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Jacqueline Jansen: Drug Mule

It's the last day of the decade and Jacqueline Jansen’s daughter has gone missing.

It's the last day of the decade and Jacqueline Jansen’s daughter has gone missing. She hands us one of the photocopied posters she's been plastering around town. “Her children live with me. She normally comes back to see them at Christmas. But I haven’t seen her since the 19th of December.” She drags on another cigarette as she slumps back on her couch in a miniscule apartment in Manenberg, the epicentre of the Cape Town’s badlands, on the third floor of a sun-bleached orange tenement flaking away from itself like a cardboard box left in the rain. “I can't sleep you know, man…”
When people say that Cape Town has the highest murder rate in the world, they really mean the Cape Flats, and when they say the Cape Flats, they're generally visualising Manenberg. The streets are barely paved. The people are barely there. Jansen thinks that her daughter’s boyfriend may have murdered her. “They took him in, but the police can only hold him for so long. And he wouldn’t tell them anything.” He’s been in jail before – robbery, assault, that sort of thing. She was last seen in Nyanga – the neighbouring, black, shanty-town district – at a shebeen there. But everywhere they go, they meet the same stony indifference. “The people say she’s dead. But, you know how it is – it’s difficult to get the blacks to tell you things.”

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In 2005, her five-year-old granddaughter went missing. She was never seen again. At the time, there were widely published allegations that the family had sold the child for R500 (about £50). But Jansen was already in prison then, having been caught on her first mission as an intercontinental drugs mule.

She lifts up her top, revealing the fulsome pink scar that runs vertically up her fulsome brown belly, speaking haltingly about how, in 2002, she thought, she'd found the answer to all her money worries.

Vice: What sort of drugs were you mule-ing?
Jacqueline Jansen: It was cocaine. I was caught at Johannesburg airport trying to re-enter the country. The police were waiting for me. I had to go to hospital and have an X-ray and that’s when they found it. They saw that one of the bags had gone breach so the others couldn’t come out, so they did an operation – I had to have all of it cut out here [points to her scar].

Was it your first time doing this?
It was the first time I’d ever done a drugs one. I also took a parcel of cash out from the Nige-ees a couple of months earlier, to Mauritius, and I was there for two days. That time I wasn’t caught. The Nige-ees have got people all over the world, you know.

How much money was there? Did you have a look?
It was a lot of money.

How much, would you guess?
I only saw the outside – a stack of hundred dollar bills like a phone directory.

Why did you do it?
It was only for my kids, man. I needed the money to feed my kids.

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How much money did they offer you?
To take the drugs – R20, 000 [about £2000]. To ship the money, I got R10, 000.

Were you worried about ingesting all those drugs? That something might pop?
No, man. Because the guy who did it with you, who prepares you, he knows what he’s doing. It’s safe.

How much did you have to swallow?
A kilo.

Were they big bullets – the cocaine?
Not really. It was about half of your finger.

How were they planning on getting the cocaine back after that?
You just wait for them to come out the other end, man.

Had you ever been out of the country before – apart from Mauritius?
No.

How long did you have to stay in Brazil before you went back?
I was there for a month.

What did you do for a month in Brazil?
They give you a hotel, and then I went round on the train, which was nice.

Was it a good hotel?
It was very nice.

What did you think of Brazil?
It’s a lot like Cape Town, man. There’s lots of different sorts of peoples there.

Did you feel self-conscious, coming through the airport?
No. They give you everything so that you look right. They took me up to home affairs and got me a new passport and all of that stuff, and they buy you the clothes, and toiletries, luggage… they even give you pocket money for when you are there. They make you look fancy, you know?

How did you get into mule-ing in the first place?
It was through a friend of mine – a childhood friend. She was also from Manenberg, and she introduced me to the Nige-ees. But she didn't have kids to feed. She just needed the money because she was using drugs. She also got caught – but in Brazil, before she boarded her flight. So she piemped [snitched] me to the police.

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Why?
Jealousy, man. She was jealous of me, and of my life, so she piemped me. But she’s dead now. She died in jail in Brazil.

What did she die of?
I think she caught some kind of germ or something. But I think the Nige-ees killed her because she knew too much.

When you were at the airport, what happened?
The police were there to meet me at the airport, you know. Because she piemped me to them, you see.

Were the Nigerians there to meet you too?
The Nige-ees were there also – I could see them across the building – but as soon as they saw the police, they just melted away.

Have you heard from them since?
No.

Would you say if you had?
No.

What were you sentenced to?
I was sentenced to 12 years. But four of that was suspended. So I got out after 5 years, in 2007. My parole finishes in 2011.

What was it like for you in jail?
It’s not nice to be in jail. It’s not nice to be away from your family, especially if you aren’t used to being away from your family.

Was this in Cape Town?
At first I was in jail in Johannesburg. But then they moved me down to Pollsmoor, because it's your right in the constitution to be near to your family.

She drifts off, then asks us whether we can contact a psychic who claims to have fresh "leads" in her granddaughter's disappearance. You'd think that the Nigerians would know better than to employ someone who would arouse suspicion on any flight – ideally, you'd want a courier worldly enough not to gasp when the plane leaves the ground. But the sad truth is that they can afford to lose a few. In Manenberg there are a hundred Jansens right behind her. Plenty of folk rotting at the bottom of life's barrel, ready to risk life and freedom for not much more than the cost of their flights.