‘I can’t forget his smell’

For six months Dineo Lekota* (13) has been falling asleep with the “stinking, salty” smell of her rapist in her nose. 

Before she closes her eyes, she says, she always remembers the smell of his sweat-soaked green T-shirt and feels the chafing of his white sangoma’s cloak on her skin. 

“I don’t like this feeling and tasting of him over and over again,” she says, crying. “But it won’t leave my head.”

Dineo and her father are sitting in the back of a car outside the shacks where they live in Diepsloot Extension 12, north of Johannesburg. They don’t want the people here to hear them.

“I’m embarrassed and ashamed,” Dineo explains. “I don’t want people here to remember my rape. It’s the first and only time I’ve had sex.”

Dineo was raped in April, barely 200m from where she lives.

Unexpected visit
That afternoon, a sangoma, who used to live in the same group of shacks as the Lekotas, came knocking on the door of Dineo’s father’s house. He told the family he’d dreamed Dineo had been bewitched. Her bewitchment, he said, would result in Dineo’s father and her stepmother divorcing.

Dineo’s father puts his arm around his daughter’s shoulders and says: “We knew this man, so we believed him and allowed him to take Dineo to the bush to wash off the evil with muti. But, all along, he was a criminal.”

The sangoma took Dineo to an open field behind a small hill near the shacks and gave her a bucket with water and herbs to wash herself. He then instructed her to take off her clothes.

“When I refused to take off my underwear, he grabbed me roughly, pulled off my panties and raped me,” Dineo whispers. “He said, ‘If you scream, I will kill you.’?”

A group of girls heard Dineo shout and started calling her name. “That’s when this man pushed me away and started running. We’ve never seen him again.”

No help from police
The next morning Dineo’s father reported her rape to the police. “The police promised to come and investigate but no one has come,” he says and looks at his daughter. “Dineo now lives in fear,” he explains. “She doesn’t want to leave our shack for anything. She only goes to school.”

Lindsay Henson from Lawyers against Abuse, a Diepsloot-based organisation that provides free legal services and psychosocial support to victims of domestic violence and sexual violence, says that “when a rapist is not held accountable for what he did, the victim can lose all sense of safety”.

Very few victims in Diepsloot receive psychological support, because “the resources are simply not there outside of our pschologist and one or two other counsellors”, she adds.

“Complaints about the police failing to follow up on rape cases in Diepsloot are also very common. In many cases nothing happens after a rape has been reported, which is why we often follow up on behalf of our clients by visiting the police station ourselves.”

Back in the car, Dineo nervously plays with her fingers on her lap. She looks up shyly and says: “The social worker gave me a teddy bear and told me the best thing is just to forget about what happened to me. But that is impossible for me.”

*Name has been changed