Lolly* wasn’t a good domestic worker. She spent her time reading when she was supposed to be working.
Sometimes she came to work late because she wanted to study in the library.
Lolly* wasn’t a good domestic worker. She spent her time reading when she was supposed to be working.
Sometimes she came to work late because she wanted to study in the library.
Lolly was just 10 years old when her foster family introduced her to a life as a domestic worker. “Mrs Bojo”, as Lolly knew her, used to hide her books so she couldn’t do her homework and had to work around the house.
“I had to come home from school and do the dishes, sweep, clean the bathrooms,” says Lolly. “Sometimes they used to hide one of my shoes so I couldn’t go to class and had to work.”
She wasn’t paid for her work; it was simply expected. “If I didn’t do the work they hit me.” It was 18 months before anyone took any notice.
“I told the teachers, and they say I must stay at the library and do homework, but they [Mrs Bojo] made me come home to do the housework.” Lolly had arrived in Grahamstown full of promise. “We saw so much potential in her,” says Giles Gush, chairman of the school governing body at Sidbury Primary, her former school at the farm. She was a top achiever there, both in class and out. “She was a really great student, took part in
everything,” says Gush, showing off pictures of her lead role in a school concert. “But then she went to Grahamstown and just went down,” he says.
With school fees and boarding costs partially funded by the Methodist Church, Lolly enrolled at Victoria Girls’ Primary. But she was no ordinary Grade 5 girl.
“The issue was the family she stayed within Grahamstown,” says Gush. “They get used as domestic servants.”Lolly went from top of the class at Sidbury Primary to repeating Grade 5 at Victoria Primary.
“We thought we were doing the right thing,” says Gush. “We honestly thought she would slot in. Boarding might have been better, if it was an option.”
Despite the abuse, she “still had it better than most”, says Gush. There are no high schools at the farms, and only the smartest pupils have the opportunity to study further in Grahamstown.
Accommodation is the problem. Gush has been campaigning for the building of boarding residences for years. Now 13 years old, Lolly has moved to a Xhosa school in Paterson, where she lives with a relative.
She is back on track and hopes to one day become a Maths and English teacher at a farm school. “She [the relative]is much nicer,” says Lolly.
“Now when I come back from school I do my homework.” A representative from Grahamstown Child and Family Welfare, who asked not to be named, says that of the nine years she has been working with the children, she has never had to deal with a case of a child being used as a domestic worker.
Grahamstown Child and Family Welfare employs several social workers to provide social services to around 400 local children, organising fostering of orphaned or abused children and working with families to reduce abuse and neglect.
“There are serious problems with children in foster care, but not that kind,” says the social worker. Unhappiness and emotional insecurities are not unusual in a foster home environment. Lolly’s case did not appear on their system, but the social worker was keen to follow it up.
*This name has been changed to protect the identity of the interviewee.
