Johannesburg - “He saw that I was on my period, but continued raping me.”
This was said by a rape survivor at the court case of Joseph Rasempane Mahloma, the alleged Tembisa serial rapist, who is standing trial on 22 counts of rape as well as a host of other violence-related charges.
A Tembisa woman, who cannot be named, on Monday told the South Gauteng High Court what happened in July 2014 when Mahloma and an unknown accomplice allegedly broke into her home, which she shared with her boyfriend.
The two assailants, wielding a firearm and a knife, forced their way into her home at around 2am, stole two cell phones and two wrist watches and locked the woman's boyfriend inside their one-room house before taking her to an open veld in an Ekurhuleni township.
Battling to hold her tears back, the rape survivor said that upon reaching the open veld, the two assailants told her to get naked and then stared at her naked body “for roughly 10 minutes”.
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“The one man with the knife told me to suck his penis until he ejaculated. I sucked the knife-man until he ejaculated."
“Then the man with the firearm also wanted me to do the same for him. At that stage, I was crying, weak, and couldn't carry on,” the sobbing woman said.
It was at that stage that the man carrying the firearm told the woman to bend over and forcibly inserted his penis into her vagina.
“He saw that I was on my period, but continued raping me,” the crying woman testified.
The survivor was asked by prosecutor Advocate Leisha Surendra to describe the man wielding the firearm - to which she replied that he was a man of the same build and height as Mahloma.
She said that she didn't get a proper look at the alleged rapists because they were wearing balaclavas.