The brutal truth of South Africa’s femicide crisis is that some bodies are deemed worthier of immediate state protection and media attention than others. For the past two months, the soil of Ekurhuleni has been turning into a mass graveyard.
Since July 2026, the bodies of nine women have been discovered across geographically siloed corners of the municipality — spanning Kempton Park, Olifantsfontein, Clayville, Rhodesfield and KwaThema.
Yet, for weeks, there was a deafening silence; Is there a chance that all the dead women were not reported missing?
The national news remained clear. The state apparatus remained idle.
Only when Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo, a popular social runner and centre manager vanished during an afternoon jog did the nation finally grasp the headline.
Only when a vibrant, relatable member of the middle class went missing did the South African Police Service (SAPS) “discover” that seven other women had been dumped like refuse in the same district, followed by sudden national media coverage.
What are the chances that the bodies of the first seven women would ever have been linked or searched for if it had not been for Elizabeth ‘Tsontso’ Moselakgomo’s popularity?
The lag in widespread media coverage regarding the murdered women is a source of intense public frustration.
The state’s response is predictable: the bodies were not found all at once or in a single neighbourhood. The scenes were scattered across a vast municipality and various police stations might have handled the “reported” missing persons. It allegedly took time for forensic investigators to aggregate the geographic data and realise that the horrifying signature of the crimes pointed toward a potential serial pattern.
This exposes a fatal flaw in how the SAPS tracks violence against women: missing people treated as isolated local crime, with no central database trigger. Because South Africa battles exceptionally high everyday rates of GBV and femicide, our institutions have normalised the slaughter of women.
When a partially clothed or naked body is found, authorities routinely misclassify it as an isolated incident of “standard” local crime. Without immediate confirmation of a linked “serial” pattern, individual murders of marginalised un-headlined women rarely make front-page news. The statistics swallow them.
Media coverage and state response in South Africa heavily rely on public relatability and social status, rather than a proactive systemic duty to protect all citizens equally. When Tsontso did not return home, her daughter raised the alarm and an entire community of runners mobilised.
Her social standing forced the media to look and by looking at her, they were forced to look at the ground where she was found. Only then was massive attention paid. The sudden appearance of the government leaders and a multidisciplinary specialist team is not proactive policing — it is political damage control.
Why in South Africa does a missing person’s report require social media clout or middle-class prominence before police treat it with immediate urgency?
Moselakgomo should be alive today. So should the other seven women, including Itumeleng Kekana, if the government genuinely had an effective strategy to fight violence against women.
The classist hierarchy of its justice system must be dismantled. The search for every missing woman should be as if she were a national icon. Every dead woman must be investigated as a national crisis.
Anything less makes the state complicit in our ongoing execution.
The national crisis of violence against women demands structural, systemic accountability. A well-coordinated, centralised, real-time forensic mapping system for missing women and unidentified female bodies across municipal lines to catch serial patterns immediately.
How many other women are lying in shallow graves across Gauteng right now, unlinked and uncounted, simply because they lacked the social capital to spark a national outcry?
Dr Linda Mshweshwe is a senior researcher at University of Johannesburg