Brenda Atkinson
When someone whom you love, and who is close to you, is raped, your heart’s selfish poems become so much emotional litter. The way your heart feels the world is as if it had never really beaten before this moment, when the phone rings, and the voice breaks: she was raped.
She is 14, a small, beautiful girl who looks 12. She is a baby Madonna, with the strength of a thousand of me, a heart of rubies. No, a heart of beating flesh and blood, which beats harder when she tries to walk, because he stabbed her in the legs, when she screamed. He did this, and (the television-drama clich) smiled as he twisted the steak-knife blade.
When I close my eyes, I see this act, again and again. It is abstract, because I was not there, real because she was there, my just-teen niece.
I am just 30 years old, I have never been raped, although many of the women I know have. As a South African woman, I think of rape as an inevitability: some say it’s one woman every 16 seconds, some say it’s every 36, whichever way, it’s too many, and too close.
I am, we are, “to-be-raped”; it is our identity when we walk the streets, or jog, or stand waiting for a bus, looking over our shoulders in the old rituals of vigilance. The women I know have been raped by their friends, their boyfriends, their relatives.
My polite, sensitive, funny, generous niece, a poet of great talent, was raped by an adolescent living in the bushes at Gillooly’s Farm. It is most likely, says rape survivor, counsellor, and journalist Charlene Smith, that this boy was not alone. His friends were there, in the bushes, watching, and waiting their turn. The reality is that these men seldom hunt alone.
Why he ran away, why the others didn’t come crashing through the grass to follow his shaking, stabbing, sadistic lead is unclear. A murky miracle. God, guardian angels, agents of heart who heard the supplications of the friend, a boy, who was with her, who lay at her side and whispered prayers into her ear through it all, who offered his fingers for her to bite on as her heart bled away.
Gillooley’s Farm is a sprawling park in the nouveau riche suburb of Bedfordview, but all kinds of families go there. All of them are unaware, because there are no signs, that the koppie-cradled oasis is dangerous.
My niece was raped in the afternoon, just before Easter, metres from other people, in a clearing. We discovered that another teenage girl had been raped there not long before. We heard stories and statistics: five rapes a month, said one journalist, and most of them don’t live; “notorious”, said another. Like all parks in Johannesburg, said Smith: full of people without homes, poor, disempowered, full of the possibility of rape.
All things considered, my sister, her husband, my niece, her friend, were lucky. The police were attentive, the gynaecologist (a woman) was superb.
But it didn’t take long for professional neglect to set in. Smith, extraordinary in her energy and knowledge of such things, advised me to get the identikit to all Johannesburg newspapers immediately – the likelihood of finding the rapist diminishes substantially after two weeks. Only there was no identikit.
Nor did the investigating officer send in sniffer dogs the next day, as he had promised to do, nor did he ever contact my sister again. When, two weeks after the rape, my niece and her friend went in to compile the identikit, the relevant policeman told them he couldn’t alter certain facial features. Only on my sister’s later insistence did this suddenly become possible.
Today, three weeks after the rape, after considerable pressure from my sister, and a call from a Radio 702 journalist, the officer at the child protection unit (CPU) says he’s going to arrest a man who bears no resemblance whatsoever to the adolescent who has been described.
He was nervous, she said.
His hands shook as he cut her clothes off her body. She got off lightly.
He got off with a thrust, a knife and a smile and now she is on Ovril, AZT, 3TC, who, I ask, who will make her whole again. Who will heal this family, which is bleeding. Who will unbitter us, who will drain the bile that seeps, even now, through my father and mother, who say: get out while you can. Their sentence is unfinished, but I know what it means: before you too are raped.
I could go on about the police, counsellors, councillors, to whom we have spoken. Some wonderful, some rotten, some simply indifferent.
One city councillor says, if we posted guards at Gillooley’s then we’d have to do the same in Soweto, Katlehong, in all the places where hundreds, maybe thousands, of women are raped every day. What he means is that they would have to have guards all over the country.
In the discourses of news, rape is so commonplace as to be hardly newsworthy: the police are rightfully applauded for drug busts, gang busts, foilings of heists, but consoling news of rape arrests and convictions is resoundingly rare.
And as everyone knows, the daily routines of determined queries are exhausting. At one police station we call, the phone rings for seven minutes, and we have to hang up. By sheer chance we discover that this, the number listed in the phone book, is not the best number to call.
In the paper, my niece sees the identikit of a man wanted for another crime: it’s him, she says, but nothing has come of that. And when today we ask the CPU why they don’t yet have the identikit, they tell us they are still waiting to receive it by post.
The counsellor from the CPU comes to console my sister, and it’s clear that she is close to breaking too.
My sister breaks down at intervals, we all do. My niece shames us all with her composure, which cracks only in her sleep, breaks her darkness apart as she screams her nightmares. Only the smudges beneath her eyes betray these nights, which she does not share until dawn breaks. We are all made children again, and less: soft-fleshed, lily-livered, we knit our pain together like a shabby autumn jersey that nobody wants to wear. We are faint of heart.
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article for this newspaper about a pregnant woman refused a job because of her “condition”. This week, light years later, my beautiful girl, wearing the T-shirt I gave her (a T-shirt with a big, red heart on it), has become a hundred years older, infinitely wise and utterly ill-equipped.
The Germiston City Council cannot afford to post guards at Gillooley’s Farm, a piece of land left in trust with the council, a park to which entrance is free, which boasts two restaurants, where one restaurateur was murdered not long ago.
Apparently, they also can’t afford to put up a few tin signs that say: do not walk unaccompanied, or, do not allow children to play on the ridge. I assume that this would be “bad” for this suburban destination, because it might discourage patronage.
The police cannot swoop and comb the koppies because, they say, they are understaffed. And so we wait.