This reporter usually ambles around on the amiable side of things – but today I’m looking over my shoulder. That’s the price to pay when you’ve crossed the line. Strayed into the underbelly. In a trap house among drug pipes, pen knives, addicts – the proverbial wrong crowd, the unnerving side. Where the subjects view the small-time reporter like they do turf rivals – with contempt, suspicion, ensuring you’re never quite comfortable. That you’re not given the answers that could have the popo sniffing around. In which case, you’d have to pay, probably dearly.
There are stare-downs, and if you don’t happen to know one of the subjects, it might get pretty ugly very quickly. But you do. You once shared a school desk, the two of you. Maybe even crib notes, now that you think about it. Back then, he was just another classmate, one of dozens in a pressed shirt with big dreams. He yawned through the parts on World History, and revelled over the local labour union movements. Said he dreamed of becoming a politician, and if that failed, maybe a shop steward – anything that might put him on TV.
What a fool he was. Fools we all were. The dreams never quite materialised, and fewer people are hiring lately. Well, he figures, he’s put in the work, done school, kept the faith, but none of those things buy the groceries or impress the fairer sex. So what if he got in on making money another way? The way that braver men have done it.
In his younger days, in the 1980s and 1990s, Colesberg was a God-fearing place, when teachers whipped errant learners, and the closest most of them ever got to drugs was dagga and wood glue. The former was associated with the unkempt and delinquent — the sort of crowd you knew better than to associate with if you hoped to make something meaningful of your life, or keep a good name.
In time it got pimped up, and amadyadya, the B-grade, seed-filled strains that you rolled into a joint as thick as a thumb or smoked through a broken bottleneck were becoming obsolete. By now, Mandrax had come into the picture. R50 could score you a full button (pill), and R25 a half. Dealers started creeping out the woodwork, and law enforcement knew there was a new menace on the streets.
Meanwhile, ordinary dagga had also begun to make way for the really good stuff. Skunk, cheese, Durban Poison, purple haze. With the influx of hookah smoking, weed became an ‘in’ thing, got cool, and social stigma wasn’t as much of a deterrent. Users became younger and younger, and lighting up outside a teeming tavern did not raise any eyebrows.
Today, in the place of mandrax (downers), it’s methamphetamine, crystal meth, or ‘tik’, that is breeding the new generation of home invaders and amapharaphara. Sounds like the nickname you might give to a pet. In reality, these are drug-addled youths who rob, cause trouble, and are regulars down at the local holding cells.
In 2023, the Northern Cape Department of Social Development found that children as young as eight were addicted to drugs. This while the province also exhibited excessive levels of alcohol abuse. ‘Historically,’ reports GroundUp, ‘much of South Africa’s crystal meth was manufactured locally: Western Cape gangs would get the chemical precursors used to make meth from Chinese syndicates.’
Nowadays, much of the supply comes from Nigeria and Afghanistan. The proliferation of ‘tik’ — even in small communities — has also seen the introduction of methcathinone, commonly known as ‘cat’[. Visit nearby towns like De Aar, and you will soon realise how these drugs are ripping communities apart, pitting parents against their own kids.
Tik is usually smoked in a glass pipe or dissolved in water before being injected. Because it’s affordable, and easy to make, it is the drug of choice in many of the country’s impoverished communities.
For Simphiwe*, tik is something that dulls the pain from an incident that got him serious jail time. ‘A place for animals,’ he recalls, ‘where I mostly tried to keep to myself and not think too hard about the offence that put me there.’ A drunken episode had led him to commit the crime, and so he tries to keep away from the bottle. ‘But,’ he says, ‘sometimes a man needs to forget. That’s why I smoke [tik].’
For his odd jobs as a builder, he finds it helpful. ‘It keeps me alert, energetic, always on the move doing something.’ But sometimes there’s a downside. One of the effects of the drug is what they call meth-induced psychosis, where the lines between reality and drug-induced fantasy are blurred. This sometimes comes with hearing voices in one’s head, which according to Simphiwe, can be ‘very scary.’
Although Simphiwe tries hard to give the impression that he has things under control, that ‘it’s me who controls this drug, not the other way around,’ it’s hard to buy it. Even to the untrained eye, he seems to be exhibit all the symptoms contained in the literature. Hang out with him for long enough, and see the fluctuating moods, one moment withdrawn and quite in his corner, the next loud, and all over the place.
There is the apparent disregard for personal hygiene, the rough-looking and darkening skin, and the younger siblings who sit anxiously outside wondering when the next aggressive affront will come.
Besides ravaging these already vulnerable small-town communities, it’s the destruction of young people’s hopes and dreams that truly gnaw at one’s conscience. No longer is the face of tik abuse the young adolescent who is impressionable enough to succumb to peer pressure. There is increased use amongst teenage girl-children as well.
A toxic mix of school dropouts, insufficient lifelines to steer youngsters into education or employment, as well as poverty often means that most of these youngsters find themselves experimenting with substances. Add to this the long-standing sense of stasis and lassitude in small towns, and chances are that many of them will never quite find the motivation to haul themselves back up.
At that point, it might be too late in any case, especially as the side-effects of these drugs are cumulative and irreversible. Once these youths have been abandoned by the system, getting their hands on the next R25 might seem like the only thing that help them ward off reality. And when pocket money can no longer feed the boy’s habit, he will probably get it by force. What the girl-child will need to do to access her next fix will be far more degrading.
FEATURED IMAGE: Themba, a ‘tik’ user in an informal settlement called Rooidakke. When his father died of tuberculosis three years previously, he blamed himself and turned to tik (crystal meth). He was photographed in February 2013 by Lindsay Mgbor for the UK Department for International Development, as part of its Isibindi programme. Wikimedia Commons.