❛I was part of the KwaSizabantu cult❜

As a child and adolescent at KwaSizabantu Mission, Erika Bornman witnessed the brainwashing and public beatings of young children. She herself was molested by her counsellor and branded a ‘slut’ when she tried to stop him. Erika has spent decades trying to get people to pay attention to what went on at the ‘mission’. It seems people are finally listening.

- CHARIS TORRANCE

Before the day her mother, Esther, came home to burn her own and her two daughters’ ‘inappropriate’ clothing (men wear pants in the house, not women!) and their makeup and jewellery, Erika was a happy, carefree little girl. ‘I just remember good things,’ she says.

It was 1979 and Erika was eight years old, living with her family in a house in Worcester with yellow daisies in the front yard, which her father planted for her mother every time they moved house. She and her two older siblings, Hanna and Chris, spent their days playing, reading and learning. ‘I would walk to school and back, picking surings (sorrel) growing on the side of the road and eating the stems,’ she recalls. ‘My father called me “die familie se kurkproppie” because like a cork you push underwater, nothing could keep me down.’

All this changed the day her mother heard a man preach at Goudini Spa. She fell under the spell of the charismatic Erlo Stegen, leader of KwaSizabantu Mission. To her parents, he seemed like a saviour, but for Erika that meeting marked the start of a nightmarish 13 years living in an oppressive environment complete with public beatings, propaganda, compulsory confessions, and molestation at the hands of her counsellor, a man she admired.

Standing up to power