At about 1pm on the Saturday of the Women’s Day long
weekend, Oom Koos used a lollipop to lure a six-year-old girl away from the
teenager, Debbie, who was looking after her. One of the things we can be
certain about is that Oom Koos was drunk.
He is one of the Coloured (mixed-race) workers on the farm
adjacent to mine; a short, wiry man with deeply etched wrinkles and a perpetual
frown. He is unmarried, probably in his 50s, and gets drunk whenever he can
afford to, which is pretty much every weekend.
Oom Koos and his drinking companions buy cheap
alcohol from workers on a nearby farm who openly run an illegal shebeen.
Neither the farmer nor the police seem to have any desire to close it down.
Oom Koos is usually drunk even before he leaves the
shebeen. It’s a six-km walk back home for him; I’ve often picked him up as he
staggers up the dirt road in the dark. Sometimes I’ve loaded his body onto the
back of my bakkie after he has passed out on the side of the road. He’s a
drunk, but a harmless drunk, I used to
think.
There’s a shifting population of about a dozen workers
on the farm next door – most of them are
alcoholics, but not all.
Debbie is not an alcoholic, although her parents
are. About four years ago, when she was 15, she dropped out of school and moved
in with a man of about 30 living and working on a nearby farm. When they made
love, they were committing statutory rape, but few people care about niceties
like that around here. Soon she had a baby girl, Chikita.
Her boyfriend had a wife in Zimbabwe, but that
didn’t seem to be an issue. One day he grew tired of farm life and moved to
Cape Town, taking Debbie and their daughter with him. He and Debbie fought, and
she moved back to the farm next door with Chikita.
After Oom Koos lured the girl away that Saturday,
Debbie said she had not paid much attention to them because she had been
watching television. Later she said it was because she had been texting.
Debbie’s best friend on the farm is her cousin Marcia,
who is three years older than her. Their mothers are both alcoholics, and
Marcia appears to have suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome. She is 24 now, but has the mental age of a 13-year-old.
Marcia is the mother of the girl who was lured away
by Oom Koos.
The girl’s name is Lionicia. Marcia and her boyfriend,
Lionel, created her name by combining their two names. Marcia was 16 when she
met Lionel, another young farm worker, and went to live with him in a
neighbouring town. They stayed together a year, but Lionel drank a lot and used to
beat up Marcia so she took Lionicia and moved back to the farm next door.
Lionicia is a slight, tiny girl with something in
her eyes that says she finds little joy in childhood. She is shy around adults,
especially whites, and has none of the exuberance natural in girls her age.
Lionicia sometimes visits the white woman who lives on a neighbouring farm,
Susan. Susan feeds her cool drink and biscuits and gives her crayons and paper
and encourages her to draw.
Lionicia draws square houses with smoke coming out
the chimney and sick figures standing outside. She draws the sun in the sky
above the house. Then she draws a red heart and the words “I love you Susan”,
and gives it to the woman.
Marcia is the kind of person who enjoys having fun
with her young friends in town, unencumbered by her daughter. So as a toddler Lionicia spent more and more
time with Marcia’s big sister, Abigail, a sensible woman who also does not
drink. Marcia was in the town 35km away, oblivious, when Oom Koos showed Lionicia
the lollipop and told her to come with him.
Debbie says she saw Lionicia go off with Oom Koos
but thought nothing of it. After a while she grew concerned and went looking for her. She told Susan later
she looked through the window of Oom Koos’s shack, and saw “bare bums” – those
of Oom Koos and Lionicia. But when the police questioned her, she said she had seen nothing.
Abigail had been sleeping and was awoken by Lionicia
crying. “She said Oom Koos had hurt her, and pointed to her private parts,”
Abigail said. She called the police, who had to come from the town. They arrived after about two hours and bundled
Oom Koos into their van.
Then Abigail called Susan, told her Oom Koos had
raped Lionicia, and asked her to take the girl to hospital. Susan drove
Abigail, Debbie and the young girls to town, and left them at the trauma room
at the police station.
After two hours, a detective from the child
protection and sexual unit arrived. He is one of three detectives in the unit,
who cover four towns in the Cederberg district, as well as all the farms. Lionicia
was one of several cases he had to deal with that day.
From the police station Lionicia went to the
hospital, where she waited another hour before a doctor examined her. The
doctor found signs of bruising around her vagina, but apparently no evidence of
penetration. Four hours after arriving
in town, Lionicia could go home.
Oom Koos was charged with rape and kept in the
police cells. He told the detective that he had been drunk, that he had taken Lionicia’s
pants off, but then he realized that what he was doing was wrong, and he let
her go. He said this all happened in the
pit where the farm workers burned their rubbish, not in his shack.
Lionicia wouldn’t speak to the detective about what
happened, because he was a man.
The next day, Sunday, Marcia arrived at the farm
with an older man in a double-cab bakkie. She told Abigail the man – her new
boyfriend -- was taking her and Debbie and
Chikita to Cape Town, and she wanted to take Lionicia, too. Abigail refused to
let the traumatised girl out of her sight, so Marcia left without her on her
jaunt to the big city 250km away.
What happened that weekend has an awful sense of the
inevitable about it. A dozen people living in comfortless shacks; cheap alcohol
and routine drunkenness; women who have
become single mothers in their teens; a
police force with too few resources; when you put them all together, someone’s
life is going to end up more crippled.
Oom Koos appeared in court on the Monday. The
charges were temporarily withdrawn for lack of evidence.
He went back to the farm, and Lionicia.
(All
names have been changed)
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