‘Mama can’t help you’

Elizabeth Jacobs and I grew up in Wellington on the same farm. She was the daughter of the Klaas and I was the daughter of the baas. My three sisters and I called her ‘Ous” because, being slightly older than us, she was our ‘Ousus” (older sister).

I saw Ous almost every day of my life. After school and at weekends she played with us. She was the best rope and ‘rek” (elastic) jumper in the whole of the Bovlei valley and she had a loud joyous laugh.

I got to know her as an orphan. When she was three a neighbouring farmer hit Ous’s mother with his bakkie and killed her. Her father died not long after.

Ous went to Stilbaai on holiday with us, where we swam in those blue waves for such a long time that our toes and fingers and insides of our mouths rumpled, while Ous, still a child herself, sat on our towels watching because she wasn’t allowed to swim in the ‘whites only” sea. She could stand in the water and, as long as she was playing with a white kid, she was tolerated on the beach.

My parents relied on Ous to make sure that we wouldn’t drown, run in front of cars, fight with one another or steal sweets from the shop. She was what people called our kindermeid (child maid) and my mother made the same pinafore dresses for the four of us and for Ous; machine-knitted, the same ill-fitting dark-blue winter jerseys for her four children and for Ous.

When I turned 12 the farm was sold and we moved to town. Ous remained on the farm and I never saw her again.

Until last month — 28 years later — when I walked into the Bellville Magistrate’s Court in search of the city council spy case. And there was Ous wearing flat-heeled, shiny shoes, clutching a plastic handbag and tissue, and sitting in the back row of Court G1 waiting for her husband to appear on charges of domestic violence and assault.

‘You still look the same,” Ous says, holding my face with both hands. I try not to stare at the stab wounds on her upper arms.

Ous’s husband, Roy Booysen, is in Goodwood prison. The day we met he was applying for bail. She was so terrified that he might get bail that she went to court begging the prosecutor and magistrate not to let him out of prison.

Twelve years ago Ous met him. Shortly afterwards he raped her at knifepoint. Before he rolled over and went to sleep, he told her that she was now pregnant with his child and that she would never run away from him.

She was indeed pregnant and she did run away. But every time Booysen found her and took her back home to their RDP house in Delft. Ous stopped running away between the fifth and the sixth court interdicts she got against him.

Booysen is an evangelist in the ‘Loof die Here” church. When his parents discovered that Ous was pregnant, the pastor and his parents married them in the sitting room on a weekday afternoon.

‘They said we must get married because it’s sinful to be pregnant out of wedlock. The church has never said anything against Roy for hurting me and the kids — the pastor tells us to pray, but I’ve said more prayers than days I’ve been alive.”

Booysen is a subcontractor doing building work. He is the father of two of Ous’s children — a seven and four-year-old. After he threw their last born, then only three months old and now a girl of four, against a wall and beat Ous up so badly that she was hospitalised, he received a one-year prison sentence, which has been the longest violence-free time in her children’s lives.

Ous has another boy, now 21, from a previous boyfriend, who refuses to see her as long as she’s with Booysen.

‘There has never been a time when I was not terrified of Roy. He would come home and ask for food and if it’s not immediately ready, his eyes would go black. When he’s like that, I can’t protect the children or myself and I know that I will be beaten and kicked and stomped on — not until I can’t take it any more, but until he can’t do it any more. ‘Tonight’s the night that I will moer you all night long,’ he would say and then he would cut the telephone wires.

‘When things get like this I hold the two kids and I say: ‘I’m sorry but Mama can’t help you now’, and I tell them to stay in the bedroom and then I go and meet my husband.

‘The first blow is often with the fist on my ear. When I fall, he will start kicking me. He likes raising his fists; sometimes with a knife and pretends as though he is going to stab me or hit me. And then when I fall down and duck, he laughs. I’m then so scared of him that I wet myself and I hear my children shouting ‘please daddy, don’t hit mammy’ and he screams that they shouldn’t call me mammy because I’m a worthless piece of shit.”

When Booysen is done with her, he locks her inside the house — sometime for up to a week. He doesn’t allow her to wash herself or change her clothes during this time. ‘Once my boy unlocked the front door and told me to run — Roy was in the bathroom. I ran into my neighbour’s yard. He asked how I managed to run past his dogs and I told him I’m more scared of my husband than of his dogs.”

When Booysen is not working he follows Ous around in his bakkie. ‘I get so scared that I don’t like going out anymore,” she says.

Ous can’t go back to Wellington to her family because her sisters are terrified of Booysen. She is unemployed and all her friends and most of her family live cheek-by-jowel in small houses unable to take her and the two kids in.

‘Once, when the police arrested Roy, the officer told me that Roy will never lift his hand against me — It was not long after that that I found myself hanging on to his knees begging him not to kill me.

‘I think I love him, but maybe I don’t. I don’t know any more what it means to love somebody. No man will look at me as a woman again — Roy tells me that and I believe that. When he beats me, he tells me that I mean nothing to him, that I’m fokkol in his eyes, but then he sends me an SMS telling me that I will never know how much he loves me — How can I know what to believe?”

The police database threw up almost 10 cases against Booysen: assault cases, domestic violence cases and an armed robbery case. ‘This man is exceptionally violent — he will kill his wife if she stays,” a police officer says after looking at the complaints against Booysen. ‘Tell her to get away from him.”

I did. ‘And go where? This house in Delft is all I have. Where will we go where he wouldn’t find us?” Ous answers.

When Ous was raped, I was working in London earning British pounds. When she had her first child I carried a backpack through Spain and went to the opening of the Guggenheim museum in Bilboa. When she was forced to walk around her house in a piss-soaked dress, I made films, working for people who had only respect for me. When she tried to kill herself and signed papers to give her girl up for adoption — something she couldn’t do in the end — I convinced myself that I needed a holiday and travelled through South America for almost a year. When she pleaded with the police and courts to help protect her against her husband, I was falling in love with a man who can’t kill spiders or poisonous snakes.

Ous is black and I’m white. She has no power — not even over her own body or the bodies of her children. By comparison I’m God. These days Ous laughs softly, covering her mouth with her hand.

Correctional services denied permission to interview Booysen, who is awaiting trial on more charges of domestic violence