This was my life!

Jonathan leaves home for the last time

Renegade Angel – CARTE BLANCHE
Date : 20 February 2005
Producer : Kate Barry
Presenter : Devi Sankaree Govender
Genre : Children, Abuse, Social and Community

A drama workshop in the Eastern Cape town of Middelburg… These children may be dancing and singing, but each one has a painful history. To protect them, the law prohibits us from showing their faces
This is Mary. As a baby her prostitute mother locked her in a cupboard every day. She was placed with a foster mother, but when the childcare grant didn’t come, she was sold for R50.
This is Mary today: a happy toddler who lives in the Care House. The remarkable woman who rescued her and all the other children here is Dianne Lang.

Dianne Lang (SA Care Trust): “I know every one of them, I really know them. I know what their favourite colours are, I know their strengths, their weaknesses, the things that they like, the things they’re afraid of - I really know these children.”

There are 67 children in Dianne’s care. Their ages range from 18 months to 17 years. Most are HIV positive, many have been assaulted, some have been raped or sodomised - all were neglected. These children have become Dianne’s passion and life’s work.

Devi Sankaree-Govender (Carte Blanche presenter): “But when she first came to Middelburg, Dianne Lang had no intention of taking care of children. She was here as an HIV/Aids educator working with adults in the townships.”

Dianne: “My children were big. I thought, ‘Oh, this is wonderful! My 18 years of life sentence is over! I can do as I please.’”

But life is what happens when you’re making other plans. One night she was asked to look after three children found in a chicken coop.

Dianne: “There was Sam, who was three years old and dying of Aids, and really he was dying. The angel wings were flapping around this little boy. And there was Betty and she had been gang-raped.”
Devi: “How old was Betty?”
Dianne: “Ten. And then there was Patricia, she was about 11.”
Dianne says the social workers weren’t interested in the children.
Dianne: “They said, ‘This is the way they are in the townships. Lots of children live like that. So what?’ And at the time I was so naïve - I actually thought it was only those three. I didn’t realise that we had more than 350 children living like that here in Middelburg.”

The children had nowhere else to go.
Dianne: “If you have a dog and you can’t get rid of it and the alternative is to get the vet to put it down, you’ll keep the dog even if you don’t want it.”

Reluctantly she decided to keep them until they died.

Dianne: “But I started loving them. I started loving them, they crawled in my heart and in my skin and in my soul and when Sam stopped breathing, I grabbed him in my arms and I held him and said, ‘Sam, you have to live, you have to live’, and then I realised how much he meant to me. And he went like this [indicating] and he started to breathe… it was like God had given him back to me, and then I knew that I couldn’t turn back, they were mine.”
Sam is now seven and started school for the first time this year. And Dianne has many more children that she now calls her own, like three-year-old Donovan whom she found on the rubbish dump as a baby. He is just one of many children discarded by a town that is struggling to survive.

Middelburg is in the middle of the Karoo, 100kms from anywhere. What little work there was is drying up. The factories have closed, the trains have stopped running and the railway station stands empty. Even the municipality has closed down and moved to Cradock. In the townships there is no escape from the grinding poverty. On a Saturday afternoon almost everyone seems to be drinking.

Dianne: “You know what’s happening here - people are so poor, they’re dying so fast, you know, that the fabric of society is breaking down so badly that there are no norms and values anymore for these children. So brushing teeth, going to the toilet, these things are abnormal. Eating with a knife and fork or even eating off a plate is abnormal. Eating from a rubbish dump is normal. It’s normal to tease one another about how old was your rapist as opposed to my rapist. It’s normal to say, ‘I was raped six times. How many times were you raped?’”

Dianne and her staff try to give these children something resembling a normal family life. They cook four meals a day and, at lunchtime, all the street children in Middelburg are fed as well. This means they cook for over 120 people daily. The house is run according to strict rules: all the children have to make their beds and do the dishes. No stealing, lying or violence is allowed. Family members may visit children on Sunday afternoons under close supervision. Every child goes to school in the township and on Sunday mornings they all go to church.

Dianne: “We’re not eating grapes now, we’re going to church now, I told you! Come on - out, out , out! I-keps, I-keps.”

Dianne: “I decided we would try out a number of churches. We went to one church and then I found out that I wasn’t welcome. And then we’d go to another church and find out the children weren’t welcome. So it ended up that we started going to a Catholic church because it was the only place that we were welcome… and we were welcomed there because we were the only members of the congregation!”

Devi: “Dianne is single-minded in her cause and uncompromising in her stance. She confronts every obstacle head on and never backs down from a challenge. Not surprisingly, this sleepy Karoo town is struggling to cope with her.”

Johan Fourie (neighbour): “I don’t have a problem if they live here, but then they make a hell of a noise on a drum. When I go and talk to them about it, he says that it’s his culture to do it. What about my culture?”

Dianne: “I have brought the black children into the white area, so that is another concept that is difficult to swallow because one of the things is [that you hear people saying], ‘Hardloop’, ‘Gaan huistoe’, ‘Wat maak jy in die dorp?” [‘Run’, ‘Go home’, ‘What are you doing in town?’]

But that doesn’t mean she’s welcome in the township either. Being fluent in Xhosa, she is able to argue the point when drunken parents accuse her of stealing their children.

The last death at the Care House was in November 2003. Luke had full-blown AIDS and was only 18 months old when he died. Dianne wanted to bury him in the nearby cemetery and went to buy a plot at the municipality.

Dianne: “They said, ‘That baby you’re burying is black, this is a white cemetery’. I wanted the baby buried there, not because it was the closest cemetery, but because they said I couldn’t do it. I jumped up and down and I phoned Bisho and they very grudgingly gave me a plot.”

The children helped dig Luke’s grave, and today they can walk down the road to visit him there. Dianne sold her own house in Port Elizabeth and has bought five houses in Middelburg to house the children. It costs R50 0000 a month to look after them.

Devi: “Are you receiving any child care grants?”

Dianne: “No. I did apply to Social Development and they sent me a letter to tell me that they would not be funding me.”
Devi: “Why?”
Dianne: “They didn’t give a reason. Even the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund say[s] they have no money.”
Devi: “So how are you managing to do this financially?”
Dianne: “Well, I had a beautiful house in Blue Horizon Bay on the beach. I had to sell that home to keep these children alive.”

Friends in Scotland send private donations and second-hand clothing for the children. And every few months she goes to the UK on lecture tours to raise money.
Dianne: “It’s not just the money thing, it’s the lack of care. The Constitution and the Child Care Act is there to protect the child but the people that are supposed to be administering it are not doing their jobs.”
If social workers think a child is in danger, they sign a Form 4 to put the child in a place of safety for 48 hours. Thereafter the court orders an investigation of the child’s circumstances.
Dianne: “In three-and-a-half years the system has only placed five… five, children permanently with me.”
Devi: “And the rest?”
Dianne: “They’re also still on Form 4s legally, a Form 4 stands for 60 days.”

André van der Lingen (lawyer): “When children are removed from their home and placed in an infant home for safety, then within a certain time prescribed by law, Social Services has to file a report in order for the court to ascertain whether the child is a child in need of care and has to be permanently placed in a place of care, and some of these reports have taken years.”

André van der Lingen is Dianne’s lawyer and is taking the government to court.
André: “It’s a specific order, it’s called a Mandamus Order - that’s an order obliging government to actually do what they have to do.”

Last year social workers removed 24 children from Dianne’s care, including this baby, and returned them to their abusive parents. Some were beaten again, before the police brought them back to the Care House. Dianne has decided that if the State won’t protect these children, then she will have to.

Dianne(cradling baby in her arms): “I’ll go to the Supreme Court this time because this is a contravention of the Child Care Act. This is a contravention of human rights, isn’t it?”

André is now launching a class action against the State on behalf of these children.
André: “In those cases we’ll have to approach the court and ask for a curator to be appointed and bring a class action for the damages that the children suffered as a cause of the abuse.”

Last week, while Dianne was celebrating her Woman of the Year award, events took an unexpected and tragic turn. Included in the class action were Lionel and Jonathan aged 14. While Dianne was overseas last year, social workers removed the two boys from the Care House and sent them to House Erica, a correctional facility in Port Elizabeth.

Dianne: “I got lots of letters from Jonathan, and I also phoned him a lot and he phoned me. I did know that he was being bullied. I took photographs of the boys. When they went to Erica, they had no tattoos. The boys told me that they were being bullied by the older boys - they were being held down, they were being tattooed, sexual advances were being made on them. They were also being exposed to drugs and so on, and they were not happy there.”

In his first letter Jonathan told her that one of their roommates had hanged himself on the stairs. Dianne did everything she could to get them out of House Erica and back home to Middelburg.

Dianne: “I have a file this thick. I’ve written letters to the Social Workers, to the Case Manager, to the District Manager, to Bisho, right up to the Minister of Social Development, to the Commissioner of Child Welfare, to the Department of Justice, to the Head of the Magistrates… every person who could possibly help in the case of Jonathan and Lionel, I have asked.”

But she got no answer. Jonathan and Lionel remained in House Erica and couldn’t go home to the woman they called Mama D, despite her promises to get them out.

Dianne: “A little boy who listens to somebody who says, ‘I’m going to get you out, I’m going to get you out’, is like promising someone, ‘I’m going to get you an ice cream,’ and it never comes - tomorrow never comes. So, for Jonathan, tomorrow never came.”

Last week Dianne received the news that Jonathan Kaptein hanged himself on the stairs. She went to Port Elizabeth to find out what made Jonathan take his own life. A representative from the Department of Social Services agreed to speak to us.

Alfrieda Mathews (Department of Social Services): “There was an incident regarding substance abuse, dagga, which they found in the premises of Erica House. The management stepped in, they confiscated the dagga, they did some investigation, they called the police and whatever. And apparently Jonathan was part of the group that was involved in this dagga, and some of the boys apparently accused him that it was his dagga. And, well, I think the boy took it too much and he decided that it’s got too much for him.”

Dianne: “I’m sorry! Not a small thing like that…not an intelligent boy like Jonathan.”

Dianne then went to the police mortuary to identify his body, and make arrangements to take him back to Middelburg to bury him.

Dianne: “The social workers on that case - and not only the individual social workers but all the way up - every single person I contacted right from the beginning until now needs to be held accountable. Anybody who could have done something needs to be held accountable.”

Alfrieda: “I would say that we did not fail, but there might be other reasons, emotional reasons, whereby the system may have failed him.”

Dianne: “If any one of those people had stopped and thought, ‘If this was my relative, if this was my child…’ If any one of them had done that, he would still be alive.”

Jonathan was buried yesterday in the Middelburg town cemetery.

Dianne: “I’m sad because I loved Jonathan. I’m sad because of the loss of potential… that Jonathon could have done something for our country. And I’ve been saying for so long that if we look after our children, we’re looking after our future. Jonathan was our future and because we didn’t look after our children, there’s part of our future gone. I’m actually passionate. If people… if there aren’t people like me out there, who’s going to speak for our children? Because nobody’s listening to them.”





IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.