I grew up in the township of Ntuzuma, in the city of Durban, in South Africa, with my mother and two younger sisters. I had a happy childhood, playing soccer and cricket with my friends in the yard, eating sugar cane. But most of all, my mother was my life.
Both of my sisters knew who their fathers were, but I did not know mine. I would ask my mother in a playful way, “Who is my father?”, and she would always answer me, “Your father is Jesus.” I stopped asking that question because she didn’t give me an answer in a genuine way that I needed.
January 16th, at the beginning of my high school education at age 14, life changed for me when we returned from a visit to our mother’s friend and found our mother dead in her bed, having died in her sleep, due to a prolonged illness. It was very painful because this is the first time I’d experienced death and it was through my mother who was everything to me. My younger sisters were 13 and 4 years old. At first, we went to live with an aunt, but we had difficulty adjusting at first, not knowing how to start a new life in a new place.
Then our aunt married a man who lived far away, and sold the house we were living in, with no notice or preparation for us. My sisters each were sent to live with their fathers. But I had no father to go to and I found myself stranded and living in the street. I thought to myself that somehow I will find a way to sort this all out, but I had no mobile phone, no means to contact anyone for help and no one I felt I could talk to. I slept on the streets, woke up, went to school, and did not share this situation with anyone there. After school each day was the most difficult. From 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. felt like several days. It’s a painful memory, but it caused me to learn to stand.
I eventually found a garage where I met a taxi driver. He asked me where I was living, saying he saw me around, and that I’m not a hobo or like all other street kids because I go to school. He said he saw me hang my school clothes on the fence. I told him I am studying and I love going to school, but that I’m disadvantaged because I don’t have somebody to take care of me. He offered that I could sleep in his taxi every night from 9 p.m. until 5 or 6 a.m., and he gave me money for food because I acted as security for his taxi. I eventually met others who helped me after I told them the pain of my story, so I had shelter to live in and food to eat, and I was trained how to sing and to perform.
However, when my school said I must pay school fees, I told them my situation and so, they asked me to provide documents showing that I have no parents. I went through a folder I had since my mother’s death, but had never gone through it before. As I went checking through the files, a brown envelope fell down. When I picked it up, written in big letters was, “I was raped and you were born.” I cried. I know my mother’s handwriting and I knew this was from her. But then I asked myself, “Why are you crying? You haven’t opened the envelope and read the letter.” In that time, what came in my mind is that I would get the answer to the question I always asked my mother. I realized, “Maybe this is the reason my mother failed to give me an answer. Let me just open the letter.”
So I wiped my tears off and I opened the letter, and I got what I was expecting inside. The letter was written, “My son if you are reading this letter, I hope it’s not late or early, but I want to tell you the reason I failed to give you an answer about your father is because I was raped and you were conceived. I didn’t have a way to tell you this, and that’s why I chose to write this letter, because I saw that I will die soon. So I need to leave this as your emotional freedom.”
But the most painful part in the letter was the part that said, “My surname Mncube is not my surname but my step-father’s surname, so I don’t know my surname as I don’t know your surname either.” That broke me in a way that I did not speak to anybody and even missed performances. I found myself lonely and thought, no one will believe this.
Another thing that is in the letter is that she said, “In the 8th month, I tried to abort you.” Fortunately, they caught her doing this and were able to avoid her continuing with the process of aborting me. They took her to a hospital where I was born prematurely. This letter answered a lot of questions because it explained how my feet became deformed. I wondered my whole life why my feet are like this, why do I walk with a limp?
I tried to forget about the letter, even though it wasn’t easy, I convinced myself that I can forget about this thing. Music played a huge role in my life. The music I was singing, I also used to heal myself because the problem was that I had no one to get answers from. We tried with the pastor of my church to go around and get answers, but we couldn’t get any.
Healing is not an overnight thing. It’s a process. First of all, I had to expose myself to the reality of my life and to accept the things I cannot change and I had to change what I cannot accept. It was a slow process. I had to teach myself everyday that I cannot change that I was conceived in rape and I had to accept that. But I had to focus on what I couldn’t accept but I could change – which is that I grew up poor. I could change that destiny. You can’t change your past, but you can change your future.
In 2013, a national radio station was looking for a motivational speaker, so they auditioned 900 contestants, given two minutes each. I shared a parable of a fly, being born in filth, but that a fly doesn’t care about where it came from, and if I will die, I will die in the plate at an expensive table in a delicious dish. I will soar to higher places. I was the youngest of the 900, and I made the finals of three. Unfortunately, the contest was terminated when the host was fired from the radio station. However, a renouned musician who heard my story contacted me and gave me my first paid speaking engagement. I began speaking as a motivational speaker about having been homeless and without a family, but not telling my entire story until 2017.
Through divine connection, I came across a lady – Thandazile Gumede — who took me under her wing and even encouraged me to tell my full story by writing a book. Today, she is like a mother to me.
My first book, Now I Understand was published in 2016, but I did not have the finances at the time to print more than 50 copies. However, my second book, I Was Raped and You Were Born was published in 2017 and about 14,000 copies have been sold so far. My third book, My Father Has Always Been There, has just been published, and is of course, about God in fact being my true Father. Today I speak more than 100 times per year.
Some people have suggested my mother has lied about being raped, because “how could a mother be proud of a child conceived in rape?” But my mother was very proud of me. She would tell me, “You have the mind of a leader,” and she would inspire me by saying I will one day help the disadvantaged and orphans. I know she would still be very proud of me today. She still inspires me.
Sometimes there are people who hear me speak who come from fully-structured families with two parents who tell me, “We wish we could be like you because you are driven and have a purpose in life.” They feel that because of their own comforts of life they cannot have an impact on the culture and don’t feel a sense of purpose. My intention was never to be a celebrity or to make other jealous of my purpose but to change the culture and to change the world through my story. As painful as it’s been for my mother and for me, there is another good part of life beyond the bad part. I was once booked at an event for rape victim advocacy, and I heard someone say that they advise pregnant rape victims in the hospital to abort. In that moment, I realized God protected me. I am thankful that my mother did ultimately choose life and love for me. I was a human being before I was born and I still am today. People think they have great knowledge today but they don’t know what they are doing by ending a life full of possibilities. Just like the fly, we can be born into horrible circumstances, but we can soar high and who knows where we will end up?
BIO: Scelo Mncube is an author, motivational and pro-life speaker and now pro-life blogger for Save The 1. Conceived in rape and an abortion survivor, his speaker bio on Save The 1 is here. He resides in South Africa. His Facebook page is Scelo Mncube Motivates.
