The liberation of the caveman

By Zdena Mtetwa

I have driven down Witkoppen road many times, coming from the Fourways direction in the early hours of the morning. But it took many times of doing this for me to wake up and see the view from the highway. One day, I looked afar and saw white and red lights, in rows, moving, like the waves of the sea. Traffic! On either side of the rows were lights of different colours. Buildings! I suddenly became aware that I did not need to look too far because from another platform, someone else was watching the same lights and I was one of the flashers of those lights. Both the red and the white lights, depending on which angle one was looking from. This is the city. I am a city girl, and part of the glamour of Johannesburg. But I can only see the glamour as long as my eyes remain innocent.

What kind of freedom is it that gives conditions to perception? Why can a woman simply not perceive and be assured of the consistency of what she perceives? Maybe she can, but not here, and not now. In South Africa, every one in two women will, in her lifetime, have her life suddenly divided into two parts: the “before this” and the “after this”. And “this” is rape! “This” is the point at which the glamour of the city becomes the gloom of a life.

What glamour is there in the hundreds of cars in the traffic when you know that the causer of your gloom may be in one of them? What glamour is there in lit-up buildings that threaten to scrape the sky when in some of them another woman is raped? What glamour is there in them when in some are police officers who take bribes to let rapists off the hook, when their victims have been imprisoned forever by grief, disease or both.

In a 2006 study conducted by Delport and Vermeulen in a jail in Gauteng, they found that 72.9% of the rapists felt no remorse for their actions. Where does freedom lie? Nelson Mandela in his book Long Walk to Freedom said the man who takes another’s freedom can never be free himself. Yet are we not free when the mind is free? These perpetrators who feel no remorse are, in fact, free.

Amid the seemingly dignified crowd that walks the city, amid the fancy buildings that indicate development, amid the parks, fairs and schools, disguised in clean clothing, the caveman walks. If he is unlucky or lucky (depending on what he believes in) there is a 15% chance that the caveman will find himself in prison.

Either way, because he is a caveman he remains free and the woman who walks the streets remains enslaved. It is only unless he, the caveman, in some way or another is made to see woman as mother, daughter, sister and not as an object, that he becomes liberated from the cave. The liberation of the caveman is the liberation of South Africa.

Zdena is a 2008 Mandela Rhodes Scholar currently working as a publications officer at the Khulumani Support Group. Khulumani is a civil society organisation that works to empower victims of apartheid who suffered gross human rights violations. The organisation strives to promote human rights and justice in South Africa.