EXCLUSIVE
The enlightenment was only good for a moment before she realised she did not know what to do with the knowledge she now had.
“Even though I had figured out what had happened to me, I didn’t know what to do. What do you say? Who do you say it to? Which words do you use? So I carried on with my life. Primary school was horrible. I was bullied and made fun of. At 12 or 13, I attempted suicide. I had the rape in my head and the school was not safe for me so I had no place and I think I wanted to quieten down things and next thing I woke up at Pretoria Academic Hospital. I had to have my stomach pumped free of the painkillers. My mother found me and saved me.”
For a preteen, that was obviously too much to take, but more was in store.
“The next time happened when I was about 18 and it was with a guy I was dating. I was honest, while we were dating, about not being ready to have sex yet and he was okay with it. (But) clearly, he was not because there was one day that he simply didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. So I was pinned down and couldn’t move. All I could say was ‘no’ and I remember thinking, ‘this cannot be happening again’. I remember crying and at some point he stopped, looked at me and went to the bathroom and returned with a towel. I was bleeding because there was no consent. For the longest time I didn’t know what to call that. When someone shows concern after an act like that, is it still rape?” she paused.
“At 21 I had to step out of my denial and admit to myself, what I already knew, that where there is penetration without consent that is rape,” she said.
In time she had to break the silence and talk to someone and the natural person to turn to was her mother.
“It was only when I was 23 that I decided to open up and talk to my mother. That’s what started my journey to dealing with this and I found myself at a rape crisis centre,” she said. So is she still angry? “To respond to cruelty with cruelty is succumbing to a negative force that started it all in the first place. I will never be cruel to a human being because I know what it feels like. My name is Nompilo, meaning ‘she who brings life’. I am proud of my younger self for keeping us both alive. I know I will never get justice, but that hasn’t left me with bitterness, but rather my belief that the suffering doesn’t compare to the glory that shall be revealed in me.”
Enter Saints and Sinners season 2 in which Gwala plays a character who is brutally raped.
“I am dealing with theme that has haunted me all my life. When your destiny, which is my job, and your victory, come hand in hand, that’s God’s doing. When I found out that Phindi was going to go through what I went through, I said: ‘Okay God, I get it, you don’t want me to go to the grave with this. You want me to help other people with my experiences’. That’s why I am speaking out,” she said.
“I would like to do things through my acting that teach people. I really want to make a difference though my acting.”
8pm, Sundays on Mzansi Magic (DStv channel 161).