Survival and the city

Just over the Bez Valley border, in a street lined with gum and oak trees, rich with birdlife, women congregate in pairs or small groups on the pavement outside large Observatory properties.  They are aged between 18 and 40 and come from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, the DRC, Malawi and Zambia. They live in Observatory, Yeoville, Bellevue East, Bez Valley, Bertrams, Kensington, Orange Grove and Vorna Valley.   

There is a loose affiliation between the women, and a pecking order. South African women get first preference for rooms in a guest house on Louis Botha Avenue, which are rented out at R50 an hour or R30 for half an hour. Clients are “Whites, Indians, Nigerians, all kinds…We don’t know them, we don’t ask questions unless they say they want to spend some life with you or if they propose you. That’s when they will tell you about their history.  Then they will tell you, I come from India, or from London, or from Australia.  Others lie to us.”

The younger women insist on condoms; the older women are more willing to compromise if they are paid enough. Fees range from R100 to R600.  

Younger sex workers are expected to pay compensation - often at knifepoint - if an older woman loses a regular client because of them. Sometimes they are forced to give up all their earnings.

Sibongile is Zimbabwean. Her mother lives in Zimbabwe and her father lives in Johannesburg. Since he married a South African woman, her father has failed to support her. She lives with her stepsisters who don’t know what she does. “They think I am chilling and working at Bruma for those Chinese shops.” She works on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays and generally has about four clients a day.  

Evidence, also a Zimbabwean, is 18.  She came to South Africa two years ago on her own. Both her parents are dead and she has no family.  “This thing is a risk. I am doing it because of my situation.  Otherwise I must sleep in the streets.”

*Not their real names.

Mrs Jeenah

It was comforting though not always comfortable when Mr. and Mrs. Jeenah lived opposite.  They were elderly and always there.  Mrs. Jeenah, a tiny woman with a scrunched up face and beak like nose, would sit on a wicker chair on the verandah and keep tabs. She was a busybody who knew everything about everyone. Although this could be unnerving at times, it was also consoling to know that somebody was keeping an eye on the comings and goings in Eighth Avenue. 

Before dementia made her frighteningly paranoid and she would summon me into her house to inspect an imaginery hole in the ceiling where imaginery burglars had forced entry and stolen her imaginery possessions, she would go through phases of being pleasant and unpleasant. It was as though she would make a conscious effort to be a good neighbour and after a few weeks of this, another persona would take over and she would become spiteful and mean.

At Christmas one year when she was in a good neighbour phase, she sent Phumzile across the road with a large box of chocolates and a card.  The card was not a Christmas card but a wedding card, and a very kitsch one at that, of an exaggeratedly perfect bride and groom standing arm in arm outside a church, with multi-coloured glittery confetti being showered upon them.

I never worked out what that card was really saying. I thought about it for quite a while.  Was it that Mrs. Jeenah had absolutely no idea what Christmas was about, or was a handsome groom at a perfect wedding her Christmas wish for me, or was her sinister persona emerging and was she insinuating that I was somehow lacking because there was no man in the house?  Because she was not a straightforward person, even now it is impossible to say.

When the Jeenahs sold their house and the West African community moved in, I missed Mrs. Jeenah. I think of her often still.

*Real names have not been used.