Growing up in Tembisa, we glorified Kempton Park.
Although we attended primary and high school there, going to Kempton Park for leisure was always an event. It meant getting dressed properly, accompanying my mother on errands and, if we were lucky, being allowed to wander through the shops before heading home.
We wore our Sunday best when we went to Something Fishy at Kempton Square. They had, as far as we were concerned, the best fish sandwiches in town. Going there felt like a treat.
Sometimes we accompanied my mother to one of the big banks, where we would spend half the day waiting for her to make deposits, withdraw her salary and pay for groceries and other expenses in cash. I was fascinated by the people who walked into the bank carrying large suitcases.
Back then, making eye contact with strangers or talking too loudly inside a bank somehow felt criminal.
When we left, I would ask my mother about the people with the suitcases.
She would tell me they were either going to the airport or coming from the airport.
That was how I learnt that Kempton Park was the gateway to Africa. I longed to see the airport for myself. I wanted to see this gateway I had heard so much about.
Kempton Park was a place of errands and possibility. We would walk from shop to shop, looking at clothes and furniture, putting things on lay-by and stopping to greet my mother's cousin who worked at the post office. We would check what Price & Pride had in its windows and what was available at Bears next door.
The town had its own character. There was a familiarity to it. Everyone seemed to know everyone, or at least know someone who knew you.
At Kempton Square, there was a hair salon run by Malume Pat. He started my dreadlocks after realising that I was tender-headed and not particularly interested in elaborate hairstyles. At the time, I had a huge Afro that covered my face and nobody knew what to do with it.
My mother would leave us at the salon and Malume Pat would look after us. He made sure we had the best magazines to read and later in the day would buy us lunch. My mother would guess what time our hair would be finished and return to fetch us.
There was a beautiful waterfall near the civic centre. Around September, on many Saturdays, wedding parties would arrive to take photographs on the manicured lawns. Gospel artists would sometimes make low-resolution music videos beside the water. We would watch, fascinated by the cameras, the clothes and the excitement of it all.
These are the things I remember when I think about Kempton Park.
Before heading to the taxi rank to go home, we would stop at Makong, a butchery that Tembisans vouched for. There was an old Chinese man who spoke fluent isiZulu and would haggle with customers, many of whom he knew by name.
They made the most delicious beef patties.
We carried them to school for lunch — and only for lunch. But when our parents attended funerals over the weekend, one patty could become a meal shared between four siblings. We would fry it, divide it and eat it together.
At the taxi rank, we would buy fruit and vegetables from the same women who had been selling there for years. Their fruit always smelled so good.
You could smell the grapes before you reached them, even while walking past or waiting for your mother to finish a conversation.
They painted their faces with red clay to protect themselves from the sun. They spoke loudly, laughed loudly and wore beautiful gold jewellery. They were part of the landscape of Kempton Park, as familiar to us as the taxi rank itself.
When it was finally time to go home, we would join the queue for a taxi. But because we lived on the same street as some taxi owners, we were sometimes escorted to the front of the queue.
Much to the irritation of other passengers.
Later, as a high school learner who needed to travel by taxi alone because of extracurricular activities, I discovered that the Kempton Park I knew as a child was disappearing.
The characters we knew were no longer there.
The big banks began closing. Furniture shops closed. Something Fishy disappeared. The fruit and vegetable sellers left, one by one. Malume Pat eventually closed his salon and left after the shop had been broken into repeatedly.
The town became frightening.
People started disappearing. Prostitution became increasingly visible. Nightclubs mushroomed. The men and women with the suitcases, who had once seemed to us like people doing important business connected to the airport, were no longer part of the picture.
Our parents became more worried.
We started wearing our long school skirts. We tucked taxi fare into our school socks. We walked quickly and whenever possible, walked in groups.
The freedom that had once allowed us to move through Kempton Park as children was replaced by calculation: Where are we? Who is around us? What time is it? Are we safe? Should we call home?
Eventually, the extracurricular activities had to stop. The anxiety was too much for us and for our parents.
The decay is visible. The fear is palpable. The town feels neglected and crime has become part of the everyday calculations of those who live and move through it.
And now, nine bodies of women have been found dead in Kempton Park and surrounding areas.
Nine women.
Women whose lives ended in places that were once part of our ordinary routines, places that were close enough to our homes that their names never felt foreign to us.
That is what makes this feel so deeply unsettling.
The fact that we know the geography of these places so intimately.
For years, we were taught to adapt to the changing town. We learnt how to survive here.
But women should not have to become experts at surviving the places they call home.
And I cannot stop thinking about the Kempton Park of my childhood — the one that felt like a gateway, the one where everything seemed possible, the one I wanted to explore because I believed it was taking us somewhere.
I wish that version of the town had survived.
I wish the women who walk through Kempton Park today could feel the same ordinary freedom we once took for granted.
Most of all, I wish these nine women could have made it home too.