The tragedy of Susan Sithole, abandoned by love and the system. Rehana Rossouw reports
‘PAIN,” wrote Susan Sithole, “is wearing my husband’s face.” On Saturday — International Day of No Violence Against Women — the pain came to an end. Her husband is in jail on a murder charge.
The tragic story of Susan Sithole is one of betrayal. Not just betrayal by a loved one, but by society. A passionate campaigner against the abuse of women, she fell victim to the violence she so abhorred — against which society once again failed to give its protection.
She was stabbed to death after being abandoned by her police escort.
Australian-born Sithole immigrated to South Africa three years ago after working for a non- governmental organisation in Botswana.
There she met her her musician husband, Solomon Sithole. They married two years ago and lived in
He was mostly unemployed, she was the breadwinner, working on projects to help the dispossessed. She was employed at the Ulwazi Educational Radio Project and was also a counsellor at Lifeline and was planning a radio programme on the abuse of
On November 11, Hamilton, badly bruised and with a gash in her head after her husband tried to set her alight, went to the Yeoville police station to report his crime.
She was told to go to a hospital or a district surgeon for an assessment of her injuries. She drove herself to hospital, where she was admitted for five days.
She was granted an interdict last Monday restraining her husband from approaching her. At his court hearing last Friday, Solomon Sithole pleaded guilty to assault and was sentenced to three months’ probation. The next day she asked the police to provide protection while she collected her belongings from her Hillbrow flat, where her husband was still resident.
Two policemen accompanied her, but left soon after arriving, her friends said. Minutes after they left, she was stabbed — twice in the heart and once in the lung. She died before an ambulance arrived.
“The system failed her. She did everything she had to do as far as police procedures go, but marital violence is treated differently from other violence in South Africa,” said the dead woman’s colleague, journalist Paddi Clay.
Clay said because Susan Sithole had a degree in psychology and worked with victims of abuse, she was aware throughout her ordeal of what was happening to her.
“She loved her husband, but she knew she had to leave him. The tragedy was that she worked with abused women in Australia, helping them to get help from the police, but in South Africa she couldn’t get the help she needed,” Clay said.
“After her husband was picked up, the arresting officer brought him to the hospital where she was still recovering. The interdict she applied for was only served on her husband four days after it was granted.
She couldn’t get an eviction order to remove him from the flat she had bought. She was killed minutes after the police protection she asked for left her.”
Police spokesman Colonel Eugene Opperman said he could not comment on the facts of Hamilton’s murder until witnesses provided the police with their allegations and a departmental inquiry was held to ascertain whether the police failed in their duty.
However, he said most instances of marital abuse fell within the ambit of private law unless victims chose to approach the police. “We will most certainly have to act where there is a criminal charge laid,” Opperman said.