Your heart breaks
streets this week said for years they suspected the house was occupied by sex workers and their pimps. But it was the sale of drugs that started six months after Kasem opened his shop that confirmed their suspicions and turned the corner into a vibrant market for the sale and consumption of illegal substances.
“Once they started selling drugs, it made it easy for the addicts, because the girls were also addicted,” said Caldrin Johnson (20), who is unemployed and hangs around the neighbourhood. “Because they would go inside to smoke and stay there with the girls until they were done, so it was convenient.”
From residents’ accounts, things escalated visibly. The sex workers started advertising themselves to passing motorists without fear.
This was not the only drug den and brothel in the suburb. Their proliferation was so apparent that it ignited the Rosettenville’s residents to take action.
Johnson said the brazen attitudes of drug dealers and sex workers astounded him. “Every single night, 10 to 15 girls stand out on the corner. Cars come up, park for a minute and then drive away. Everyone knows what’s going on.”
He said there were attempts to rescue the women staying in the brothel. He recalled walking up the road and passing the house with his mother, when they spotted one of the women standing outside. “My mom did try to help them and told her, ‘You don’t have to do these things,’ but the girl just laughed,” Johnson said. “I told her [mom] the [women] stay here because they get the drugs for free and [they] like the money.”
Kasem has now moved his spaza shop to a new location further up Norman Street. Another resident, while helping the grocer offload fruit and vegetables, said, when the sale of drugs started, most of the neighbours stopped leaving their homes at night.
“We were instantly afraid because now it wasn’t just girls, it was these big guys on each corner as well. I couldn’t go out at night anymore, I would get robbed,” the man said.
He, too, is afraid to give his name, claiming the dealers take note of who speaks to the journalists who have visited Rosettenville since the residents started protesting against the drug dens and brothels.
Nyaope boys
The electrical box and shelves left by the residents in the looting spree were found and stripped from the walls by the “nyaope boys”, as they’re called by Johnson and his friend, Simphiwe Tsele, a 22-year-old who is also unemployed.
“It’s their house now. They have taken it for smoking drugs and stripping anything left inside. The people that buy [sex] also use the house,” Johnson said.
“They stay here because it looks abandoned. At night they can do whatever they want and people won’t think anything’s happening because it’s dark,” Tsele added.
The most prized possession stolen by the nyaope boys after residents launched the arson attack was the 4m-wide steel gate, Johnson said. “They stole that before anything else.”
The metal meant a big payday for scrap dealers.
Any item of plausible value was looted; the pipes and wiring were taken in the days and weeks following the attack on the house. Below the front porch, the home’s earth cable has also been dug out and stripped for its copper, a valuable metal that earns R50 a kilogram at scrap dealers. The handle on the back door and its hinges are the only metal items left in the house.
Between February and June, the presence of people smoking drugs in the burntout building merged with brothel activity. Used and new government-branded Max condoms lie next to the plastic used to package nyaope inside the room that Kasem’s employee once called home.
The room’s window was boarded up after its glass was broken and the frames were stolen. An old mattress and dirty sheets fill the floor space in what Johnson called the “fuck room”.
A narrow alley separating the property’s exterior wall from its garage and outbuilding is littered with rubbish and fresh human faeces.
A blooming pink rose bush grows in the corner of the front yard, staring down at the broken windows and walls of what was once a home.