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  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 lea
rn 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.

  Fourteen

  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 minut
es, 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.