Breaking bad: A drug manufacturing laboratory was raided by police in Kempton Park. Photo: Felix Dlangamandla/Gallo Images
A once successful Vanderbijlpark fashion designer and a Tembisa school dropout might seem worlds apart, but they both fell prey to highly addictive crystal meth.
Donovan du Preez, 46, drove his successful fashion design business to new heights to support what began as a cocaine-initiated addiction. Sibusiso Dibelo Hlatshwayo, 23, took to robbery, stealing cellphones to satisfy his craving for “that indescribable high”.
Both lost the support of their peers and families. Both were pulled from the brink by witnessing the suffering of their mothers struggling to raise the family.
They began a painful rehabilitation journey, one they’re now determined to complete after several relapses.
Du Preez began using cocaine at the age of 16, discovering the quicker high of crystal meth when his family moved to Cape Town after he matriculated in 1994.
“Fortunately I never had to steal. I did well at school, sports and cultural activities and went on to succeed in fashion design, starting my own company. It was awesome to snort cocaine, I never hid it.”
At first life was a party; he was celebrated as a “creative” and got into the swinging scene after witnessing some celebrities injecting crystal meth at a party.
“I fell completely in love with crystal meth, injecting it for that instant high. With coke you own the room, but crystal meth is more enjoyable. I went from one gram of coke a day to five grams of crystal, spending R1 000 a day.”
Du Preez ate three meals a week, losing 25kg. He was also sleep-deprived, averaging three nights a week and suffering bouts of paranoia.
He’s been clean for six months now, with his legs scarred from injecting and having narrowly escaped death from pneumonia.
Asked what changed, Du Preez says he reconnected with his mother after a self-imposed eight-year estrangement, shortly before she became engaged to a man who disapproved of his lifestyle. His father, who died when he was much younger was “militaristic, drank and used to beat my mother”.
The turning point was when he saw his 70-year-old mother crying.
“I was as high as a kite. My teeth were destroyed. I could see in her face that I was a mess, that drugs were not right in her eyes. That broke me. I could see the destruction in my family and thought, well nobody will remember me as a successful designer, but as scoring and injecting with street people, a swinging guy at sexual meetings. I didn’t want that to be my legacy.”
Du Preez is determined to continue his spell at the South African National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence’s Wedge Gardens Treatment Centre in Gauteng.
He is working as an orderly in the centre’s detox department and studying “security”, his ambition being to start a security company. He is eligible for discharge by Christmas but doesn’t want to tempt fate during the “silly season” and so is aiming for January.
Sibusiso Hlatshwayo is a fellow resident at the treatment centre. He also nearly lost his life, except it was to a mob of angry schoolchildren, one of whose cellphones he and a fellow drug user had stolen using a toy gun.
“I was accompanying my mum to week-day church. I’d reconciled with her after abandoning my family and my eight closest local chommies for a drug-using crowd. I bumped into one of my user crowd and asked him what he was up to. He said he was going to score a phone and invited me. There was still time before church, so I excused myself from my mum and went. He had a play gun, and I had a Bible. We grabbed a phone from one pupil as she came out of school and ran off, but the school bus drivers saw us, chased, and caught us. The crowd gave us one hell of a beating before the police took us away. I spent six months awaiting trial and was found not guilty. My friend got seven years suspended.”
The turning point for Hlatshwayo, who started with khat and went on to crystal meth, was scoring an oil-based version from Nigerians in Kempton Park. This was when he started getting paranoid and “hearing voices in my head”.
“I thought, eff it, what’s this? It was scary. One day my mother was kuzaring [remonstrating] me. I hit her on the head with a mop,” he says, bowing his head.
“I refused to do chores, so they stopped giving me money, clothes, and food. I didn’t see the tough love. We are three boys; I lost their and my mother’s respect.”
He began to see himself through the eyes of his old friends, who were living “clean, nice, good lives”.
“I treat myself like a kid now. I need to take care of my [inner] baby, especially when I see those I was with before. My before is on the streets, using. I need to focus on my after. At home they’re trying to come back to me. I need to win myself back. My mum says if I want my old life back, she’s there for me.
“I’m a smart persuasive guy and I can persuade myself to change.”
Hlatshwayo plans to go back to school and matriculate after first extending his rehab by three months. “I want to be the blessing my mother named me after.”
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