Step mom strips pupil, beats her up

MATSETSA — In what could be the worst case of child abuse, a pupil living with a stepmother alleges that she was almost poisoned by her guardian.

The 14-year-old Form One pupil, *Nontobeko Nkosi, said on one occasion when she came home from school, she was advised by her siblings and neighbours not to eat food that had been prepared for her by her step mother.
After much probing, Nontobeko said she was eventually told that something poisonous had been put in her plate.
Heeding the advice, she said she gave the food to their dog and two days later, the animal was found dead near a pit latrine at her homestead.

The step mother, name known but withheld, was not at home when the area was visited this past week.
Nontobeko’s situation is reportedly so bad that at one point, she stayed for over a week with a neighbour identified as Gogo Mabizela.

Mabizela told this publication that not all was well at her neighbour’s homestead.
She said she took in the child because it was unbearable for her to live there.    

Relating her horrid life to this publication in the company of her principal, Nontobeko said after the food poisoning incident she had never eaten food at home that she had found already prepared.
The girl’s father only comes home on weekends because he works far from home and the girl lives with her step mom and her sibling.

“What further saddens me is that my father sides with my stepmother and no longer talks to me,” she said.
Nontobeko said a recent incident, which almost drove her crazy and led her to stay at the Mabizela’s was when her mother told her to strip naked and beat her all over the body.
The scars on her body serve as evidence.

She said her ‘crime’ was that she had taken a shoe-brush to school and forgot to come back with it.
“She beat me so badly that I decided to go and stay at my neighbour’s house because I thought I might have killed her,” she said.
Mabizela says Nontobeko’s step mother told her that Nontobeko had a tendency to hang out with different boys and she (neighbour) should take her in at her own risk.

“I am still to meet with the girl’s father and it is being arranged by the chief runner of the area,” she said.
She said she did not get along with her neighbour and had also reported the matter to the police.
Nontobeko, whose biological mother died seven years ago, said what made the relationship sour was that her father used to give her money and bring her nice things whenever he came home.
The step mother has an older sibling.
“After that we have not seen eye to eye and she always calls me names,” she said.
The school’s principal Mr Hlophe said if this was the kind of treatment that Nontobeko was getting at home, then it definitely explained her behaviour.

She said Nontobeko was always in trouble for one thing or another and they had believed that she was just a wayward child.  
Police PRO, Senior Superintendent Vusi Masuku, said Siteki police under the Domestic and Violence Unit were investigating the matter.

Swaziland Action Group Against Abuse (SWAGAA) Director Cebile Manzini-Henwood said it was very frustrating to hear these kinds of violence stories day in and day out.
She said society had become so violent that even women were participating and are also perpetrators.
“The father of this child must not take this matter lightly as we shall look into it,” she said.         
*Not real name

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