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Page 5
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.
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.
Eleven
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.