This autobiographical work is described by the author herself as “a warning and a true story”. Along with Never Been at Home by Zazah P Khozmayo, No Way Out is a product of a life-history project funded by the University of Durban-Westville.
Though Mdakane had a reasonably loving early family life, especially from her grandmother, her mother is stern, her father is absent and the uncle she adores exploits her as a child model. But much worse is the fact that she is raped on the way home from school when she is only six — a horrifying event that she confides to no one.
Such self-sufficiency is to stand her in good stead as the curse she imagines the rape has brought on her seems to blight her life. Her family situation deteriorates when both her parents acquire new partners and she gives birth to an illegitimate baby. This is the boy child her mother has always wanted and Zinhle is cast out and forced to leave her child behind.
“It was the beginning of the end of the world for me,” Zinhle says, and indeed from this point her life descends into a gruelling chronicle of misfortune. Zinhle describes her suffering in these simple words: “I survived street life, I survived my mother’s abuse as well as my stepmother’s, I’ve gone through rape, I survived drugs, I spent days without food and I got over all the people I lost in my life.” Despite everything she manages to end her harrowing narrative optimistically. “‘But I will never lose hope that some day I’ll live the life I always wanted to live”.
No Way Out makes for painful reading and its style is not polished, but what it has to say is certainly worth hearing.