50 Cents Per Day
My parents never gave me money, and when we lived in Athlone I had to walk through the bushes to get to school. One day, a thin white lady called me from one of the houses at the edge of those bushes. 'Hey, little girl, come here,' she said. 'I want to talk to you.' She looked friendly and I was curious, so I went up to her.
She said she wanted me to work for her, washing and polishing her long red stoep and washing clothes with that blue soap people used in those days. It was a long bar of soap, blue and white; I can't remember its name. From then on, I went to her house two or three days a week. I got paid 50 cents per day.
Things weren't so dear in those days: with those 50 cents I could buy sugar, coffee, tea and bread. When my parents saw me coming home with these things, they asked, 'Where did you get all this?' I just said, 'A white lady gave it to me.' I liked having this work because at home we had so little, so the money improved things for me. But in reality it wasn't better, because I wasn't going to school, so I wasn't learning the things I needed for my future.
At the time, I didn't know that. My mother died when I was still young, at primary school. My older sister, Patience Nomabhulu, became like a mother to me, so my mother's death did not seem a terrible thing. But when I was 14 or 15 and in Standard Five, which is now called Grade Seven, I stopped going to school.
Instead, I went to my friends' houses so we could spend all day talking and joking. It was quite innocent. There were no boyfriends and we were just having fun. But we weren't going to school.
By Jo-Anne Smetherham