Is it true that levels of personal violence remain unchecked in South Africa? Are they escalating? Or is it just that, by the law of averages, the possibility of violence against your person gets closer and closer until it is literally breathing down your neck?
It’s not so long ago that a niece of mine was gang-raped in the privacy of her own home while her parents stood by helplessly. A gang of young men bent on violence had apparently been stalking her for weeks when she was out having a good time in the Northern suburbs with friends, and had found out where she lived. Their only comment, after they had taken turns invading her beautiful young body, was to ask where her ‘other friend” was — the one they had seen her with around Rosebank. Apparently, the plan had been to rape both of them that same night.
This is a crime not just of violence, but of cowardice — four tough, armed young men against one terrified young woman, her parents cowering helplessly in another part of the house, knowing all too clearly just what was going on. And, speaking of cowardice, needless to say, although the members of the gang could easily be identified and were known to hang out on the edges of one of those tough, dark townships that we still cling to like we invented them, the police were stumped as to where to start looking for clues. Months later, still no arrests have been made.
We’ve had the unfortunate saga of a very different young man, Kabelo Thabedi, who was so frustrated by endless queues at the offices of the department of home affairs for the simple and vital task of obtaining the identity document he had applied for two years before (without which his prospects of work were impossible) that he stormed into the office of one of the department’s bureaucrats, brandishing a toy gun to make his point. She, naturally, was scared out of her brains. The young man was ‘disarmed” and arrested. And, within days, the long-awaited ID was in his hands.
It was too late for him, however. The Book of Life is not going to be of much use to him as he begins to serve a five-year prison term for his ‘crime,” harmless as it turned out to be after all of that. I feel for him. Because the system could not find another way of dealing with his justified anger, it threw the book at him instead. Another young life wrecked.
And it is not just the young people setting out on the uncertain path of life who are affected. A couple of months ago, I received an SMS that was being circulated to inform all of us who cared to take an interest that novelist, essayist and Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer had been robbed in the broad daylight of an expanding morning, the time when she engages in her tireless round of literary labours, by another four young men, who climbed over her wall and proceeded to herd her (all eighty-plus years of her), her domestic worker, who is in her 60s, and the helpless gardener into the house.
When I went round to visit, she was stoical as ever — except when, as her story unfolded, she told me that she could have tolerated almost anything except the violation of a precious gift from her late husband, Reinhold Cassirer — her wedding ring, of no value to anyone but herself and her abiding memories of a long life together. They ripped it off her finger.
The three victims were herded upstairs as the robbers demanded money, the keys to the safe, anything. There was a little bit of money for domestic needs tucked away in a drawer, which Gordimer gladly handed over. While she was doing this, one of the men told her domestic worker to lie down on the bed. At which point, the novelist exploded, disregarding the danger that she might have been exposing herself to.
As she said to me: ‘I didn’t know if I was going to see this old companion of mine raped in front of my eyes. I shouted at them.” Feeling, I suppose, in spite of herself, like a white madam all over again. And, remarkably, they desisted, took the money, locked the three of them in a cupboard in the bedroom and departed over the same wall they had entered by. It is probably the presence of mind of the domestic to hit the alarm button that saved them all from an unspeakable fate. Who knows?
So just when I was absorbing all of that, I ran into another famous South African artist, the musician, composer and band leader Victor Ntoni, in a well-known downtown establishment in Newtown. I didn’t notice what was wrong until he brought it to my attention. ‘You might be wondering why my face is looking like this,” he said, pointing at his swollen jaw and lips. ‘I was walking out of Hillbrow towards Berea, pretty late at night, when out of the blue a couple of guys knocked me down, assaulted me, kicked me in the ribs. I still don’t know what it was all about.” But he suspects it might have been a hit from someone who doesn’t care for him much or for his music or whatever.
Anyway, like Gordimer, he is still alive to tell the tale.
Not so fortunate is the daughter of another eminent jazzman, though one from a different generation. We have all read the story of how saxophonist McCoy Mrubata’s daughter was brutally murdered and mutilated in Guguletu last week. Like my niece who had been raped, she was my daughter’s age — a young woman in her early twenties who had every right to think that the world was her oyster.
No, siree, Bob. No chance. Families devastated all over again. Not to mention, because you can’t bear to think about it, the agony she must have gone through before the ordeal, including the gouging out of her eyes, was finally over.
Well, yes. These are all people I know. I stand helpless on the sidelines, as all of their loved ones do. As a friend said: ‘You feel like going out and doing the unspeakable. You feel like becoming a Charles Bronson-type vigilante, killing these perpetrators and their families to boot.” And as he said, that’s the last thing you want even to think about feeling.
But sometimes you do think you’re going over the edge.