Life and Survival as a Destitute: My Own True Story

By Sarah Harper

My book is about my life from childhood to now. It looks at the difficulties and traumatic experiences i went through in my childhood - sexual and physical abuse,and not being protected by those who were supposed to look after me and love me. I try to give comfort to those who may have been in a similar situation to mine.I'm writing this book, telling the whole world of my suffering and pain i experienced as a child - sexual abuse, physical abuse, pain that i have locked up inside for years. Revisiting my past whilst writing this book has been extremely painful and has filled me with tears in some chapters. It has always been my desire to tell my story so that people know that despite all the pain i experienced and although i may still be damaged psychologically, i managed to overcome this and have a balanced life.

As a child, i had no one to tell about my suffering. I was that child that no one wanted to know or to speak to.There may be people out there who are suffering in silence like i did and may be scared to talk to someone. I hope that this book will inspire and counsel them and encourage them to do something about it. I hope that my book will help those affected to move on with their lives like i did.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Nov 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456789466

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE 

Age 4 - 7

I suppose as a child, I held onto most of the nasty things that happened in my life—things that were said and done to me as a child still haunts me. I also suffer from internal, physical damage that will be with me for the rest of my life. I remember being told all the time by Khulu, Your mother is just a prostitute in the city, swapping different men and creating different surnames for each of her children. She doesn’t care a damn about you. This was really painful to know, that my own mother didn’t like me or care a bit. At that point I didn’t like my mum at all, and I remember repeating those words to people, telling them that my mother was a prostitute in the city, because they laughed about it, and I thought they would now love me because I had made them laugh. It did not occur to me that these were not pretty words to say. I was naively unaware they were mocking me. Although she was making money in the city, my mum would not come to see me or send me food and clothing. I remember saying I hated my mother and my father and that I would never do anything for them when I grew up and that I didn’t want to know them.

The anger I felt as I was growing up changed to humbleness. I wanted to demonstrate to people that it was possible to love someone’s child as your own. The humanity in me was not from a book; I was born and was exposed to this cruelty, to torture and abuse, and it really challenged my feeling towards humans’ well being and how to treat one another. It bothered me fiercely—how could people be this evil, especially to children? I became strongly influenced to help other people’s children and treat them as my own. In fact I would be so heavily involved that I would forget they had their own parents; I would talk about other people’s children who loved me like their own mum. That is one thing I look back on and am proud of, as well as the fact that my own children loved sharing their rooms with these children, creating a big, loving family. Giving love to a child, never mind whose child, should bring joy to anyone’s heart.

We are all the same in spirit; regardless of different classes, of worse or better parenting, we are still human beings. However, to be fair my mum, she was not a prostitute; she worked for white people by the white suburbs, and she worked as a nanny, not earning plenty of money, as I was made to believe. Mum was not a prostitute, but she was a woman who was unlucky in her relationships with men, and life was really difficult for her. I do sympathise with her because she had no family support network around her; when I got to know her when I was a bit older, as well as my half-siblings, there was no genuine love between them, other than the fact that she was a provider to them sending food and clothing. However, I still feel she should have done her best to visit me and feed me as much as she could, but that wasn’t the case. Mum cared for Edward and Beauty, and her siblings, and also her mother. I was out of that particular network, hidden away where she wouldn’t have to see how I was or what I looked like. To be honest, my mum said that I embarrassed her; her friends did not know she had a child of my age. Eventually I made sense out of it, and that is why it was always about Edward and Beauty, who were good-looking too. I was never introduced to her circle of friends, not until when she was terminally ill and needed me then.

My mum didn’t add me to her children’s book. I was the hidden-away object that she didn’t have to see. She knew Nandi was old, as old as her own grandmother—how on earth was Nandi going to cope with me? She had lost all her dignity, her husband, her daughter, and her son-in-law, and she had to sell all her livestock. We were both objects of a broken home.

My mum earned very little money for being a nanny and looking after two children, Angela and Susan Cole. Once in my life Mum came to visit me for one day. I was seven years old, and she brought me these beautiful clothes and knickers. It was the first time I got to wear knickers in my life. The dresses had nets underneath. I was completely overtaken with happiness, and even though they were second-hand clothes, to me they were new and unbelievably beautiful. They smelled so lovely and new to me. My mum looked so beautiful and was very light in complexion. I remember telling my mum the traumas that I endured in this home, and I cried my eyes out to her thinking she would rescue me and take me with her, but she just looked at me and said, You are growing up; don’t worry.

I just thought, You don’t care about me, do you? You really don’t love me at all; you don’t even know me, so it is true what they tell me about you. You don’t love me at all. I didn’t have the guts to tell her that to her face. She was not my mummy and couldn’t protect me from the way I was treated out of her presence. The only thing I had wished was that she could have stayed a little longer. She only stayed for two days, and though it went quickly for me, it had given me relief from the beatings and verbal abuse, and I felt like a child, not a thing, as if I belonged within the family. It was her first and last visit to come and see me.

My Life with Grandma Nandi

My earliest memory with Nandi, whom we called Grandma Nandi, was that she was full of love for all of us. She had her own biological great-grandchildren, Liya and Lisa, from her only granddaughter, Linda. Linda was three years younger than my mum. I was four years older than Liya and six years older than Lisa, so I was a big sister to them. Despite being beaten up severely and verbally abused as children, we really connected and bonded. I suppose we all had one person we loved most: Grandmother Nandi. She comforted us, and when she was scolded and was crying, we also cried with her. The insults she received were too painful to bear; I can recall her son-in-law calling her a witch who killed her only own daughter. He went on and said, You hate your daughter; stop crying, It was just after the death of her daughter, and Nandi hadn’t stopped crying.

We ate together from the same plate, the three of us kids, but I’d be told to stop eating and leave more for the others. If they left some, then I would be given the chance to finish it. They told me I ate too much anyway, that my stomach was like a fifty-kilogramme sack because I never got filled up. This insult made me feel so different from all of them; and I felt there must be something wrong with me. I wished so much to be like them, to be their actual blood sister and be treated just the same, belonging to their family. I belonged nowhere—I was that child who no one wanted. Many times I wondered how it felt to have two parents, a father and mother who loved me. I wanted so much to belong to a family and call someone Mummy or Daddy. It was a dream I would never reach. I never experienced the feeling of being nurtured with love. It is this one reason that makes me nurture and love my babies so much. I had discovered what love was through my children; the way I feel about them is unconditional love, and they are a part of me, part of my flesh.

I think the most painful thing was being told my own family had washed their hands of me; they didn’t want me from the day I was born, and I was like a curse. This hurt so much, and I asked myself was it because I was too ugly? I was always told about the trouble of having me; I can remember Khulu saying to me, You used to have faeces all over yourself, and you walked like an animal, so your own people refused you. I wanted to be treated like my adoptive family’s own child, however it didn’t seem to be a blessing on my side really; I was abused, their little slave person, not a child they sincerely rescued. My own parents didn’t want to care for me and love me, so why should they? I wished to be dead at many times after being beaten up very badly, thinking, Why didn’t I just die from this? Then my problems would be over, and everyone would be happy. After all, no one will even notice, other than Grandma.

No one noticed Nandi’s protests on my behalf. Instead her son-in-law would also scold her. He had sold all her livestock and definitely had no respect for her either; he had moved on with his life and remarried, whereas she had lost her only daughter and was still grieving, living like a destitute in this home. Quite often she would speak to herself, and I remember her words vividly, saying she would go with the world and die in the field, that animals would eat her body where nobody would ever find her. These were painful times for her, but she could not break her daughter’s pledge to never leave her children alone, no matter under what circumstances may happen with her husband. This was a strong promise to make, but she honoured it nevertheless.

I remember often seeing Grandma Nandi cry her eyes out after her son-in-law insulted her. She had no control because it was not her home, and she was a destitute just as I was. I once told her that if she died I wanted to be buried with her alive because there would be nothing for me left. She replied with very angry tone of voice and said, You never, ever repeat those words to me again. I couldn’t understand why; I thought she loved me and wanted to be with me forever. As I grew older, I realised what she meant, and understood how difficult life was for her. She was like another Mother Theresa, and I am honoured to have known her for seventeen years of my life. She prayed every night and every morning without fail; that’s what gave her strength and counselled her. She remained a devoted Christian till her death.

My Life at 6 - 11 Years: The Abuse

I felt very scared all the time, especially when Khulu approached our hut where I slept with Nandi. I could never predict what was going to happen to me until he’d gone back to his bedroom. Whenever my name was called, my knees would start trembling and become weak, and I was scared before I even knew what I was being called for. In most cases, I would be called, then I would be told off or even beaten up; it was rarely for good news. Only at times when Liya and Lisa did not want his leftover food and were full, would I be called for a good thing. Khulu would call me to offer me the leftovers, but he always said, You never get enough, you eat like a horse. Here, feel that sack of yours.

On one occasion, I got lost in the field while I was herding the cattle, and I ended up losing the herd. As a punishment, I was beaten up really badly and was deprived of food for the day and night. I remember feeling pangs of hunger until I could not feel the hunger anymore. At times I hid in the bushes until all of them were asleep. While hiding the darkness will be drawn out, and there was every possibility I could have been attacked by dangerous snakes and scorpions, but who would have even cared what could have happened to me? I was a child and should have not been herding cattle in the first place. Sometimes Lisa would save me pieces of sadza wrapped in her dress, and when no one was looking she would throw them on my blankets before silently letting me know there was some food for me. She had a soft heart and sympathy for me, unlike her sister Liya.

It seemed anybody could do whatever he or she needed to do with me. As it happened, on one afternoon I came back from fetching water, one of my usual duties. Unknown to me, I placed the gallon of water on the ground, I heard the door close behind me, and the next thing I knew there was this woman, Khulu’s sister-in-law, the new wife of his brother. She grabbed me and lifted my body up, saying, I will kill you! She beat me so badly the blood flowed from the scars all over my body. It did not help that I had very little clothes on me; most of my flesh was exposed. I had no idea what I had done to her. Khulu was upset at this incident, but only because she had buzzed in without telling him what the problem was; according to him, she had no respect for him.

I was a punching bag for anyone, and my new dress my mum had brought me was shredded into pieces when Thandi beat me up one day. I remember telling Liya that her mother was going to marry John, because I had just seen them talking. Why I said that, I don’t know. I still have the scars, and it was really bad. For some bizarre reasons I still miss that dress. Thandi had come back home from her marriage, after becoming widowed from her first husband. Her mother had died before her husband’s death, so she was back home and afterwards decided to go to the city to look for work. She lived with my mother until she found herself a place at the hostel for women, where she found a job at the factory.

CHAPTER TWO 

I started schooling in 1960 in January, which was the beginning of the school year. The previous year I was went back home, because my right hand couldn’t reach my left ear, and that was the mark to measure the right age to start school. They did not ask for birth certificates in rural area schools; it was not important because many children were born at home with the help of traditional midwives, who were just older women with experience in childbirth. Hospitals were quite a distant away, and only a few travelled to hospitals because that meant going there earlier and waiting for the delivery day to come; the women had to be accompanied by someone who would look after, them (e.g., cooking, for it was self-catering). I suppose for these reasons people preferred to have their babies at home. My mum says I was born on 26 March 1952, and that definitely leaves a very big question mark in my life, because she didn’t go to school and couldn’t read or write, so how on earth was she sure of when I was born?

The school was very far for young children—it took more than six hours to get there, and most of the times we ran to get there in time. When we got there late, we would receive beatings from our teachers: we were made to lie on the bench, face down, and the teacher beat us with a huge stick. There was this tree called a maphani, and it is quite strong and had long branches, so that’s what they used for hitting us. Missionaries who visited the school quite often managed the school; they did not allow the beatings of pupils, so the children were happy in their presence because we would be treated well. The treatment from the teachers encouraged most of the children to become truants, because we were scared. I can remember one boy who was older than myself, who was beaten in the hall while we were called to watch. All the teachers beat him, one after another, until all the sticks they had prepared were broken, and afterwards he could barely limp to his home. Luckily he lived locally, about fifteen minutes from the school. I really don’t know what his parents said to the teachers; all I know is that he did not return to school again and went to the city for job hunting. All these things got to me—that there was no legislation to protect the children, from cruelty, from the teachers.

In those days classes were graded differently. I started school in 1960, and I was between six and seven years old in what was called Sub-A (now year one or grade one); after that there was Sub-B and then standard one, two, and three. I must have been in standard two when I started playing truants the odd days with a friend of mine called Oliver. We