When proportional councillor Rochelle Minnaar (39) had her first hit of tik, she didn’t know what it was.
“I didn’t know about drugs. The only thing we knew about drugs was what we were taught in school. Meth wasn’t part of the subject when they gave us life studies.”
She was 19, and the drug was still relatively unknown in Beacon Valley where she lived. Rochelle didn’t try drugs again until a month later, after her father died and her grieving mother found out she had used drugs.
“I wasn’t smart enough that time. I didn’t have any wisdom,” she said. “I thought to myself, well, if you guys think I use drugs, then I am going to use drugs.” That was the start of an almost decades-long addiction.
“My life spiralled very quickly into a very deep, dark hole,” Rochelle said.
She couldn’t stop using, even when she fell pregnant with her first child. After her daughter was born, she became uncomfortable with her addiction.
“I didn’t have any empowerment,” she said. “Nobody taught me how to empower myself, so I went back to drugs after my child was born, and she would be with me wherever I went to smoke.”
Rock bottoms
Rochelle is grateful her daughter wasn’t harmed during that time, but she wasn’t as lucky.
“About four years into my addiction, I was gang-raped,” she said.
She often roamed the streets at night because her addiction made her “arrogant”.
“That night, everything in my body told me ‘don’t go out tonight’.”
The rape was one of many rock bottoms – being kicked out, going hungry, being beaten, chased away by loved ones, and feeding her two young children dry bread dipped in sugar water. She became waifishly thin, her skin was pale and filthy and her hair was matted.
“But I couldn’t stop using drugs,” she said.
She believes many of her darkest experiences happened because the pursuit of drugs drew her into gang circles. At one point, gangsters hijacked and abducted her, suspecting she was an informant.
“They just drove and drove,” Rochelle said. Eventually, they pulled over and threw her out of the car.
“I didn’t know where I was.”
She walked and hitchhiked for hours.
“Kind people of different races and religions helped me that day.”
Meanwhile, her cousin had told her family about the abduction.
“When I got home, my mommy was sitting in the dining room crying, my whole family was there,” Rochelle said. “I was such a terror to them. I don’t know what they were thinking. I never asked them.” The abduction was a turning point. After that, Rochelle willingly went to a Christianity-based rehab with her mother’s help.
“I didn’t know God,” she said. “I was praying but I didn’t know who I was praying to.”
Deliverance
During a prayer session, she had an intense physical experience.
“It felt like bones were breaking inside my body but my hands were still up. I touched my head because it felt like jelly.”
She says the experience instantly “delivered” her from the drug cravings.
“I didn’t have any cravings after that. I couldn’t believe it. Drugs capture your mind, your whole being. I thought, how is this happening? And then I started to embrace it instead of asking why. I embraced the fact that I was no longer a slave to drugs.”
She spent the next 13 months in rehab processing the grief she had numbed for years.
Life was still full of challenges when she returned home. She married shortly after but divorced two years later. She didn’t crave drugs again – until her mother died.
“I found myself very broken, very alone. My mommy did everything for me. I didn’t know how to do any of that because I came from drugs, to courting a man, to getting married — and my mother was there all the time.”
Struggling with grief, she wandered aimlessly.
“I found myself walking to a church in the Town Centre and I heard people praying. This person was praying for me… for that brokenness. And then I just felt that wholesomeness again.”
After that experience, she no longer felt directionless.
“That was when I started getting into community work and activism,” Rochelle said.
This led her to the National Coloured Congress, and eventually to her appointment as a proportional councillor for sub-council 17. From this position, she hopes to help build a “healthy, healing community” by changing mindsets.
Her strategy involves faith-based partnerships.
“Government is not going to build a building in every community to serve as a rehab, a recovery point, a halfway house. We don’t have enough social workers, but we can work with churches to give more people accreditation to deal with addiction.”
She wants to reach out to other recovered addicts too.
“I need more people like me,” she said. “People who can say, ‘God has delivered me from drugs. There is a process. Restoration is possible. Deliverance is possible’.”
