Jack Lundin: PERSONAL HISTORY
Until a few weeks ago you could have seen him on the corner of Pretoria Street and Quartz: filthy dirty, stinking of glue, begging from cars. Twelve years old and one of the small army of Hillbrow street urchins.
My notes on Elias start at 9.50 am on October 1 1996, when he was 10. One of my informal writer trainees, Thomas Khoza, was out on the streets researching the experiences of children held in adult jails. I still hold the verbatim transcript of that historic first meeting.
Elias comes from Rathanda, a location outside the Vaal Triangle town of Heidelberg. On that morning, Elias, a child of few words, spoke more than perhaps he ever has since.
As he told it, after stealing a gongo (car radio) he was taken to Heidelberg police station and thrown into a cell full of adult prisoners.
“There were eight of us and the fathers made me a woman because I was beautiful. Sometimes I could not sleep because spooks bothered me. There were times when I felt like falling down.
“The police took us out to wash their cars. There was a fat white policeman called Cobra, who used to pierce me with a sewing needle.”
The magistrate wore a black robe. “Most of the questions they asked I could not answer because I was nervous. What made me more nervous was the man in black.”
As punishment, Elias was stretched across a table and sjamboked by two white policeman. He got four strokes.
After his release he did not go back to his family. “My [step]father used to beat my mother with burning wood when he was drunk. He beat me too. There were times when we slept without food because my father bought beer with all the money and my mother had to borrow mealie meal from our neighbours. But my mother was always kind to me.”
So Elias, with his friend Abram, hitchhiked to Jozi and Elias became a street kid.
A month after that interview, Khoza and I took Elias home to Rathanda. We met his parents – Elias keeping a wary distance from his father. We met Mistress More, the pastor’s wife whose small farm school Elias had attended. She told us how Elias used to live with a band of vagrant children in the veld, coming in to scavenge food from rubbish bins at night. Four weeks later we drove out to see how he was getting on. We discovered that Elias had returned to Jozi.
This became a regular pattern. He was hungry for his mother’s love, but she was plunged so deep into poverty and despair that she couldn’t supply his needs. On the streets he pined for her; at home he could not live with her.
We tried everything. There was a family close to his parents’ shack that he used to run to. We gave them R100 to feed him and enrolled him back into the farm school (R10 for the year). Elias said that from the money we gave the family they bought a loaf of bread and spent the rest on beer.
That Christmas he almost died on the street from a chest infection. We took him to a paediatrician and he pulled him through.
By this time we had taken two other kids off the street: Ishmael (16) and Mile (15). We found a place for them at a shelter in Kempton Park run by Child Welfare and they resumed their schooling. We took Elias to join them, but it lasted only a few days. He spent his time sniffing glue with street children and on January 31 1997 he hopped on a train back to Pretoria Street. We tracked him down and he said he wanted us to keep visiting him on the street.
April 9 1997. Elias is 11. We had taken him home three weeks earlier and now drove to Rathanda with a cake and tracksuit for Elias. We lit the candles and sang Happy Birthday. His mother wept.
That month marked the start of a nine-month renaissance for Elias. With his parents’ consent, we took Elias to a farm near Warm Baths, to Khoza’s mother.
Every few weeks we went to see how he was getting on. The glue-sniffing stopped overnight. Elias put on weight and attended the local farm school. After a few months he could speak Shangaan fluently. We took his mother to visit him and she was invited to stay for a holiday.
But in January this year it all fell apart. One afternoon he hit the road back to Jozi.
The most I could get out of him was that one of the boys on the farm had been beating him. He got as far as Hammanskraal on the N1, where the police picked him up and, in an act of true kindness, drove him to Rathanda. After a few days he was back in Pretoria Street again.
This year was bad for Elias. He became emaciated. He spoke in grunts. In the mornings he woke up on the pavement, his T- shirt drenched from nose-bleeds. He never liked street kids’ organisations, but I persuaded him to attend Street-Wise for the occasional shower and change of clothes.
But his attendance tailed off. Finally we sat down on the pavement had a chat. He agreed he was getting nowhere and hated the street. He agreed that his mother could not care for him. He agreed that I should find him a safe place to live and that he would do his best to settle there.
I discovered Firlands, a children’s home for abused children in Linden. I found a school that would be happy to accept him – Parkhurst Primary. Only children who are the subject of an order from the Children’s Court are accepted at Firlands. When I cautiously told him this, Elias to my surprise immediately agreed that we should go to the court for a care order.
There was a brief bureaucratic nightmare obtaining the forms from Johannesburg Child Welfare. But on May 28, in National Child Protection Week, Elias moved into Syringa House at Firlands, run by the Salvation Army.
He’s been assessed by a remedial teacher, who finds him of above-average intelligence, with an excellent short-term memory. The teacher will see him twice a week to help unlock the chains around his damaged but ever-hopeful spirit.
The seven other children we have taken off the street – Ishmael and Mile have been joined by Tshepo, Thabang, Thabiso, Moses and Justice – are either re-uinted with their families or getting there. They adore Elias and ask after him constantly. They are rejoicing at the good news: Elias is off the street.
Jack Lundin is a senior editor with the Financial Mail