Race, class and outrage over femicide

OVER the past weeks violence against women has trended on social media platforms with #MenAreTrash being a conversation starter or breaker, depending on your standpoint.

This is in the wake, in particular, of the brutal murder of Karabo Mokoena, whose partner has been charged with her killing.

While the extent of the outrage against Karabo’s murder speaks to a rising level of sensitisation about violence against women, particularly intimate partner violence, such horrific incidences are not new.

South Africa is not only known as the rape capital of the world with an average of one in every three women being raped in their lifetime, but statistics reveal that three women are murdered by their partners every 24 hours.

This, on average, amounts to a body-count of 1 092 women being killed every year at the hands of the men they love.

The question on the minds of many is how do we address this scourge of violence – femicide as it is officially defined – affecting women and girls? How do we do more than just reduce victims of sexualised or intimate partner violence to mere hashtags before moving on to the next trending topic?

And what role do race (and here I recall reactions to Reeva Steenkamp’s death at the hands of her partner, Oscar Pistorius) and class play in whom we collectively mourn, or which incidences enjoy greater outrage, if at all?

When attempting to make sense of the horror of Karabo’s death a question that arises is what of the “faceless” and “nameless” women and children who reside in the townships and rural areas of South Africa and add significantly to the body count of victims of violence.

The townships of this country are among the most violent in the world. A recent incident in Mdantsane highlights this: community members chasing a rapist literally stumbled over the bodies of two young women who had been raped and murdered. The bodies of Bongiwe Matoyo, 27, and Lindokuhle “Manto” Malote, 19, a matric pupil, had been tossed over a cliff in the township and were found quite by chance.

This further speaks to how women, and black women especially, are devalued in our society. Like Karabo, whose body was disposed of and set alight in an open field behind a park in Lyndhurst, Johannesburg, women’s bodies are easily brutalised at the will and whim of violent men and thereafter disposed of. Recall the case of Anene Booysen who was found disembowelled and dying.

It seems, for the most part, that our society has made peace with the notion that townships are inherently violent so it is okay to leave those who inhabit these spaces to their own devices.

Apartheid logic continues to dominate how state institutions interact with these spaces. This is evidenced by the often quick responses by the SAPS to quell so-called service delivery protests such as the ones that recently took place in Breidbach and which trickled over onto the N2 outside King William’s Town. Yet the desperate cries of community members for SAPS patrols or the delivery of other basic services very often fall on deaf ears.

Of violence in townships, Steve Biko remarked: “When you are in a township it is dangerous to cross often from one street to the next, and yet as you grow up it is essential that kids must be sent on errands in and around the township. They meet up with these problems; rape and murder are very, very common aspects of our life in the townships”.

Violence has continued to fester in townships long after these remarks were made. And neglect of these spaces is a habit that endures in the post-apartheid dispensation.

Between the murders of Reeva and Karabo, there have been many more cases of femicide, but there have been no discernable public outpourings of outrage. Why is this? Was the outcry about Karabo’s death because we are increasingly fed up with gender-based violence? Or was it because the violence we associate with certain geographical locations suddenly shifted from the spaces we thought did not affect us?

I’m not implying here that we would not have cared had Karabo not been an Instagram-account-holding millennial. I’m simply grappling with why many more women have died under similar circumstances in the weeks since Karabo’s brutal murder, yet we have no names and have not coined more hashtags. Do we take these killings as seriously?

What I am convinced of though, is that our society is no longer quite the same since Karabo’s death. So how do we proceed from here? There are no clear or concrete solutions, however if we were to start dismantling the damaging logic which causes us to address femicide in part, and to problematise the notion that domestic violence is a private or family matter, then we will begin to address this scourge which has gripped South African society for so long.

Zikhona Valela is a writer and holds an MA in history at the University currently known as Rhodes