‘I am tired of expecting better from men’
We have been here countless times before, wringing our hands over the rape and murder of women. It’s time to ensure enough really is enough
● In SA, you visit your boyfriend at his flat and leave in a rubbish bin. In SA, your ex shoots you in front of your mother. In SA, you’re kidnapped from your house by a group of men and found dead under a bridge.
In SA, you lock yourself in your boyfriend’s bathroom, then he pumps bullets through the door and into your body. In SA, you never make it home, and are found instead at a construction site, raped, your abdomen sliced open. In SA, you’re stabbed to death on New Year’s Day for being lesbian.
In SA, you go to the post office and have your head bashed in with a scale.
To say we have a femicide crisis would be an understatement.
The murder of Uyinene Mrwetyana has galvanised thousands of South Africans to march, to tweet, to sign online petitions, to say that, finally, “enough is enough”. Women are outing their rapists and harassers on social media. We’re the angriest we’ve been over violence against women and girls.
“Enough is enough,” we all shout. And while it feels as though this time is different, we’ve been here before. We all shouted “enough is enough” when we heard about Anene Booysen’s especially brutal rape and murder. We claimed that was “the tipping point”. But it wasn’t.
And so we thought Noluvo Swelindawo was it. And said the same thing with Karabo Mokoena. Now here we are again, gathered at the latest outrage train stop, shouting “enough is enough”, as we do every year, every time one woman’s murder makes headlines.
And for each victim whose name we know, there are many others who will forever remain anonymous, buried in the unmarked graves of statistics. Just another dead woman, highly likely killed by a man.
So how did our dear government and president react to this latest anger? They suggested we spend this weekend praying the femicide away.
Before news of her murder broke, some asked why Mrwetyana’s case was getting so much attention. Well, it’s because she’s a microcosm of what happens in this country every day. Today it will be someone else. And tomorrow it will be another woman. And maybe someday it will be you. Maybe someday it will be me. To reference the hashtag and movement: Am I next?
In Mississippi Goddam, Nina Simone sang: I think every day’s gonna be my last. And while the song was about the civil rights struggle in the US, it’s a fitting description of what South African women go through. In this country, freedom of movement is a myth, especially if you’re a woman.
There are men who joke about what they would do if they were women for a day; fondling their new breasts is somewhere near the top of the list. Sorry, boys: the reality is if you were women for a day, you would look over your shoulders almost every minute that you’re out in public. If men were women in SA, they would be afraid of walking alone or driving alone after dark, and be nervous when it’s time to jump into an Uber at night.
If they were women for a day, they would live with the scars of being raped at age 12 by a cousin, a secret they were still living with almost two decades later to protect their mother, herself a lifelong victim of abuse. If they were women for a day, they would avoid men at all costs. They would know that it’s the only way to survive in our country.
If men were women for a day, they would know that we cannot even fully trust the men in our own lives. Not our brothers, not our fathers, not our cousins, not our lovers. Because they have, on many occasions, been the ones who hurt us.
Being a woman in this country is an extreme sport — we’re safer base jumping without a parachute than we are in our own homes.
But we aren’t only afraid: we’re angry. Boiling over. We’re done playing nice. We’re done being polite. The goods girls we’ve been socialised to be are either dead or dying.
We’re on our own — many women have long known this, some are only waking up to the realisation now, and some still believe the same men that harass, rape and kill us can be our allies. That our devils can also be our gods.
“Not all men,” I hear you whine. “Stop calling us trash.” But you don’t have to be a rapist to be part of the problem: some women have, for instance, tweeted that they saw their tormenters taking part in last week’s protests against gender-based violence and femicide.
And if being called trash offends you, we’re done caring. The time to coddle men’s feelings is over. Women have spent millennia coddling the male of the species — that hasn’t stopped us from landing up beaten, brutalised or dead.
There are people who say that this is no longer a woman’s fight — that men have to lead it, that it’s up to them to change the society they created. I’m not buying it. Men, as a collective, have proven time and again that they cannot be trusted.
They have proven that we can’t depend on them for anything except to harm us, to gaslight us, to trample on us (sometimes literally), to jump into the sharing of women’s rape stories with “what about the men who have gone to jail because of false rape accusations?” — when in reality most men don’t even go to jail for actually raping someone.
I am tired of expecting better from men. They have proven themselves unworthy of that expectation, unworthy of our respect. As one writer said to me in conversation, her respect for male individuals is “renewable daily”. Men are the perpetrators of violence — against women and against each other. Why trust them?
Enough is enough, we say — but it never is. Experience has taught us that petitions, hashtags and marches don’t make a difference. Speeches from politicians are what they are — just talk. We’ve commented on the government’s proposed national strategic plans on gender-based violence and femicide — but it probably won’t be enough.
But we shouldn’t stop. It’s time to take the lives of South African women out of men’s hands. We only have ourselves. Only we can fight for us. And as exhausted, as weary, as hurt, as despondent as we may be, it’s important that we don’t lose our anger, for to lose our anger is to lose our voice. Our anger is our power.
We will march until our feet can no longer carry us, we will raise our fists in the air until our arms fall off, we will scream until our voices collapse. We’ll die trying — and chances are those deaths will be at the hands of a man.