This is the story of Kamilla Sambora, a very pretty young Ugandan woman, who was lured to South Africa by promises of a modeling career and untold fame and fortune. She was one of the many black African women who annually find themselves lured from different parts of the world for the express purposes of sex slavery and, to a lesser degree, domestic work.
Some of these girls (those destined for South Africa) are sold into various fraternities and have to obey their masters diligently. Those who do not toe the line consequently find themselves on the street, where life can be ten times worse than expected, especially in places like the rural areas of Johannesburg and the Cape Flats, in the Western Cape.
Kamilla was lucky. After initially being inducted into a sex ring in Johannesburg, she managed to escape her captors and landed up in Cape Town, where a Somali friend of mine brought her to our Madressa (Muslim Religious and Cultural institution) on the outskirts of Cape Town, commonly known as the Cape Flats.
She had told me what had happened to her, and that she was only interested in getting back to her parents and brothers in Uganda, but that she had no money and no passport(The modeling "Agency" in Kampala, Uganda, had said they would see to everything!)
She couldn't speak English very fluently, and on occasions she mispronounced certain words, but what she had told me had had me was shocking. My jaw had dropped when she had told me about Samantha, a sixteen year old girl, who had been raped by a Government official, then found dead in her room not long after that incident. The police had concluded that it was suicide, and, seeing that there was no next of kin to notify, they had left it at that. No one else had dared to say anything — the guest house (where she had stayed), and its staff were forbidden to speak to anyone. She was further victimized when she was labeled a whore. What else could you expect from someone coming from a foreign country, being bold enough to ply her trade in South Africa?
This attitude was something not uncommon in a land where the borders had been open to anyone (from the African States) since APARTHEID had been abolished. Day by day, whenever you watched the news on television, hordes of Zimbabweans and Angolans and anyone else could be seen making their way across the border, either by climbing over dilapidated fences or crawling under them.
.jpg?t=20120209092158)
Article comments