The sins of our racist, violent and patriarchal past often come back to revisit us, writes Mbuyiselo Botha.
“They will never recover… their symptoms (of post-traumatic stress disorder) are severe. It is unfortunate that (their) memories will stay with them for the rest of their lives. They look fine from outside, but their souls are damaged”.
These were the chilling words of trauma specialist Malose Langa describing the tragic experience of two young women – Siphokazi Tyeke and Jabu Mbatha – who had to watch as their husbands were stripped naked, hands tied behind their backs, and then thrown into a dam where they drowned in the “Rhodes Park murders”.
After being made to watch their partners drown, the gang turned to the women and raped them.
The question on everyone’s minds was: have we reached a situation where we have marauding gangs of criminals who are capable of doing anything and everything to other human beings, without fear of being caught and sent to prison?
Every South African was afraid and we held a collective breath while the police searched for these criminals.
Three were caught, charged and went on trial. We read that others were Zimbabweans who simply vanished across the border.
The court heard evidence that after the gang had ambushed the two couples, they tormented the women with the sight of their drowning husbands – SizweTyeka and Zukisa Khela.
Only then did they turn on the frightened and traumatised women and gang-raped them. They wanted to drown the women too, but one of the criminals talked them out of it.
Three of the murderers were found guilty, charged and sentenced six weeks ago to four life sentences each for the rapes and murders, plus 15 years for robbery. This is one of those heinous crimes that, when it does occur in our troubled land, we are reminded just how the sins of our racist, violent and patriarchal past often come back to revisit us – and remind us that we haven’t really dealt with the deeper and structural damages created by the brutality of apartheid and repression.
Apartheid was a very immoral system that sought to dehumanise and infringe on Ubuntu bethu, our self-love, pride and our dignity as a human race.
The fact is that we were called sub-human and verses from the Bible used to justify the evils of discrimination; and, not only that, but the system was designed to ensure that we were treated and reminded of this anomaly everywhere we turned, destroying many of our people’s sense of humanity.
We talk about pass laws that ensured that, as a black man, you could not move freely after migrating from the homelands where you were robbed of your land and cattle, and forced into the single-sex hostels.
Men were stripped naked in front of each other, whether young or old, married or single when they went to apply for the dompass.
Black men were humiliated in front of their wives, parents and their children because they were perceived as boys by the white man. All these decades of brutality are manifesting themselves in the violence that black people are subjecting one another to today.
The violence in the Rhodes Park incident shows that violence has dehumanised us as African people. Again, this sense of entitlement of men over women’s bodies is not about sex, but about power.
Take the case of a 70-year-old man who beats his 60-year-old wife to death because she did not cook and dish out food for him. A young soldier kills his partner, using a bomb, because he couldn’t accept that she doesn’t love him any more.
There are alternative ways of resolving any disagreements without resorting to violence, especially towards powerless women.
Some of our upbringing exposed us to acts of violence which made us normalise brutality and cruelty.
We must mobilise as groups and insist that we start support groups to educate our men and to try to deal with their latent anger and hatred.
Nobody must talk us out of it by saying “but apartheid is dead and buried” when the wounds and scars are still fresh in the black man's psyche.
There are many churches in our communities and we need to mobilise those to run workshops to confront and deal with the rage that is in our black men and boy children because of the absent father.
If we don’t do this, the scourge of a fatherless society will continue to haunt us for many decades to come because the only good black men would be either those in jail, or those who died prematurely because of crime.