While their mothers entertain clients by night and sleep by day, children of the sex industry are forced to fend for themselves
Thuli Nhlapo
Mothers are expected to be selfless, caring and constant. Celeste Nqaki* has never experienced such love.
When she celebrated her first birthday on December 21 last year, there was no candle to blow. She does not have friends who could have joined her for a celebration, but the white men moving in and out of her mother’s bedroom kept her company.
Even though her mother remembered her birthday she was, as usual, too tired to care, stoned after sniffing cocaine and busy servicing clients. Her father did not shower her with toys to replace the packets of condoms she uses as a rattle: he stopped coming to visit soon after she was born.
At a glance Celeste behaves like any ordinary one-year-old brought up by a single mother. However, she is growing up surrounded by pictures of naked women on the walls of her home and watching her mother perform oral sex. Her mother is a prostitute.
Celeste lives in a dilapidated house in Rosettenville that her mother shares with six women and a bunch of scar-faced men. The doors and windows are constantly left open and the women sleep most of the day, leaving her unattended.
Usually little girls shy away from strangers, but not Celeste. She shrieks with laughter and crawls faster to the person offering a packet of fried chips that serves as her staple diet. She was about to open her arms to be picked up when someone emerged from the kitchen.
“Hey! Lekgoa! Mlungu! Howzit?” a black guy with a framed picture of Mangconde, an Eastern Cape prophet, dangling on his neck said before picking her up. Because Lekgoa or Mlungu, as she is affectionately called in this house, had soiled her nappy and had wet pants, the guy dropped her.
“Are you looking for her mother? They’re sleeping like they always do during the day. This baby plays alone if we are not around. She looks hungry. I doubt she’s been fed since morning.”
He volunteered all that information without being asked. He then pulled Celeste by the arm to the room where “they were sleeping”.
The house was filled with the stench of dry urine, rotten leftovers and dirt. The bedroom door opened to the scene of two women sprawled on a bed built with four five-litre tins and a thin mattress.
Unlike the blue-eyed, chubby Celeste with her light complexion and curly golden brown hair, Ntomboxolo Nqaki* is dark-skinned. Her unkempt kinky hair, red eyes and very thin cheekbones makes Ntomboxolo look like she has been sick for a long time.
“What do you want? I have been working the whole night. I am tired. I need some rest. Pununu must go and play,” she says.
It took a lot of patience to establish that Celeste’s plight began when Ntomboxolo decided to leave her job at a Hillbrow bar where she worked as a topless waitress. She claims the salary was not good so she had a hard time surviving on her R85 tips a week.
“I used to admire other women who came to the bar but kept on disappearing with white men. They made a lot of cash in a matter of minutes. I thought that was an easy way to make money. Because I do not have experience and jobs are scarce, I decided to join them. I became a prostitute,” Ntomboxolo explains.
“At first, I made a lot of money. I even moved out of Hillbrow because I wanted to service decent clients in the suburbs. It was easier in those days because I did not smoke cocaine and had no child to worry about. I could work as far as Alberton and Pretoria.”
Ntomboxolo is only 32 years old, but she talks about the time she was still “young and hot” in the sex industry. It was during those good times that Ntomboxolo met a decent white man who became her regular client.
“He was nice and good to me. He offered to pay more than R100 for a blow job and R150 for a full house. Because I trusted him, we had sex without a condom. He paid more for that good gesture.
“I had an affair with this guy. It was more than a prostitute servicing a client. He cared about me and that is why I never had an abortion after discovering I was pregnant with his baby.”
Celeste’s father is the owner of a restaurant at The Glen shopping mall. He is a happily married man who loves his wife and children and does not want them to know he has a child with a prostitute.
Ntomboxolo is proud that she supports her daughter by increasing the number of men she slept with in one night. She believes she could do better if it was not for always having to come back home to check on Celeste. She admits that Celeste stays alone most of the time because she has to stand on the street or accompany clients to their homes. For clients who choose to order her menu at the house, Ntomboxolo serves them in front of Celeste because she thinks she is “too small to know what is going on”.
“You can take my Pununu. You’ve come to visit us many times so I now trust you. Please take her. She even likes you. You will let me see her if I miss her,” Ntomboxolo urged me.
Pununu, Celeste, Lekgoa or Mlungu is not the only child in this house. Mfundo Nkonyane* (10) is the son of the number one prostitute in the house. Winnie is her trade name and she hails from KwaZulu-Natal.
Convinced that she lives a normal Christian life with a poster, squashed between pictures of naked women, that announces: “Christ is the head of this house, The same Yesterday and Today, and Forever,” Winnie allowed her son to visit during the December holidays. She is now stuck with him because she could not afford to send him back home.
“The problem is that I now smoke cocaine and all the money buys the stuff. But I will send him back next week,” Winnie says. She seems to have forgotten that she has made the same promise for four weeks.
Mfundo keeps on staring into space. Trying to have a conversation with him proved fruitless, because he did not seem to comprehend. The scar-faced thugs say they take him along when they do their errands because they are protecting him from his prostitute mother.
According to Jill Sloane of the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce, “It is not appropriate for a child to be in the same room where sex takes place. Not everyone works at the same time so the girls must work together as a group as child minders.”
Sloane said the sooner prostitution is legalised the better, because cases like Celeste and Mfundo could be dealt with.
Johannesburg Child Welfare said the case was “the tip of an iceberg” and talked about conducting an investigation only after a complaint from the public about the children’s situation.
The South African Law Commission might prepare a White Paper on decriminalising prostitution. Child Welfare might continue to wait for a telephone call from someone. But Celeste and Mfundo continue to live alone every night.
* Names have been changed