Nyoape is just about everywhere

You’ll find them on the streets, in dark alleys and dilapidated buildings around the townships, filthy, unwashed and in pairs, or in groups, congregated to smoke or inject themselves, or alone going somewhere to meet others for a ‘fix’.

That is what they literally live for, a ‘skyf’ or a fix to start the day and while away the wasted time they spend smoking or injecting themselves or their friends with the dreaded drug, nyaope.

Sidelined by society as social outcasts and surviving on the money they make from stealing not only from their own families, relatives and few friends they have left, these nyaope addicts are a rapidly growing generation of youngsters around the country’s towns and townships who have become unwilling slaves to the dreaded drug.

These are young social outcasts and the community’s human derelicts who have become slaves to one of the deadliest drugs ever peddled in the townships. What is even scarier is that those whose lives have already been destroyed by this drug are no longer confined to parts or sections of our morally decaying society in the townships, where they are viewed and discarded as insignificant statistics on the fringe.

Instead, they remain children of parents, or a parent, an aunt or an uncle, neighbours, families and relatives we know and even friends with whom we went to school.

But through lack of guidance or parental love, somewhere along their lives something snapped and they fell off by the wayside and got hooked, and the downward spiral to nowhere never stopped.

A fix or a skyf a day is all they need to keep whatever is left of their body and soul alive. As some of them explain in this dramatic video footage, getting hooked was their biggest mistake.

What is detailed in this video footage is, in fact, just the tip of the iceberg compared to what is going on, on a much larger scale in just about every city, town, township, informal housing settlement, ghettoised neighbourhoods in many of the former towns and cities and in just about every neighbourhood around the country .

As we continue to talk and write about, as well as illustrate the plight of these young rejected social outcasts and members of our society, they continue to destroy themselves daily with no hope in sight for the predicament in which they find themselves.

As parents, relatives and family members of these “lost souls” – we hope and pray that, as most of them often indicate, they will eventually find their footprints back into our hearts and the mainstream flow of society.

And for the very first time, Kathorus MAIL has posted a video on its website and social media platform to illustrate just how far down the embankment line these youngsters have rolled their young lives down the slope.

*Video supplied and produced by Langa Mangali