I was
going about the mundane task of shredding lettuce for a salad when my mother
launched into a tale with chilling nonchalance and a blasé air. A woman we all
knew, a woman trained in law enforcement, a policewoman, had been killed in
cold blood by her boyfriend. It no longer mattered that the woman had been
married and her having a boyfriend had gained disfavour in our small community
(because in a small town everyone knows everyone’s business).
Nobody
knows why it happened but everyone knows what happened. The woman was nine
months pregnant. Everyone had been having a lovely time speculating about whose
baby it would be. Even though they judged her, and judged her harshly, nobody
wished to see the woman dead. So on the day a keening cry was heard, emitted by
her aged mother on a clear sunny afternoon, nobody laughed; nobody thought she
deserved it; and many cried upon hearing the grisly tale.
It
would be her young children’s testimony that would lead to the arrest of her
boyfriend. It seems that the woman went missing for a few weeks; no one was
alarmed as her lover was missing too and everyone added two and two together.
The boyfriend came back, claiming to have been visiting family and asked where
the woman was. That was when the alarm was raised. When police came asking
questions, the children said it was the boyfriend whom they had last seen with
the woman. Perhaps it is the compulsion, often cited in criminal modus operandi
investigations, for the murderer to return to his crime scene that sent the
boyfriend looking for the woman. In a matter of hours, the woman’s now decomposing
body was discovered in a cane field. Her abdomen had been slit open, the child
wrenched from her uterus and bludgeoned to death. There were signs of rape and
stab wounds.
Each
slice of my knife into the tomatoes made me visualise the murder of this woman.
No matter what she had done, no matter her morals, she did not deserve to die
like she did. And yet I carried on, ‘oohing’ and ‘aaaihing’ when appropriate
while my mother regaled me with the horrifying story.
On
Monday, a co-worker told us the story of how she found her children’s nanny
stabbed, her eyes gouged out and raped the previous Saturday. Y co-worker had
to identify the body when the community called her and asked to see whether or
not the ‘victim’ was still alive. Despite this shocking experience, my co-worker
was at work on Monday, although visibly sad, showing no signs of the emotional
scarification one would expect from the encounter.
My mother,
my co-worker and myself are products of a country that has become desensitised
to violence. We are saddened yes, we grieve, but we are hardly ever shocked at
the violence of crimes against women. We are no longer distraught when we hear
stories like this, we are just fervently thankful it was not us. We are aware
that nothing differentiates us from those who have fallen victim to such
cruelty, except sheer dumb luck. We are powerless to protect ourselves pre-emptively,
because when our turn comes the perpetrator might not need to break down
windows or scale walls, it could be someone who has shared your bed and shown
you what you thought to be love.
Indeed,
our country is diseased.
