Lindi remembers the day she knew there was no turning back and, tucked away among her belongings, she keeps the photograph.
Her 15-year-old self, flanked by her older sister, smiles back at her. It was Christmas Day, and their mother, a domestic worker, had been saving up for the girls to have their hair braided for the occasion.
For Lindi: a yellow and white frilly dress, and shiny black shoes decked in bows and ribbons. For her sister, the same, but instead of sunshine yellow, a letterbox red.
At 2pm, after posing for the family portraits, Lindi disappeared into the bedroom. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe. She drove a pair of scissors through the braids, letting them fall to the floor alongside the dress. She put on her shorts, T-shirt and takkies, and ran her fingers along her shortly cropped hair. She knew her mother was going to be angry. But the outfit felt like a disguise.
“I feel good when I look at those beautiful pictures of me and my sister. We were raised like twins,” she says, sitting on the bed she shares in a one-roomed tin structure with her girlfriend, “but I’ll never forget how I really felt on that day. From that day, I knew I couldn’t be anything else.”
On the map of Lindi’s life, Christmas Day in 1996 is not the only landmark that speaks of an identity struggle. From a much earlier age, she had befriended the boys in her street in Site B, Khayelitsha, and spent hours each day playing makeshift “board games” with tiny stones outside.
“I grew up as a boy. I always asked myself, ‘What is happening to me?’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll see what happens when I grow up,’ but from that day, I knew I wouldn’t change,” she says.
In her late teens, Lindi fell in love with a young woman and they started a relationship. Not long afterwards, a neighbour visited her mother and said: “I think Lindi has got a snake” – referring to the myth of lesbians keeping a snake in the bed for lovemaking.
“I got home from school. I didn’t know that my mom’s friend from the neighbourhood had come by and said, ‘I hear your daughter’s in love with another girl. I hear your daughter is having a snake.’ I told my mom I was not sleeping with another girl.”
It was around that time a male neighbour began taunting Lindi. “In the beginning I hardly noticed him,” she says. And then came the warning. “You’re not a man. One day I’m going to teach you a lesson,” he said.
One summer afternoon in 1997, when Lindi was just 16, she was on her way home from basketball practice when a car drove up alongside her. The window rolled down to reveal the same man who had been taunting her. This time, he wasn’t alone.
The four men forced her into the car and drove away, but later the other three got out.
“As soon as I was alone with him, he said, ‘I did tell you that one day I would catch you and now I have caught you.’
“He took me into a room that had no window, and locked the door.”
Over the next four days, Lindi – who had never had penetrative sex before – was repeatedly raped. Her assailant offered her no food.
“It was difficult to scream for help when I was inside that house. I would have heard if there were people outside, but nobody was there. There was nobody to scream to,” she says.
The day after her abduction, Lindi’s mom went to school to ask if her friends knew where she was.
She waited another two days, and went to the police stations and the hospitals, but there was no trace of Lindi.
Meanwhile, Lindi sat in the room each day, knowing what was about to happen every time her assailant came back. On the fifth day, he left his phone behind and Lindi called her mom. “I don’t know where I am,” she said, telling her mother what had happened to her. “On that same day, they found me.”
Hospital
The police called an ambulance and Lindi was taken to hospital. For a week, she lay there. Both her body and her soul felt broken, she says. And then her mother came into the hospital room and broke the news to her: she was pregnant.
Lindi was ashamed to face the world. She stayed out of school and only ever left the house to visit the hospital for check-ups. After nine months, she was rushed to the Day Clinic in Site B where an agonising birth followed.
Over the next few weeks she breast-fed her baby boy, but she found it difficult to touch him and love him. After just two weeks, determined to carry on with Grade 9, Lindi returned to school. But, with no counselling to help her work through what had happened, her body gave up.
One day, six months later, while cleaning the floors of the family house, she blacked out. She was checked into a clinic for severe depression. On her return to school a few weeks later, she enrolled for life skills training and youth camps where, for the first time, she spoke about her sexuality and her ordeal.
“Before I joined the groups, I didn’t want to touch the baby. My mom had been supportive, but it was then that I realised this is my child and nothing is going to change that.”
It took Lindi four years to pick up the pieces of her life. She had bonded with her son, and was finally doing matric.
Then it happened again.
This time, too, it was at the hands of a man she knew from Site B. He abducted her after a sports tournament. First he raped her in a car, then he took her to a house where the ordeal continued. He said he had to do it to her because she was a lesbian. He was going to teach her a lesson.
Then Lindi discovered she was pregnant again.
After her second son was born, she felt suicide was the only way out. “I wanted to kill myself,” she says. “But eventually I told myself, ‘I am not going to change. I am going to be a lesbian. It is the person I am and my life will carry on.’”
Lindi managed to pass matric that year and later volunteered for organisations such as LoveLife and Hope Worldwide. She also came into contact with the Triangle Project, which offers support services to survivors of hate crimes.
But the memories of being raped creep into her mind every day. Today, unemployed and living in a small township near Somerset West, Lindi still has nightmares.
Her girlfriend, terrified that the same thing might happen to her, asked Lindi to move in with her. They have been together for seven months.
“I did try to report this at the police station,” she says, “but you know the process of lesbians in police stations. You stand on your own there.
Her children – now 12 and eight – live in Site B with Lindi’s mom, who has drawn a veil over the rapes. She pretends her grandsons were born in normal circumstances.
“I am close to them, I love them,” says Lindi. “They are my children. I buy them something when I can, but I have no job, it’s not easy. When I do, I make the journey to Site B.”
The place is knitted into her destiny – her past, her present and her future. When she goes there, she often sees the perpetrator of the second rape. He owns a big tavern not far from her mother’s home.
The other one – her childhood acquaintance who lived down the road – now stays near Port Elizabeth. He too is a free man. - Independent on Saturday