Cape Town - An emotional Khayelitsha mother of a rape victim
collapsed as she left the witness stand after testifying at the Western Cape High Court yesterday.
The woman, whose name is withheld to protect her child, broke down on several occasions while giving evidence against Aviwe Hoya, charged with kidnapping, robbing and raping five Khayelitsha pupils.
The offences occurred between September 2011 and August 2012. State prosecutor Maria Marshall contends the
victims were on their way to or from school.
Marshall alleged Hoya ambushed the victims, threatened to stab them, and forced them to walk with him before taking them to an open field behind Esangweni High School in Kuyasa, Khayelitsha.
He would rape them in a portable toilet.
“After my child was raped I was never okay again,” said the mother.
She said when the doctor who examined her daughter asked her to look at her daughter’s scars, “it was painful for me to look”.
“Since then I have had sleepless nights,” said the mother.
The victim, according to her mother, “never wants to play with other children and locks herself inside the house”.
“I hate all men. When I am looking at men I feel like I want to stab them. My daughter says she will be in peace once the man who did that to her is dead,” said the mother.
Ntomboxolo Roro, a teacher at the primary school the victim attended in Grade 6, also testified that the child had told her Hoya followed her and other children, and had grabbed the victim, put a knife to her waist and taken her next to a lake where he raped her.
“We tried to console her, but she was shocked, shaking and crying,” said Roro.
Wandisile Ngqele, who owned a shack where one of the victims was raped, said on the morning of June 5, 2012, Hoya asked to sleep at his shack because he had problems with his uncle.
“When I came back from school I noticed there was sperm on my bed. A neighbour told me detectives had come to look for me because someone was raped in my shack,” he said.
A group of residents accompanied by police came to his home looking for him that evening
Ngqele said he took the police to where Hoya stayed, but he was not at home.
The case continues today.