Khadija Magardie
On a late afternoon in December, four years ago, Ncele Kgadima * locked herself inside a long-drop toilet on a rural plot in Ga-Maribana, Moletji, outside Pietersburg in the Northern Province. The heavily pregnant woman, 20 years old at the time, gave birth in the fetid, dank and poorly lit toilet. Then she walked away.
The infant boy survived and, after brief treatment for hypothermia at a hospital, was placed in foster care. His rescuer later recalled how someone held her feet while she went into the pit head-first, digging through the worms, excrement and dirt to find the source of the faint cries. She eventually found the baby’s arm and pulled him out.
His young mother was found guilty of attempted murder and of contravening the Child Care Act by abandoning a child. In October last year more than three years after committing the crime Kgadima was sentenced to three years in jail. The nearly 10 months she has spent inside awaiting trial will not count towards her sentence.
In January 1997, the first time police arrived at her employer’s house in Laudium, near Pretoria, to question her, she confessed that she had “thrown away” her child. She was arrested, released on bail of R500 and ordered to appear in court two weeks later.
At her first court appearance, too poor to afford a lawyer, she entered a guilty plea on her own behalf. There were more court appearances that year, during which time her employer, a Laudium housewife, had hired the services of a local lawyer to get her faithful, long-standing “girl” off the hook. The lawyer gave assurances that he would “bring Ncele home” for a reasonable fee. But several fees and taxi-fares to Pretoria later, the case entered its second year. During each appearance, they were told to come back because one or the other element of the state’s case was outstanding.
By the seventh postponement in 1998, Kgadima resolved that she would not go to court again. She had pleaded guilty, so what was the delay about, she wondered. Moreover, she could not understand the court proceedings and nobody was bothering to explain anything to her. The lawyer was communicating through her employer.
When she failed to show up at the court on the due date, the blue-and- white police van arrived and arrested her.
Kgadima had a constitutional right to a trial concluded “without unreasonable delay”. She also had the right to an abortion. In terms of the Choice of Termination of Pregnancy Act of 1996, any woman can go to a government hospital and request a first-trimester abortion.
But in practice women face countless problems in accessing the services. Women with little awareness of their options will end up choosing the backstreet route, putting their lives on the line through methods involving anything from Jeyes’ Fluid to coat-hangers to expel the foetus. Others, like Kgadima, will end up behind bars for attempting to kill their newborns and sometimes succeeding. Several trays in government mortuaries are occupied by tiny corpses of infants smothered at birth or left to die in the veld.
In court, the state prosecutor slammed Kgadima for her “lack of motherly instinct”. But what the court never got to hear about was a life of abandonment, grinding poverty, lack of educational opportunity and, ultimately, a desperation that made Kgadima leave her newborn to die.
Behind the thick glass partition, the slightly built woman in the prison-issue cream cotton dress with blue flowers looks even younger than her 24 years. She has a pretty face, with almond-shaped eyes and high cheekbones. Her slightly pimply ebony skin almost gives her the appearance of a teenager. With up to 10 visitors bunched together in adjoining cubicles, attempting to talk simultaneously through a crackling intercom that periodically goes dead, it is difficult to hold a conversation. That is why prisoners find it difficult to express emotion, or even speak about their crimes.
Kgadima’s eyes well up with tears when asked what she does to keep herself busy during the daytime.
“Some women watch television, but you have to pay to do that and others read the magazines, but how can I do that?” she asks in a thin voice that eventually chokes. As the thumbprint affixed to the receipt of her bail payment in 1997 indicates, she cannot read or write.
Abandoned by her mother, whom she refers to simply as “a drinker”, Kgadima has spent her life cleaning other people’s houses to support her younger siblings, her 78-year-old “ouma”, Rosina, and seven-year-old Josiah and 10-year-old Selina, her two other children. From the time she was old enough to talk, she remembers having to work to earn a living. The father of her children, who is also the father of the abandoned newborn, has never paid her any maintenance. He also refused to allow her to use any contraception.
When she was arrested, she earned R300 a month, which she sent back to her grandmother in Ga-Maribana to pay for her children’s school fees and for medicines for Josiah, who suffers with severe eczema. Her former employer, who paid a hurried visit to her in jail, promised to buy “Christmas clothes” for Kgadima’s children.
Seeing her trusted helper behind bars reduced the woman to tears.
“Oh [Ncele], I miss you so much, my friends are all saying how dirty my house is looking now, especially now its Ramadan,” Kgadima says her madam told her.
In court, the lawyer asked the court to take into account his client’s lack of education and that she could have been depressed, which was rejected by the prosecution and the magistrate.
“You realised that a newborn baby could not get out of that hole by himself and would probably die, yet you walked away as if nothing happened. What a gruesome way to die,” she told Kgadima.
What strikes one about Kgadima is that she readily admits to what she did and appears remorseful. But when social workers called her during the trial to ask her to take the baby back, she refused. “Nobody knows what it is like to have no money, and no hope, like I have,” she says sadly. *Not her real name