Father,” she said, smudging the Sunday talk with what some would describe as desecrated breaking news, “I am a sex worker, but am also a devoted Christian, and make no bones about it, and what I contribute to the coffers of the church, which is a spoil of my labour, helps to sustain the church, and pay your stipend.”
Thembekile is a fictitious name I give her to protect her identity in the world where sex workers are derided, and have their character painted in the vilest of descriptions.
The “revelation”, if you would describe it in those terms, took place in the confessional, in my old church, where I was a priest.
“I come to confession not so much to confess anything or any sin, or wrongdoing; I do so because I have no job, my matric certificate has done nothing to earn me a job. I have a family to support: my mom, my two children and my two siblings who are unemployed. If you, father, show harsh judgment, it is your problem, but I know my God understands.”
Then she adds: “How I wish society would be more understanding, and that we as sex workers may be allowed to own safe salons to ply our trade. But the government is fixated on seeing us as scum, unworthy of nothing… these choices we make not because we are comfortable with them, but circumstances beyond our control force us into them.”
Here is a church chorister, beautiful, erudite and eloquent, a young woman in her early 30s, in a confessional, opening up to her priest, without guile; dishing out a lecture that, I think, should help the country’s policy makers reflect more deeply on her words, and on many other words of her ilk, as to what ought to be done next to correct this anomaly. To speed up a clear-cut intervention to formulate a legislation to decriminalise sex work.
“It does not help, even the police who arrest us, in many instances, are beneficiaries of our services… it’s all a lie; a farce, this is all hypocritical. May God open the minds of the government to do what is right.”
This story has stayed with me and the words I place in quotation marks I have sought to reconstruct as accurately as my recollections allow. They were said some years ago.
This week, the vilest side of human cruelty reared its ugly head, as it always does in our violent SA. A macabre discovery of decomposed bodies of sex workers found in a motor car workshop in Johannesburg is on the lips of South Africans, and should act as a catalyst to change our thinking about enacting laws that decriminalise sex work.
Why do women, who engage in a trade of their choice, get violently treated by perverted men whose sense of morality is dulled by their prejudices?
We have a slow government that takes ages to respond to any crisis. The LGBTQ+ community is endangered, and so is the community living with albinism.
The violence in this country moves on its own momentum, nothing will stop it until the government’s priorities coincide with those of society.
As the ANC-led government patches its own perennial internal squabbles, it has become oblivious to the needs of society. As was with Nero as he fiddled while Rome burnt to ashes, so it is with our government, paralysed by deficient leadership.
The murder of six sex workers is a tell-tale sign of what bad governments can do to society.
- Mdhlela is a freelance journalist, an Anglican priest, ex-trade unionist and former publications editor of the SA Human Rights Commission journals
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