Never Eat In This Restaraunt In JHB

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode DM on African confessions. The following story that you're going to be listening to, it was sent to us by one of our dear sister all the way from Lisu. Let us um uh listen to her story. Then we talked to her in the comment section thereafter and it reads like this. The first message that she sent to me, these are the dark secrets that happen in this other restaurant where I used to work in Jobeek. Thanks God. I left that place. I left South Africa. Now I am back home.

[00:00:37]Yo, if you like eating out downtown, my brother, tell the people to listen to me. If you like downtown food, you better open your eyes wide and be very careful where you buy your food. This is my real life confession. I am a lady who came all the way from Lisu to look for a job in Josim. I thought that I was just going to come to cook your normal food.

[00:01:05]Before I had came to Josie, I did not know by the way that I was going to work in the restaurant. I just came back from Lisutu thinking that my cousin was going to get a job for me and I would be working in the kitchens working as a maid. But I ended up working in this other restaurant in that kitchen. The things that I saw made me pack my bags and run straight back home and to never want to return back to South Africa because of the secrets that I know. I am afraid that someone can hunt me down. If I return back to South Africa, besides me and my boss's husband, we started to sleep with each other. I will tell you how exactly it happened. So I got scared when I fell pregnant for him and then he forced me to have an abortion at an illegal Nigerian clinic again. It was in Jobeek. Right now as we are speaking I am back home in Lizu because I just said let me return home but I want to tell you the evil things that happened in that restaurant. So let me tell you how it all started from the very beginning.

[00:02:23]I left Lisu because life was hard. You know how it is. Even right now life is hard. But I know I now have experience of the outside world. When you are in your country, you think that out there is something that is much better than your country. But when you are back in your country, you start to you start to become happy. The things that you used to take for granted, you are not even afraid when you see the police walking around. When I was in South Africa, you're just thinking like you are a criminal simply because you went to another country to look for an opportunity to survive. In my country, even to this very day, jobs are still scarce. And if you do not have connections, you can sit at home for years with your qualifications or your skills while your stomach want food. So like many other people from my country, I decided to take a chance and then I went to Johannesburg, the city of gold where everyone believes that money grows on trees. You can't blame us. Those that went to Jag in your 1980s, they used to tell us about stories of Johannesburg.

[00:03:36]Every African has this fantasy about Johannesburg. Thinking that money can be found so easily. I packed my bags, said goodbye to my relatives and crossed the bordom thinking that I was going to South Africa. I can say that Johannesburg is like the New York of the whole of Africa because of that fantasy that we all have when you think about New York City. That is the same thing that happens to other Africans when they are leaving their country coming to South Africa. You think that immediately when you arrive things are going to work out. You're going to become a millionaire. But the devil will be waiting for you. When I arrived in Johannesburg, the reality hit me hard.

[00:04:22]Turned out that my cousin is nothing but a prostitute. Your guys, Josie, is not a playground. It is something else. It is different from any African city. And if you play soft, they are going to eat you alive. and to eat you alive. I was eaten alive by boys who pretended to love me.

[00:04:43]It hurts that these were guys that had been in Jo for a long time that were from Leo. So they saw that this one, she is new. She does not know anything about South Africa. I would stay with a guy, this guy pretending as if he's saving money to marry me and then he would just leave you without paying rent and then you have to worry about food. I was staying in a cramped room with my cousin and other prostitutes from Liz Sutu, sharing the rent, waking up every morning, everyone having sex everywhere.

[00:05:17]It was just gross. And then I said, "Let me look for a job." I looked for a job everywhere, every supermarket, every small business in downtown Jobeek. After weeks of searching for a job, I finally got lucky. Or at least that is what I thought at that time. I found this small restaurant right in the middle of town, but it was downtown Jobeek. It is near this busy taxi ring. So this woman, she placed her restaurant in a place that is so nice for business. The owner of that restaurant, she's a South African woman.

[00:05:54]She is someone that is very rich. She stays in a gated community. She drives beautiful cars. and I just wanted the job. I got that job after an interview.

[00:06:06]She made me to wash dishes whilst she was looking. So this boss lady, she does not like hiring South African people at all. I don't know now, but when I was still there, if a local South African person ask for a job, to cook, to clean, cashier, the boss would immediately chase them away or tell them that there were no vacancies. She only wanted foreign workers, especially ladies from my country, Zimbabwe or Mozambique.

[00:06:35]Malawans not so much. She did not like them. I do not know why. She wanted us, those that did not have legal papers to stay or to work in the country. Why did she prefer us? Because she knew that if you are a foreigner, you are completely desperate. You can do anything even to sacrifice yourself so that you can just work. She knew that someone who crossed the border illegally or someone without a South African ID has no rights. You cannot go to the police station to report a bad boss. You cannot go to the labor department. You can't complain and you cannot refuse to do anything. If you were told to do creepy illegal things, you would do it. We were completely trapped working at the mercy of our boss lady and we were not even getting paid a lot of money. The money that we were getting paid it is just that you can buy maze meal pay for the shack. That is all where I was staying in the location. The restaurant itself it is not something that is fancy. If you walk past it you just think that it is a typical South African restaurant. cheap plastic chairs and a lot of people that will be sitting side by side. And then you can buy pop, rice, beef, stew, chicken, and various salads that are served to your poor people that are working in town. Taxi drivers, those that sell in the street, those shoppers that want some food so that they won't feel fatigued when they are shopping around. So it was always full of people but places like this they will fool you. You will think that there is no one who can even do rituals because that restaurant it was not even big. It was just tiny and it was making crazy unbelievable amounts of money. One Saturday evening, the boss lady asked me to help the cashier to count the money because the the the till it was overflowing with money. So when I started to count the money, it was a lot. I almost fainted. I realized that this tiny restaurant, it was making more profit, I'm sure, than this other boxer supermarket which was down the street.

[00:08:58]It did not make sense to me. I started to think that maybe she or her husband they were selling drugs because how can a shop with only three big pots and a stove, a gas stove, then it can make money more than a boxer supermarket that sells groceries to thousands of people each and every day. So the owner of the restaurant, they were staying in a gated community and she was staying in a nice house. You could not even believe that she is surviving because of that small restaurant. I started to ask myself several questions. How does a tiny restaurant beat a whole boxer shop? It's not because we were getting a lot of customers, but it was because of the rituals that these people were doing. So for my first weeks of employment, everything was completely fine. Peeling potatoes and helping the ladies that were cooking that were from Zim. And then that was when we had a few customers one day. It was very slow on that day and it was on a Sunday. Usually downtown on a Sunday it is very quiet especially if it is not month. For a normal business owner, you don't think much about it. But brother Nashim, when this happened, that was when the boss called us into her office. She was not even shy. She then said to us as she was asking me and the other Zimbabwean ladies, she was like, "Has any one of you have pubic hair? When was the last time that you shaved?" All of us, we were embarrassed. I had recently shaved because I had gone on a sleepover with another boyfriend of mine, only my armpits, but not a lot of pubic hair.

[00:10:50]The Zimbabwean lady, yo, she was full of pubic hair because she was not sleeping with anyone. I don't know why she was not shaving. This was after the madame boss here told us that she was going to give us money if we were going to tell her if we had pubic hair or not. I was the first one that said that I have pubic hair, but I only have the pubic hair on my armpits. So then that was when she gave me a shaving stick and then she told me that I was supposed to go to the toilet and to shave the hair.

[00:11:25]that Zimbabwean lady, she was also given a shaving stick and we were told to shave and then to put that hair that will be that will be falling down into a dinner plate. It was a white dinner plate with a red dot in the middle of the dinner plate. I will never forget it. And after we were done, then we went back to her office. I could not even look at my own pubic hair, not knowing what she wanted to do. So then that was when she told us that we were supposed to burn it. We burned it on top of her table and after we were done, that was when she took some spices, but this was black pepper, the powdered one, and then she started to mix with that ashes of the pubic hair that we had recently shaved right there in the restaurant toilet. I was completely shocked. My heart was dropping straight into my stomach. My knees, they were shaking. I could not believe what I was seeing.

[00:12:29]This person was a business owner and taking this pubic hair and then mixing it with food. It was something that I had never had in my entire life. And then we were told to go and to put this into the stew. And when we were doing this, she said that we were supposed to say a prayer. So this prayer that we were saying was that just like when a woman has opened her like her legs wide open, men will flock to her. May the men that are in town right now flock to this restaurant to buy this food. And after we were done, we mixed it with the stew.

[00:13:13]And then we went with a plate. I had a plate. I was pretending as if I was eating. Oh, so gross. I would never eat such food. She told us to stand at the dome and it was raining a little bit and she told us to blow the steam from the stew and the pup into the street, making sure that people won't become suspicious. So the people they just thought that since the pup and the stew was very hot, you were just trying to cool down the pup before you can start eating. Then after we had blown the the steam into the street, we went to the dust bin and we threw away the pup in the in the stew. Within a couple of minutes, the first man entered. He literally stopped his taxi and he walked out of the rain and he came and he ordered for a half plate of of the pup and the beef chew. I looked at that man as he was eating and I felt so bad knowing that there was some ashes from our pubic came that he was also eating.

[00:14:18]The people that were buying this food, they did not even know that this was what was happening. If you thought that the pubic hair story was bad, wait until you hear what our madame boss would make us to do whenever the business needed an extra push. The hair ritual, it was as if it was just level one. As the months went by, the boss lady wanted more money because she was supposed to go to China.

[00:14:46]It was an expo that was happening in China. She wanted to go with her friends. She decided to introduce level two of your kitchen morty. And this part is the exact reason why I finally dropped and I abandoned my salary, including me sleeping with her husband and her threatening to get people to shoot me to run for my life. She called us into the back room again and told us that we were going to start using our own period blood, real period blood in the kitchen. Yes, you heard it right.

[00:15:20]menstruation blood. I froze when she told us that this was what she wanted.

[00:15:25]She looked at all of us female workers and said that whenever we were on our monthly periods, we were strictly banned from throwing our pads or tampons into the toilet bins even at our homes. We were supposed to harvest that blood and to bring that blood into the kitchen and then we were supposed to squeeze it directly into the big container that we prepared the salads. So just imagine the scene that I had to be part of. We had this huge metallic bowel that will be full of freshly grated beetroot salad.

[00:16:02]Then under the boss lady's instruction, actual period blood would be poured into the beetroot and you had to take a big wooden spoon and then you had to steer everything together until the period blood matched exactly the per the beetroot juice because beetroot like it is dark red color. It looks like period blood by the way. the customer could not even see the difference or to smell. To someone it will just look like it is a normal beetroot salad. So this was a way of people to come to the restaurant to eat and to spend more money in this restaurant and we would do this when someone was on the period. You will be using their blood. I started sleeping around with the madame boss's husband because he said that I was very attractive and he liked me and then we were sleeping together. The madame boss then found out that I had been sleeping in her bedroom. Brother, it was a mess up. I had to run away from South Africa and then I returned back to Lisutum where I am right now to this very day.

[00:17:15]Even here in Leutum, I don't even bother when I go to town to look at pap and to eat pap in town. I'm so scared. You know when you have done some things in your life, you are afraid. Like for an example, I slept with my madame boss's husband. You see, I am also afraid that if I am dating a man, I do not want my friends to know about that man. I do not want my cousins to know about that man.

[00:17:45]I do not want anyone to know that I am dating a man because I'm scared that once people know that you have a boyfriend, they're going to start sleeping with your boyfriend. So, I just want people to know to think twice before you just buy any food because you'll be eating food that you have no idea about at all.

[00:18:10]Yo dear listeners right there was a message that was sent to us by one of our DM uh sister. Let us try to speak with our dear sister in the comment section. Strange strange things indeed they do happen in this world. Y can you imagine but let us try to speak with him in the comment section. taking your own uh pubic hair and then you are busy putting that pubic hair inside of the food that other people are going to eat.

[00:18:45]They would bend that pubic hair and then uh they they would put the ashes, mix it, she says with black pepper.

[00:18:55]Yeah. Have you ever eaten food downtown?

[00:18:59]Food that made you sick? food that you did not understand what was inside of that food. If so, you can come to my inbox and then you can share with us your own side of the story. I'll be back with another episode.