In early June, *Thulisa Makinana went on a night out with friends in Kuyasa, Colesberg. In the wee hours of the following morning, her lifeless body was found in a nearby veldt allegedly stabbed multiple times by an intimate partner.
For the quiet Karoo town, the incident sent shockwaves, saw the provincial government personally paying their condolences to the family of the deceased, and the Central University of Technology where she was enrolled releasing a press statement condemning the attack.
In the immediate aftermath, scores descended on the Colesberg Magistrate’s Court for the suspect’s first appearance, demanding that he be denied bail. On the 17th of this month, just days before the massive national shutdown against gender-based violence (GBV), residents of Colesberg attended the court proceedings in solidarity with the bereaved family. Dressed in black, the milling crowd sang songs and chanted slogans lamenting the stranglehold of GBV that continues to choke even remote platteland dorpies.
The national statistics paint a bleak picture of shockingly the highest numbers anywhere in the world. Eleven women are murdered every day in the country which works you out to around one woman killed every 2.5 hours. Furthermore, 113 rapes are reported daily, a figure which some organisations dispute, suggesting it is probably way higher due to underreporting. But perhaps it is the exceptionally brazen and brutal manner in which these crimes are carried out that leaves one recoiling in utter shock.
The stories are often so grotesque that even in this, one of the world’s most violent societies, they linger in the news cycle, often attracting global media attention. Think of Anene Booysen the 17 year-old girl who was gang-raped, disemboweled and left for dead at a construction site in the small town of Bredasdorp, Western Cape.
So violent was the attack that Dr Elizabeth de Kock who was on duty when Booysen was admitted to the trauma unit at the town’s Otto du Plessis Hospital could only compare her injuries to those sustained by victims of serious car accidents. ‘I didn’t think it was possible that someone could do that to anyone,’ she’d later testify in court. The record, however, shows that Suth Africans are clearly capable of far worse. For her murderer, it seems it wasn’t enough to put a bullet through her chest; he also just had to hang the heavily-pregnant 28-year-old Tshegofatso Pule from a tree in an effort to stage a suicide back in 2020.
Long is the list of both victims and perpetrators who left us all aghast in shock and disbelief. There is the story of Uyinene Mrwetyana, a 19 years-old University of Cape Town student in 2019, who was running an errand at a post office. This visit brought her into the company of Luyanda Botha, an attendant who later raped, killed and dumped her body in an open field.
Nosicelo Mtebeni, 23: killed and dismembered by a boyfriend. Her body parts would later be found in a suitcase on a dump site. Karabo Mokoane, 23, murdered by a boyfriend and becoming one of the most widely-covered and condemned cases of GBV in the country. Olorato Mongale, Karabo Mokoena, Chesnay Keppler, Gontse Ntseza, Nomsa Jass, Hannah Cornelius are the ones who got to know of, none of them older than thirty.
In some twisted sense, which perfectly reflects the rogueish sort of society SA is fast threatening to become, the country continues to attract shady druglords, sex traffickers and at least one British man who once stood accused of orchestrating a hit on his wife while they were honeymooning here back in 2010. Although Shrien Dewani was later acquitted, there was the perception about South Africa that here you could pay somebody almost next to nothing to make somebody disappear for good.
Even more twisted is how, their fate notwithstanding, the country at least got to know of these aforementioned names. Hashtags were created in their honour, placards were raised outside courts, campaigns came and complete strangers immersed themselves in the grief on social media – posting and resharing the mourning, words of condolence and saying ‘not in my name.’
A 2022 paper published in the International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology entitled The Role of the Community in Preventing Gender-Based Violence and Femicide: A Case Study of Northern Cape Province, South Africa lists unemployment, poverty and alcohol abuse as some of the key drivers of GBV in the province.
The DFA, a paper published in the provincial capital, Kimberley, often carries grim reports of booze-addled incidents of GBV particularly in the town’s poorer communities. With the backing of research-based evidence, we know that the province’s high levels of alcohol abuse also exacerbate the issue. Hospitals are often the scene of bloody patients with stab wounds and injuries sustained from drunken brawls.
But it is the sheer senselessness of it all that has rallied the community to unite against GBV. There is something that cuts especially deep when the roots between victim and perpetrator go back generations and are plunged decades deep. In such tightly-knit communities one will likely find that these people and their families would’ve experienced some form of interaction at one point or another.
Their parents might’ve been classmates, or broken communion in the same church. Their brothers could’ve played for rival soccer clubs, or once dated the same girl. Maybe they didn’t know each other by name, but they’ll probably always remember the face. In more interesting places, people die or disappear and are soon forgotten. Here, they die and everybody seems to recall a story about them. In their anger and grief, some will ponder quietly as to how so-and-so’s son could do such a thing. And in all the pain and suffering, the community will arise early, and on a balmy mid-morning, they will stand outside the court in memory of Thulisa – all the promise she once held, the wonderful person she was amongst them and say ‘you are not forgotten.’ And amongst them some will wonder, what have we become when on of us turns to cannibalise one of our own?
*Not her real name
Featured image: An image against gender-based violence. Source: Unjani Clinic website.