Rebecca Malope: My dad threw my mom in a river full of crocodiles

Veteran gospel singer Rebecca Malope has opened up about her upbringing and the relationship she never had with her father in an interview with Anele Mdoda on Real Talk.

She talked about her father’s abusive nature when she was young and how that affected her mother. She said her father once went home, fetched her sister and her brother and left her behind, leaving her feeling neglected. In one of his “moments”, he also threw her mother in a river full of crocodiles, an act of attempted murder.

Though she lived with the anger for years, she said one night, against the will of her mother, she went to find her dad. Her mom didn’t like the idea of finding her dad, but she insisted.

“My mother said: ‘How can you do that, this person wanted to kill you,’ and I said: ‘But that’s my father’.”

She then received a call from his neighbour telling her that her father was sick and that he had lost his job. “After dropping that call I was angry. I said, why is he calling me, what does he want from me?”

However, she then saw the visit as an opportunity to get answers from him. She lied to her mother and told her she was going to a rehearsal.

When she got there, she found that there was no electricity, but there was a small radio playing her song. At the time, she thought of how the last time her father had seen her was when he came to fetch her brother and sister from that same house but left her behind, and then he was seeing her as a grownup and famous, and he actually needed her.

“I asked him who’s my father, and he said: ‘It’s me.’ And I asked him how, not because I didn’t know; I knew it was him, but I needed him to say it.”

After endless apologies he made that night, Malope made a decision to forgive him, as she wanted to be free and move on with her life.

“After that I fixed his house, and I bought him a car. My mother was angry, but eventually she understood.”

She has also forgiven her father’s family that abused and abandoned her.

With her father and uncles having neglected her and her sister having been killed by her boyfriend, was that why she never got married, Mdoda asked her.

She admitted that the rejection from the men in her life at a young age affected how she viewed marriage but also said she was able to move on from the anger “because God helped me”. If not, she would have bought a gun and shot everyone who made her angry, including “that rapist that raped me”, referring to her aunt’s husband, who “took advantage of her sexually”.

Malope is happy now and said she knew not all men were like the ones she grew up around.

“It’s just that I need to throw that picture out of my mind before I get married.

“But I have my fiance, he’s a wonderful man, I love him to bits. He’s a loving man, so we are happy together.”

She said that after having been together for nine years, they might get married, although she did not think marriage would make a difference.