‘I was part of the KwaSizabantu cult’

Before the day her mother, Esther, came home to burn her own and her two daughters’ ‘inappropriate’ clothing (men wear pants in the house, not women!) and their makeup and jewellery, Erika was a happy, carefree little girl. ‘I just remember good things,’ she says.

It was 1979 and Erika was eight years old, living with her family in a house in Worcester with yellow daisies in the front yard, which her father planted for her mother every time they moved house. She and her two older siblings, Hanna and Chris, spent their days