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  I still regarded Cape Town as home though, so I was never tempted to stay in Joburg. I had my relationship with Freckles and I was getting used to going to school.

  And there was my dad – I still wanted to find him.

  On the day we left, the volunteer caretakers and shelter mothers looked for the rest of the kids, but we flew back to Cape Town with lots of empty seats on that plane.

  When we got back to Cape Town, we knew Madiba’s voice; we knew that in Cape Town the older street boys were paid R10 to put up posters of him. We also knew where De Klerk lived, and that Mandela had been in prison on Robben Island, which we could see beyond the docks.

  We knew it was the end of apartheid, and the city itself was high.

  But what did it all mean to us? We loved the Madiba T-shirts we were given. We would wash them, hang them out carefully, and sleep in them on the side of the road.

  A few years before this what we street kids couldn’t understand was why so many people had flocked to Cape Town’s Grand Parade five days before Madiba’s inauguration speech in May 1994. What were they all doing there on the streets, our streets, all these people from all over the world?

  There were celebrations in town every day and suddenly there were all these road blocks and we didn’t understand – it sometimes irritated us because they were messing with our escape routes, the routes we normally took when we’d stolen something from Shoprite.

  So we climbed the walls of the City Hall, and the library, and the clock tower, and sat in the shade, watching all these people.

  We heard people yelling, ‘Freedom!’

  And we robbed the visitors, stealing their money and bags. By 2am every night, our sleeping quarters under the bridge would look like a frickin’ Chinese shop! The next day, we would sell the bags and buy weed. It was an amazing time for us as we moved through the crowds.

  We felt so free. Everyone was happy; no was was focused on us.

  Our special treat was fish and chips – that was what we’d buy when we had earned more money than usual, which we did on those amazing days. If one of our guys was puzzled and asked, ‘Who is this Mandela guy?’, we’d tell him to shut up and just eat his fish and chips.

  By the end of Madiba’s inauguration speech, we had celebrated our freedom and were high on drugs.

  PART 2

  Seven

  IN 1996, WHEN I WAS fifteen I was moved from Ons Plek shelter in town to Siviwe shelter in Woodstock, near Salt River Road. Siviwe was a more stable shelter – their main aim was to reunite street kids with their families. It was cleaner and had nicer facilities. I was moved there because the guardians felt I needed more stability.

  It meant I was not living with Lea any more, but I saw her most Friday nights, when the Ons Plek girls and the Siviwe girls gathered together for a social time.

  Siviwe ran a programme at the Salt River community centre to get us kids involved in activities – painting or acting classes, and things like that. It was there that I bumped into my dad’s brother Donald again. He was now an HIV activist working at the centre. I’d given up on Donald a long time before, and I didn’t want a friendship with him now, but there was something he could tell me – he knew where my dad was.

  I kept that information for a long time before I found the courage to go to my dad’s house.

  I kept my dad’s address to myself until a certain Friday. When the new shelter mother arrived for her shift late in the day, I lied to her and told her that I’d already got permission to see my dad for the weekend. She gave me money for the train to go and to come back, and told me that I had to call the shelter when I got there.

  I had planned to go on a Friday evening because I believed I would sleep at my dad’s place. I thought he would happy to see me.

  It was a weekend I lived to regret.

  Extension 3A in Gugulethu. That’s where I found my dad’s house and learnt that he had set up a shebeen there with a new girlfriend, Beverly. They had one son, Storm.

  My dad was high when I arrived. There was a feeling of resistance. I had always had so much hope that he would take me back. But he was now with Beverley, and he was cold towards me. I felt it deeply. It was clear that they didn’t want me to stay there. I think my dad had the same attitude as my mom: that if I stayed with him, I would mess up his family life with Beverly.

  We ate together that night, but as time passed I felt that he needed to go somewhere and that I needed to leave. He made it sound like he’d always known where I was. He said he’d come visit me at the shelter.

  And then my dad left.

  I couldn’t travel back to the shelter so late on a Fiday night – it’s dangerous travelling alone on trains, especially at night. So I decided to hang around in Gugulethu. I smelt some weed and followed the smell to a house where some guys were smoking. They let me sleep there.

  My dad’s house was not far from the house of the singer Ringo Madlingozi. The next morning, I sat for a while and listened to him playing his music in front of the Rasta vegetarian shop.

  When I went back to the house, I met Beverly and Storm. Beverly was angry with me. She locked the house and told me I must wait outside. And then she also left. I don’t know what happened. I waited the whole day, until it was very late, and no one came back.

  I got the picture – I was not wanted.

  Even though it was already dark, I decided to back to town, to spend the rest of the weekend under the bridge. Then I could return to Siviwe and pretend it had all gone OK.

  I was raped on the train coming back.

  I could not fight my attacker. Rather raped than killed, I thought. I never told anyone what happened on the train coming back from my dad’s house. The only person I felt I could relate to was Lea.

  At Siviwe, I started misbehaving, and so I was moved back to Ons Plek. I’d be there for a few months and then I’d be sent back to Siviwe, where I still had a bed. They kept my bed because they felt there was hope for me, that I was just going through a bad patch.

  But the pain of my dad not wanting me pushed me right back. He had a home – why didn’t he want me there? I was once his child … and now he has another family? How in the hell does that happen so quickly, I questioned.

  I felt discarded. I just didn’t understand why he would dump me in the shelter to start another family, have another kid. Another kid who he was looking after. Why couldn’t he do the same for me?

  Eight

  I WAS ALWAYS SO ANGRY and upset. And I moved back and forth between Siviwe and Ons Plek.

  Every time I was moved to Siviwe, Lea stayed at Ons Plek. She was committed to staying safe. She hardly every left the shelter. The times I came back to see her she always seemed like she was doing better. I loved her; she was like a little sister. Our relationship faded when I moved to Siviwe, but I always remembered that she was there at Ons Plek, trying to stay safe.

  While I was at Siviwe, I tried to stay clean, but sometimes it just got too much for me, and I would go back to the streets. Occasionally I would go back to my mother in Khayelitsha. After a while, my circle of moving also landed me back at my dad’s house.

  Even after everything that had happened, I still felt good about seeing him – I would come and go maybe once a month. He’d let me know when Beverly wasn’t there and I’d rock up. I just wanted a relationship, and it was important for me to spend time with him.

  When she was around, he wasn’t happy to see me, but I’d have fun with him when Beverly wasn’t there. We’d eat soft white bread with lots of Rama margarine, Simba Mexican chilli chips and Oros orange squash. He was a fun person, quite cool. But my dad drank a lot after he was kicked out of Woodstock.

  We also played a game, snakes and ladders – throw the dice and move your stone up or down. It was fun. Every time we ate together, we’d play that.

  We didn’t discuss problems. I didn’t tell him that my mother didn’t want me – he couldn’t have known it would turn out the way it did. I never asked him fo
r anything because we’d both lost a home and a family we loved.

  Sometimes he would let me sleep overnight on the floor, but the next morning I would have to jump on the train back to town.

  Sometimes I couldn’t sleep over, and would have to leave at night. I took many train rides at night, travelling back to Ons Plek, or to under the bridge. Train rides at night meant I faced being molested by guys who would drag me to the toilets and do things to me.

  One time as I was on the train from Gugs, on my way with some other girls from Ons Plek to town for a Brenda Fassie show. I somehow didn’t feel fear when we were approached on the train by some aggressive men.

  That night the train didn’t stop at all the stations so we couldn’t jump off. But it wasn’t me who was raped that time.

  And I just kept moving, on the streets, sometimes in the shelter, back and forth to my dad’s house to flop on the floor for the night, then back to the streets. Always moving.

  Because I was in and out of school all my childhood, I never attained enough education to move smoothly from one grade to the next; rather, I was always put in a special learner class for kids from the streets, like myself.

  Eventually I ended up back in Siviwe, and after that I went to Batavia Secondary School, which was for special needs kids, because my reading levels and learning were low compared to other kids of my age. I settled down again, and tried to keep things steady.

  Back in Gugs, my dad’s shebeen business didn’t do well, so Beverly went off to Joburg to deliver drugs. She got caught and was locked up, and that’s the last I ever heard about her.

  With no income, my dad couldn’t pay his rent, so he went onto the streets to deal drugs. I don’t know where his son, Storm, was taken.

  After that, I saw my dad sometimes on the streets in Salt River, near Siviwe. He didn’t always recognise me, but I still hung out with him before the Siviwe gates closed. Sometimes he would give me a R100 note, and I would brag about him to the other kids.

  Every week the shelter gave us money to do our shopping at Shoprite, and we would sometimes see my dad on the streets begging. The other kids began to make fun of him, and this made me very angry.

  The shelter had lots of girls who shared their beds: it was quite common among the shelter girls in order to secure a place in that society.

  By now I had learnt only one way of dealing with my deep-seated feelings of hurt, batrayal and rejection: sex. I became this butch girl, and I took out my frustration on one of the girls at the shelter, a childhood friend. I found myself abusing her in the same way that I had been abused. She never seemed to complain about the way I treated her – she would get annoyed at me if I went quiet, if I didn’t touch her and seemed to not care. Then she’d become confused and jealous. It seemed to satisfy my anger.

  Nine

  BY THE TIME I WAS close to my seventeenth birthday, I had become more focused. I knew that if I behaved well, I would be able to stay in the shelter for the year after I turned eighteen.

  I went to school. I went to the tutoring sessions. I went to all the sessions with the shelter’s volunteers and funder. I did all my duties. I didn’t go out much. I was still with Freckles, but he was in jail again by then, and so even he wasn’t a distraction – in fact, after that, I never saw him again.

  In 1997, Michael Jackson arranged for the Ons Plek kids to see his show at Green Point Stadium.

  It was an incredible night. We were so well behaved because we felt really important and respected. To get ready, we had done our hair, used all our hairclips, put on lip gloss and worn our most fashionable crop tops. We were very prepared because we thought we were going to meet Michael Jackson as we had uTata.

  In the stadium, we were given great seats right at the front, and although we never met him it was a great night. When he sang ‘I believe the children are our future’, this spotlight lit up our row – and there were all these Cape Town street children. We were all so excited that Michael Jackson had seen us, and when he threw a kiss we all claimed it was aimed at us.

  We really felt like he knew us. Ons Plek did have its benefits – it made some great memories for me.

  One day, when I was at Siviwe, someone told me my dad had been found dead on the street. It was a terrible shock, and I had sudden fits of crying at the loss of another loved one; first my two great-grandparents, and now my dad. I was in standard 8 at Batavia Secondary School, but I left after that year because I felt so lost after my dad died.

  I missed him so much.

  My social worker and I thought that if I attended his funeral and met his mother and other relatives, that might be an opportunity for me to join their family. I thought it was a nice plan, because I remembered staying at my dad’s mother’s house on a farm way out of Cape Town when I was five years old.

  She was called Auntie Em. I remembered quite a lot about my visit, even though I was so young. I had made friends with a white boy, Japie, the son of the white farmer. Japie was a boer boy with yellow hair. The water at the farm was salty, so we had to go to Japie’s well for fresh water. And when we went to town, we had to take a donkey to the bus stop. There were a lot of beautiful tall trees and I’d had fun there, although I hadn’t stayed long.

  I was excited about meeting my dad’s family, and that maybe I could go to live with them. But at the funeral, nobody knew who I was. Nobody even said hello. My social worker told my granny Em who I was, but she didn’t recognise me, and she said she was too old to take care of more children.

  I went back to the city even though I wanted to leave, to get out. It’s amazing how your life can be happy and then go backwards again, and then again. From Michael Jackson nights to something like this.

  One day, somebody came to me while I was sitting outside.

  ‘Did you hear? Lea is dead.’

  Apparently she had been walking on the mountainside at Lion’s Head, which I found strange since she didn’t like to leave the shelter. She came across a group of men. They raped her, and then stoned her to death.

  I had lost yet another person.

  I made plans to run out. I had to go to that spot to see for myself. I went looking for something; I wasn’t sure what. The walk was long. When I got to the spot, I just sat and sat and sat. While I was sitting there, I was thinking of ways of getting out of the city. My dad, who hadn’t want me, was gone; my best friend was gone …

  I thought: So, just go.

  One thing about being at the shelter was that the gates were closed at 9pm. I sat there until 8pm. When I got back down the mountain, the gates were closed, and so instead I went to the bridge. I went there and smoked weed.

  I just wanted to smoke as much as I could. I needed to.

  Lea was somebody I could talk to. Her loss made me feel so emotional; her death upset and angered me so much that I didn’t want to stay in the shelter any more. But at almost eighteen, I was experiencing an emotional breakdown.

  After Lea died, I remained under the bridge for a whole week. I was thinking how I had to get out of this life in Cape Town; I had to find something better.

  While I was there, I met this nice girl called Ntombi. She was an educated girl with a family, but she hung out with us under the bridge that week, smoking with us and telling stories.

  Ntombi knew our ways, even though she had never had to enter our world. She brought us old clothes, and if she went to a party, she brought us the leftover food.

  She was so nice to us. We hung out at the bridge together, and that’s how Ntombi and I became friends. Ntombi told me she was going to Joburg, and I told her I was thinking of leaving too. I asked her for her number there, so we could stay in contact. I said I was going to call her the minute I was released from the shelter.

  I kept that number as if it was the most important thing in the world to me, because while we were smoking she was describing this great life in Joburg. Everything about it sounded so amazing. And I thought that was what I wanted.

  So one day I stoo
d at the robot at the V&A Waterfront, close to the bridge where we’d been staying, and I gave two men blow jobs. That gave me enough money to pay for the train to Joburg.

  I went back to the shelter, and I kept checking on my money, which I kept hidden in a takkie. After that I called her every now and again, to keep checking that she was expecting me.

  Ten

  I WAS A STREET SURVIVOR, having learnt how to steal, how to defend myself, how to find protection and how to fight off what I thought would harm me – survival instincts that had been developed in my system from the age of nine.

  I didn’t mind being smelly and dirty, or having ripped clothes. I lived with street people, and on the street I’d found people that I loved.

  At eighteen, I decided to give up street life, and go to Johannesburg to find a job and a new life. I contacted Ntombi, who was a university student in Joburg.

  Ntombi was sympathetic when I told her that I thought there were greener pastures in Joburg. She agreed to let me stay with her in Yeoville when I arrived, until I found my way.

  Two days before I left Cape Town, I called her again and she said I should call when I arrived in Park Station. She was so excited for me, she said. For me, it was that feeling of having something so exciting to look forward to – my new life. Ntombi reassured me that everything was going to be great, that we’d hang out and do stuff together.

  Everything in me was just so, so excited to be taking this step. Ntombi was in Joburg to study so I knew she had great connections. I couldn’t wait to see her.

  I had packed my stuff and I was ready. I had my bottle of glue, I had three zols, I had buttons wrapped up in paper. I had a pair of jeans and one tight top. I had this funny bomber jacket, roll-on deodorant, a face cloth and soap in a see-through plastic bag.