always something that I wanted. Sometimes I was really, really happy to be out of the shelter, to have that freedom, and Freckles was my best friend on the streets.

  As I moved around with him, he never did anything nasty to me. He acted tough on the outside all the time, but he had a tender side, at least towards me. I liked his green eyes as they stared at me.

  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 f
or 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.

  Six

  THERE WERE VOLUNTEERS WE KNEW from the church who used to bring food parcels to us when we were staying under the bridge. One day in 1995, a few of these volunteers came to collect us – they told us that we were going to go to Johannesburg for Madiba’s birthday because he wanted to spend it with us.

&nb
sp; Even though we didn’t have families, there was a feeling among us that uTata took care of us. Every year on his birthday the shelters were given party packets and a huge birthday cake with Mandela’s face on it from Pick n Pay. We always loved that – we really felt some connection to him. We’d sing happy birthday even though he wasn’t in the room. I sometimes felt a bit stupid singing to someone who wasn’t there, so I was happy I was usually high and could really celebrate these moments. They were the good times. It was so exciting, something we really enjoyed, which made us feel like he was looking after us.

  I was fourteen when we Cape Town street kids were collected and flown to Joburg, to a hotel in Gold Reef City to meet Madiba. So this was something different – we were finally meeting uTata!

  There we went from the streets of Cape Town to an expensive Joburg hotel. It was madness – we took over the hotel for about three days, smoking weed and glue, sometimes passing out. It was all very exciting: it was cool that we were getting the opportunity to see uTata, and it was cool to sleep in a clean bedroom, to not have to share a shower. We felt expensive, and important. And we felt spoilt, knowing it was uTata’s money that was giving us this gift. For once we were not being punished for being street kids. And everything was clean. We were so excited we almost didn’t sleep. We would wonder around the hotel wearing our sheets, pretending to be ghosts.

  By the time we got to meet with Madiba, most of us were high on glue, and the social worker could only take the younger kids to meet Madiba up close. While Madiba was making his speech and talking about education, there we were at the back calling out and waving: ‘Viva, Madiba! We are so happy you are out now! Viva, Tata!’

  By the time Madiba finished, we were already gone, back to Gold Reef City to swim and have fun.

  The hotel was near a park. Some of the kids took off their new Madiba T-shirts, and headed to the intersection to beg for money. They didn’t want to return to Cape Town. Back in the hotel, I heard this rumour that they were going to run away. They had an opportunity to be in another city: and we all knew that the bigger the city, the more places there were to beg for money. These kids had no reason to stay in Cape Town.