Crumbled pieces of paper are all she has to show for the many trips she’s made to the local police
Khadija Magardie and Xoli Nxumalo
Since her divorce three years ago Mantoa Chabalala has been stalked, threatened, beaten, verbally abused, narrowly missed being shot in the head and had an undertaker turn up to collect her body.
She has lost count of the number of times she has been to police stations to report the incidents and to lay charges.
A weary, blank look in her eyes remains fixed as she digs in her purse for crumpled pieces of paper with the official South African Police Service stamp, dates and case numbers. Describing them as “all she has”, they are still not proof enough for the police to take her seriously.
Once she woke in the middle of the night to find two men standing over her bed, knives in hand. A struggle alerted the house to her screams and the men fled0 after stabbing her in the arms and back. She opened a case of attempted robbery and murder at the local police station the next day.
A few days later she arrived home to find the two men in her living room. They claimed that her ex-husband had hired them to kill her, but refused to pay them because they did not succeed. Cold shivers ran down her spine when they told her: “He was hiding in the veld behind the house the whole time, waiting for us to come out”.
Weeks later Chabalala’s pregnant daughter Sibongile awoke from an afternoon nap to answer a knock at the door. It was a worker from a funeral parlour, Ndhlovu and Sons. He told her that they had been instructed to collect the body of a Mantoa, who was apparently killed in a car accident in town that morning.
The distraught daughter, who had not heard from her mother since she left for her job in Brakpan that morning, broke down, asking who had made the call. The undertaker assistant told her a man called “Chabalala” had called, telling them that as the “late” woman’s husband, he would pay for all funeral arrangements.
Chabalala had been in an accident in central Johannesburg that morning, but was not seriously injured when a taxi nearly knocked her down. She says she arrived home that afternoon to see her crying children, who thought she was dead. To this day she does not know how her ex-husband found out about the accident.
“I have so many questions, about everything.” Chabalala does not know why her husband wants her dead, but she suspects, she says, it is because she knows of several of his “activities”, allegedly car racketeering and fraud.
The months of living in fear have taken their toll, not only on herself, but her children. One of her daughters has failed the sixth grade more than three times. The youngest cries when her mother is out of sight.
“This man used to love me, what went wrong?” she asks, tears welling in her eyes. After the attempted murder, she approached a women’s organisation for help. They told her to leave home immediately and go to a shelter. But with her youngest child barely out of nappies, and her eldest having just given birth and needing assistance, she could not leave.
Chabalala’s ex-husband is a serving police sergeant, based at Diepkloof.
She has found that it’s impossible to convince the police that spousal abuse at the hands of one of their own is a matter warranting any form of intervention.
This week a visit by an uncle convinced Chabalala that she should confront the police on their inaction. Her uncle, a former policeman who plucked her ex-husband out of a painter’s job to land him a constabulary in the force, is outraged.
“He’s not fit to be a policeman!” he says angrily. He convinces his niece to accompany him to the police station and demands to speak to the station commander to find out why her cases of the past three years have not been investigated.
The first stop is Protea police station, to which Chabalala is no stranger, having been there several times to lay charges of assault while married and to report what the hit-men had told her. A bright sign, featuring neatly uniformed, smiling officers, reads: “Break the silence on Domestic Violence”.
A half-hour later she is told the station commander is out and that the case though they have no record of it was likely transferred to another police station, possibly Diepkloof.
“There’s very little I can do about this,” announces a police captain. This has become a lyric played over and over in Chabalala’s head.
Another two officers, who sit and listen politely to her story, conclude: “This is a family matter, madam.” “Maybe if it was an external matter …”
“Have you tried the Maintenance Court?”
Finally, a policeman suggests that Chabalala take the matter up with the body tasked with investigating complaints against members of the police, the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD).
According to an ICD spokesperson, Tsoeu Ntsane, the watchdog body will deal seriously with any complaint filed by a member of the public against policemen who commit violence and officers who fail to intervene or thoroughly investigate domestic violence complaints.
“In fact, we encourage the public to report the failure of any police officer to fulfil their responsibility in terms of the Domestic Violence Act,” he said, adding that the police were obliged to investigate such complaints, regardless of whether the perpetrator was a policeman.