The murders of miners at Marikana by brutal state apparatus, the rape and murder of Anene Booysen by a group of men, and the killing of Reeva Steenkamp by her male lover have common threads. All three reflect a confluence of systems of violence that span centuries. Each is a product of past and prevailing […]
Anene Booysen
Posted inNews/Politics
South Africa and that Time cover
Alex Perry’s story about Oscar Pistorius and South Africa’s culture of violence has inevitably attracted a great deal of attention from the Twittering classes. The general consensus is that the piece, which draws a link between Pistorius’s shooting of Reeva Steenkamp and the endemic violence that characterises our national culture, is poor journalism and full […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Anene, Reeva media frenzy reveals a nation’s shallowness
For the past three weeks we have been treated to a feeding frenzy around the deaths of two women due to violence in South Africa, by the media, by politicians and by commentators (myself included). But I am wondering if we are not losing sight of what is really at stake here. As a commissioner […]
Posted inGeneral
Sexism – catch them young with lollypops
Which kid doesn’t enjoy Saturday morning cartoons? My kid is no exception and I join him often enough, but this Saturday I am annoyed by Pin Pop’s very obviously sexist TV commercial on e.tv. Why is it being screened at a time when toddlers are bound to be tuning in? Does the answer lie in […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Why I will wear black next time
Since the murder of Anene Booysen, I, and I suspect many others in the gender-based violence sector, have felt completely overwhelmed by the multitude of opinions and approaches to gender-based violence articulated in the sector, the media, and in public and private conversations throughout the country. At the research unit where I work there have […]
Posted inGeneral
I am not wearing black today
By Lize Hartley Let me start by saying that wearing black today is an act with good intentions. It comes from a good place, and I am not pointing fingers at those who have chosen to wear black. But I won’t be wearing black today. To start with, wearing black is not “taking a stand” […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Rape, let’s end it
By Miranda Pyne Anene Booysen’s gruesome murder last week caused many of us to speculate about revenge. Yet again we sombrely witnessed another violation. Another woman’s life wasted. People online, and on the radio, called for castration, the death sentence, sentencing the murderers to life in the worst prison possible, in some overcrowded hellish place […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Activists do make a difference, Haffajee
There’s an old philosophical riddle that goes like this: If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? Updated for a contemporary 21st century South Africa reeling from the rape-murder of Anene Booysen it might read like this: Does work exist if Ferial Haffajee […]
Posted inLifestyle
Local erotic fiction goes global
In the same week that South Africa’s first mainstream erotic novel for women hit shelves, a major publishing deal was announced that is poised to take local erotica worldwide. There are those who chose to link these two events with the horrific rape and murder of Anene Booysen — the implication being that women’s erotic […]
Posted inGeneral
#StopRape alone won’t stop rape
A significant component of the national outcry following the horrific gang rape and murder of 17-year-old Anene Booysen highlighted the extent to which South Africans shift blame and culpability on the raped, and not the rapist. This manifests itself through the lazy recourse in our national dialogue to primitive and antiquated explanations for rape: broken […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Bringing out the big Gundelfingers
”Why does divorce have to be messy?” someone asked on Twitter. Today’s trending topic is, of course, the Sexwale divorce. Anything is messy if it involves lawyers, anger and, of course, money. A lot of money. (A R70 million house! R150 000 a month maintenance! I hope at least that the R1 million car demand is in […]