Voices of anguish: Sex workers speak
Lovie, 39, says she can remember the worst thing that happened to her in her sex work as if it happened yesterday. She remembers how a regular client in the business went from a cool guy to a monster. He was a regular client of female workers, but it was the first time he approached her. “Can I take you out for a night?” he asked her, and she said to him, “How much are you going to pay me?” to which they agreed on P150 since there was no business that day. What she remembers is that before they left for her place, the client asked her if she needed food because he wanted to buy some, to which she agreed and spent P130. “On the way, we met my friends and I could see from their body language that they wanted to tell me something,” she says. Lovie states that when they got to her place, the client gave her the money before they had sex as per her norm. She would then put it in a safe place known only to her, and put her cellphone on the sofa. “I felt really tired that night and knew that if I had sex then, I would not perform very well. So I communicated that to my client and requested that he let me sleep for 30 minutes or so. He agreed without any form of resentment and told me that he was also drunk and would not enjoy sex, saying that sleeping for a while was a good idea for both of us. I was happy because I had not thought he would agree. He even asked me to switch off the light,” she recalls. Usually when Lovie gets to her house with a client, she locks the door and removes the key from the door for her own safety, which she did on that day and switched off the light. To her surprise, the client woke her up around 4am, the lights were on and he was dressed up and ready to go. “Actually, he said the only reason he woke me up was because he did not know where the keys were. I asked him if he was willing to go without sex though he had paid for it and he said he had no problem, whatsoever. As I was just about to open for him, something just told me to ask him why he was leaving so early in the morning at the risk of being attacked by animals in Kasane, but he insisted he had to go because he was going to work early in the morning. That made sense and I opened for him,” she says.Once the man had left, Lovie took a scan of the whole room and realised that her clothes were moved from where she had put them. She also found that her money was not where she had placed it. “The container in which I put all my money and everything I had made for two months was empty. Everything I had worked for was gone - US dollars, Rands and Pulas, my sweat and my blood were gone. I nearly fainted,” she says. She followed and traced the client whom she would later catch with some of her possessions and counting her US dollars. Upon confronting him, he grabbed her by the neck and pointed a knife at her throat and said, “It’s your choice bitch. Tell me what you want, money or life?” When she said she wanted her money, he agreed and said that he was going to give her the money and kill and bury her. She left him with the money and went to report him at a police station in the town, where she was told she could not be helped as sex work is illegal. Another sex worker, Metlholo, 39, says that sex work is not for weak women. The things that happen to female sex workers are horrible, painful and sometimes downright degrading. She recalls one night when she was disrespected by her client, a white man who had promised to pay her P500. “When we got to his house, he changed and said to me, ‘Who do you think you are bitch? Please take a good look at me. Do you think for a second that I can sleep with a black and ugly slut like you? You must be kidding. I can never touch you. Not even with a 5 metre hole. You are good enough to be f**ed by my dog and you’re going to do it now,” she says. She was shocked when the man forcefully undressed her but was able to fight back successfully, whereupon she quickly put her clothes back on, darted out of the house and rushed towards compound’s security guard who confirmed to her that his boss made black sex workers sleep with his dog. The security guard would aid her escape, telling her about a storm the previous week that caused damage to the electric fence, allowing her to escape by going over the wall. Another sex worker says she was beaten by a truck driver because she refused sex without a condom. “When I went to report around 2am, police simply told me prostitution isn’t allowed in Botswana and that the truck driver was my brother from Zambia and that I shouldn’t report him,” she says. These are the narrations of sex workers put together in a book called The Voices of Sex Workers in Botswana, by NACA, UNAIDS and Gender Affairs department. Botswana Police spokesperson Dipheko Motube could not be reached to react to allegations of police officers dismissing the sex workers on account of sex work being illegal in the country.