Chapter 1

Chapter 1

I’ve always been different, always been the kind of girl who stuck out in a crowd, the kind of girl who didn’t entirely look like those who were around her, hell, even her own family. I've always been the black sheep in the family, or in this case the white sheep in a family of black sheep. 

I wouldn’t say that there was ever something really special about me, other than my “skin condition”. I didn’t find myself to be the most beautiful woman in the world and I certainly wasn’t the smartest. I didn’t have the most contagious or most attractive laugh and my smile was nothing to write home about. I wasn’t too tall, neither was I too short- I was just, average. 

I’m really the average girl next door and the girl you would probably be in the same class with for months but always forget to put a name to the face. I was the kind of girl you would sit next to in a minibus taxi and probably completely forget about after a few minutes. 

Hell, I was soft spoken too and eye contact was always a problem for me. I wish I was an extrovert but I like keeping to myself. Maybe it’s because of all that I went through when I was a kid. The bullying, that is.

As I’ve said, I’ve always been a bit different. You see, I'm your everyday South African Kasi girl. A Kasi is a neighbourhood that is mostly occupied by black South Africans- it’s the “hood” or the “ghetto”. But I love where I come from, and the blend of culture and tradition among the people united every one of us. 

I love walking past spaza shops, which are actually small stores in a private house, and smelling the fish oil that’s been used one too many times for frying chips and viennas. It’s the way that a random Indian, Somalian or Pakistani man is suddenly “my friend” when I try to bribe him to give me free airtime or free sweets. I love waking up in the morning to find my mother already sweeping the sandy street in front of our house for the sole purpose of catching up on gossip with her neighbour friends.

I experience the Kasi life the same way as everyone else but what makes me stand out from everybody else is the fact that I'm an albino and there's not many like me. Maybe I came across one or two different albinos at some point in my Kasi but for the most part, I was the only one around my area. 

That’s not to say that I was the butt of people’s jokes around me, matter of fact, you’ll be surprised how much the people around me treated me indifferently especially with the dark history of the treatment that albino’s experienced in this country. Everyone treated me fairly, of course except for the little kids who believed that I was either a white person or ran besides me on the streets and kept telling me I was an albino as if I wasn’t aware of it. 

Oh, I seem to have gotten a bit off topic here, haven’t I? This usually happens when I’m stuck in my head. I just go so far off I almost forget what it is I’m here to talk about. 

No, you didn't tune into this book to read about my life in a random Kasi like millions of others in South Africa. You definitely didn’t tune into this book to read about my albinism and my life with it, no. You're here to read about how in the hell a girl like me living in an RDP home in Mabopane, got wrapped up with the Italian Mafia and a very, very dangerous man named Arrigo Gabriele Leonardo.

My name is Nyeleti Mabuya- trust me when I say, you definitely want to read this story.