Broken Women of the South

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.

The Monsters We Live With

When a monster is in the backyard you cannot promise your children that they will be safe in your home. You cannot assure them that if they lock the gate then the bad people will stay away. You can’t fool them into thinking that danger comes from a stranger.

I lived with an uncle who attempted to rape my mentally handicapped cousin. I have never forgotten how my cousin looked the day after the attack. Three of her teeth were missing, her lip was busted up and she was limping.

He had broken her window and attempted to rape her. Were it not for the physical strength I now believe she was given to defend herself from those who would hurt her because they believed she was helpless, he would have succeeded. As it was, she hurled an electric generator at him while he was stripping naked, (I once tried to pick up that generator and it was a mission), slammed the door on his fingers and yelled for help.

The only other person at home was my grandfather, my uncle’s father. He was an old man suffering from cancer of the oesophagus, he witness the image of his youngest son poised erect above a child the entire family had raised and protected from harm from the day she was born. It never escaped my notice that my grandfather died two weeks after my uncle was sentenced to five years in prison for attempted rape, his father’s testimony having been paramount in securing his conviction.

“I heard noises, Mimi was calling ‘mkhulu, mkhulu’ I arrived him was standing above her, shaking his left hand (which had been slammed into the door) and holding his erect penis while she whimpered and cried beneath him.”

These words, translated to English, sound infinitely better than they are in Xhosa, our language. With these words, a father acknowledged in a court of law that his son had been a monster, his desires and appetites that of a monster. He admitted to having raised a person who would turn out to be worthless, therefore capable of acts that would lead others to question their own self-worth. When he uttered to those words, I like to believe he found release, not only at having told the truth and fought to protect his grandchild but rather, also having freed himself of guilt, that it was his child who was now the family’s mortal enemy. He felt relief at knowing that with his end fast approaching, his final gift to his family was to remove the monster from the backyard.

Two years into his sentence my uncle was granted parole into the custody of his eldest sister. I begged her not to accept, to refuse him his second chance but blood is thick and she allowed him to come home. He promised he had changed. And for a year he worked and kept on the straight and narrow, he contributed to the household and faint rumblings of “he’s really changed” began to surface.

And then:

“I walked in to the kitchen to check on Mbali who I had sent to pick up pitcher of juice five minutes prior and who wasn’t answering my calls for her. We had been sitting far from the house under the shadow of some trees as it was a very hot day and the juice had been cooling in the fridge. When she didn’t return within a reasonable time I went to look for her, convinced that like any other child she had been distracted by something else, like the TV. I walked in and saw him, pinning her to the refrigerator, a hand clamped on her mouth while another roamed in between her thighs which had been forced apart by his knee. I broke a vase on his head and attacked him until the other arrived and we called the police. She was 13 years old.”

Monsters are not only the strangers we caution our children against. Sometimes, we invite them to share our lives with us.