T.O. Molefe, The New York Times
CAPE TOWN — Two years ago,
when Jyoti Pandey, a 23-year-old Indian physiotherapy intern, was gang-raped
and fatally beaten by six men on a bus in New Delhi, there was a moment of soul
searching among South Africans.
We knew such brutal acts
are commonplace here, yet could not recall the last time we reacted with
anywhere near comparable outrage. The sad truth is that many of us had been
hardened by the daily news reports of violence committed by men against women
and the perfunctory moments the government officially sets aside to reflect on
them. The overwhelming visceral response from Indians shook those of us who
heard about it from our stupor.
Our national resignation
to gender-based violence has its roots in the myths and logical fallacies we
rely on to excuse our inaction and dissociate ourselves from the everyday
brutalities committed against women.
This collective
resignation is most evident in response to the seemingly ceaseless instances of
murder and rape that befall black lesbians. Just last month, 23-year-old Gift
Makau was found gruesomely murdered in a township just outside of Ventersdorp,
roughly 100 miles west of Johannesburg. It is believed she had also been raped.
Ms. Makau, like the majority of lesbian victims, was out to members of her
community and presented herself outwardly as masculine; she was targeted for
being lesbian and for her gender expression, too.
This month the body of
28-year-old Thembelihle Sokhela was found in Daveyton, a township just east of
Johannesburg. She was reportedly found in the room of a man now charged with
her murder. Activists say she, too, was raped before she was killed.
However gruesome they may
be, crimes against black lesbians don’t register on the public’s radar amid the
general landscape of violence. The police reported that there were over 17,000
homicides and 62,000 sexual assaults in South Africa between April 2013 and the
end of March 2014.
In fact, some public
officials and commentators have argued that if the intention is to reduce
murder, focusing on the relatively few crimes committed against black lesbians
is misguided, since the majority of homicide victims are men. But this logical
fallacy assumes that seeking to reduce hate crimes committed against black
lesbians would come at the expense of reducing other murders.
When South African
government functionaries lament violence against women and children during the
official 16 days set aside each December for that purpose, they seldom reflect
on their role in allowing the conditions that foment the violence to continue
unabated. To them, the violence against women and children, and the disorder
and structural violence in the country’s poor townships over which they preside
are unrelated.
The fact that the murders
and rape of black lesbians take place in townships points to the existence of a
general disregard for the lives of people who live there. Twenty years after
the country’s first democratic election, the townships remain underdeveloped
and poorly resourced. The schools there are generally poor and job
opportunities are few. Police and residents are constantly at loggerheads, if
not about inadequate policing then over the excessive force police use to end
protests over township living conditions.
There is also the case of
Oscar Pistorius, the world-famous athlete who this month was found guilty of
culpable homicide for fatally shooting his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. He now
faces a potential maximum prison sentence of 15 years on that charge and up to
five years on a lesser charge of negligently firing a gun in public. His case
has nonetheless forced South Africans to confront two dangerous dissociative myths.
Mr. Pistorius is wealthy,
dashing, famous and white. He has challenged South Africans’ quietly whispered
belief that domestic violence and femicide are the preserve of poor, black men
prone to alcohol and substance abuse.
This belief allowed
middle class and wealthy whites to tut disbelievingly as they leafed through
the Sunday papers reading about the latest incidents of violence against women.
In their minds, this violence was something happening far away and the people
involved were part of a society divorced from their own.
The public spectacle of
the Pistorius trial, which centered on a predominantly white gated community in
Pretoria changed all that; it’s no longer so easy to tune out to the shouting,
breaking glass and sounds of fists on flesh coming from the house next door.
Regardless of whether
there’s any truth to Mr. Pistorius’s defense against the charges — that he
feared someone had broken into his home and fired shots in self-defense — his
argument exposed the violent masculinity that cost Ms. Steenkamp her life. The
person from whom he was supposedly protecting himself and Ms. Steenkamp was a
figment of the white middle-class imagination: a member of the dreaded hordes
of poor, black men who each night ostensibly scale the electrified fences of
gated communities to rape and pillage.
The question now facing
us is how to make each South African realize that the instances of brutality
against women they hear about periodically are patches in a larger quilt of
myth and inaction. So insidious and pervasive are these myths that no one can
completely deny complicity. Perhaps only when each of us begins to take
personal responsibility for the violence we allow in our midst will South
Africa, like India, have its moment of collective outrage over violence against
women.
