The news on the radio was very confusing. The Supreme Court in Bloemfontein, it announced, had rejected a claim for compensation against the minister of safety and security made by a woman who had been raped by three uniformed policemen one dark night in 1999.
What was confusing, given the uncomfortable shorthand of how news gets delivered to you on the radio, was that the impression given by the brief report was that the brutal trio had got off scot-free. No such thing.
The story ricocheted around the radio waves for most of the rest of the day. It became an insistent topic of debate on the talk shows — thank goodness, because that allowed us to come to some kind of understanding of what was really going on.
The three policemen, it turned out, had offered a lift to a distraught young woman who was walking home after a row with her boyfriend in a nightclub. Presumably the cops were driving a police car. Instead of giving her the comfort and security that their uniforms suggested, they took her to a secluded spot and proceeded to take turns raping her.
The news and the chat shows that followed failed to give us clarity on what happened next — whether they then dropped her off at her home, as they had originally promised, or simply turned her loose on the streets once more, like they had found her.
The instructive part of the story is that she lived to tell the tale, unlike so many other victims of this kind of crime, and was able to identify her attackers at a later stage — small miracle. Many others have simply been killed after the act and left in the wilderness, the identity of their assailants frozen forever in their glazed eyes and muted, screaming mouths.
In this case, it emerged, as the radio blazed through the day, that the woman not only survived, but lived to see the baddies tried and sentenced to life in prison, plus an extra 10 years on top of that for abducting her. Justice had not just been done, but seen to be done.
Why then, with the perpetrators safely behind bars (or as safely as it gets around here), had the story re-emerged into the media?
The traumatised woman decided, or was advised, that this was not enough — and who can blame her? She needed to have some further acknowledgement of the scale of her pain and humiliation. She wanted whoever it was who pinned the badge of courage on the breasts of those bastards to take responsibility for their dereliction of duty. So she decided to sue the minister who had supposedly let them loose on the streets.
The shaggy hair of justice disagreed with her analysis of who was to blame, and turned down her claim for compensation. The argument was quite complicated. The cops had been off duty, the Law Lords declared, and whatever they did to the unfortunate victim was out of the normal parameter of the duties to which the minister had entrusted them. Therefore, he or she could not be held accountable for their actions (even though they were still swaggering in their uniforms which she or he had given them at no cost while they did it).
And the argument went on like this: if she had been raped, for example, in a police station during the course of a routine enquiry, then the minister might indeed have been liable. But she wasn’t. So the minister isn’t, and so on.
So the airwaves went ballistic. What were the rights and wrongs of this situation? The implication really being that the shaggy hair of justice was deeply out of order, and the woman should be given a grovelling apology by the minister and some financial compensation, running to about half a million rands, to make things square up in some fashion, at least.
Of course, the radio-listening public of the newly psychologically liberated and democratised South Africa (why weren’t they at work anyway? Or were they calling in from their office phones, at the expense of yet another hard-pressed minister or captain of industry?) had plenty to say on the subject. Opinions ranged from ”Hang ’em high” to ”Free the hot-knob three” to ”Bring the country to its knees if this is what the struggle was all about”. In short, South Africa was foaming at the mouth and not actually delivering a lot of substance.
In the meanwhile, the woman who had started all the trouble, as it were, had still not had satisfaction at the hands of the highest authorities in the land. Justice itself was on trial.
There remain many questions. If my housemaid, for example, had murdered someone on her weekend off, could I be held responsible? Should a licensed taxi operator be held liable when one of his operatives wipes out innocent lives while casually turning into oncoming traffic? If bits of an orbiting spaceship sent into space 30-years ago fall to Earth in Australia, killing several Aborigines, can the chief of the tribe rightfully sue the current president of the United States? And so on.
I believe that the Law Lords, in their wisdom, were doing precisely what they had been appointed to do — that is, sticking to the letter and the spirit of the law. Bent cops have been busted, and hopefully (although unlikely) these things will never happen again. The minister was not the one who committed the crime.
The public has the right to air its opinions on the matter. But in the end, random radio hardly has the finesse to get us to the heart of the matter — which is that we live in a randomly violent society, where all of us are part of the problem.
If gang rape, murder, robbery and personal indignation are to be abolished, where do we start? Unfortunately, not with the minister.