In 1999 three academics working for the Medical Research Council released a study on abuse of women in parts of SA. It was titled: “I Do Not Believe in Democracy in the Home: Men’s Relationships with and Abuse of Women.”
The study found that 27% of women surveyed in the Eastern Cape, 28% in Mpumalanga and 19% in Limpopo had been physically abused in their lifetime by a current or ex-partner. The study also found that 51% of women in the Eastern Cape, 50% in Mpumalanga and 40% in Limpopo were subjected to financial and emotional abuse.
That study was undertaken in the early days of our democracy. It, and others like it, were a warning sign: fix your society. We did not listen. Today, gender-based violence is at pandemic levels in our country. According to police minister Bheki Cele, 855 women and 243 children were killed in SA in just three months from April to June this year. More than 11,000 (yes, eleven thousand) cases of assault (with intent to commit grievous bodily harm) were opened with the police in those three months. The victims were, of course, women.
The rampant murder, rape, and abuse of women have become normal in our society. We hardly talk about it except at designated days and months in the year. We have normalised the horror.
These are not the only horrors that have become normalised in SA. Every day one sees horrors unleashed upon the innocent — as the country just moves on somnambulantly. We have become inured to the suffering of our people. The extraordinary, the unacceptable, have become normalised.
In the late 1990s violent car hijackings took off across SA. Today you hardly read or see reports about them. They are normalised. We have learnt to live with this horror among us.
Back in December 2007, president Thabo Mbeki admitted that his government should have heeded pleas by Eskom to invest more in electricity generation to keep up with the country’s economic growth.
“We said not now, later. We were wrong,” Mbeki said. “Eskom was right. We were wrong.”
Yet what have we done since then? Nothing, except to break Eskom down even more. The blackouts are worse. You would think that 15 years after Mbeki’s admission we would have got the problem fixed. Yet here we are, living in darkness, with businesses shutting down and workers unable to perform their duties. What’s even more depressing is that we now regard these blackouts as perfectly normal.
Yet here we are, living in darkness, with businesses shutting down and workers unable to perform their duties. What’s even more depressing is that we now regard these blackouts as perfectly normal.
And that is the problem with South African society. Things that should never be normalised, in this or any other society, have become normalised. This past week I opened the tap, and a weak flow of water came out. I did not even call a friend to vent my frustration. I just continued as if nothing was wrong. Yet, on Tuesday in Gauteng, the economic powerhouse of SA, there was no electricity and no water. It was just ... normal.
Who, anywhere in the world, accepts what Stats SA tells us and we see every day in our streets: youth unemployment in SA is at 66.5%. Reflecting on this, president Cyril Ramaphosa said in June: “No society can expect to grow or thrive when the vast majority of its young people are out of work.”
In my travels in SA these past few weeks I have come to dread visiting townships and villages. The streets are awash with young people hooked on the drug nyaope. It is everywhere: in the streets, in schools, in our own families. Grandmothers hide money and possessions for fear their grandchildren will steal from them to satisfy their addiction. Crime, fuelled by the need for drugs, runs rampant. That, in turn, triggers vigilante justice by residents.
That turns communities into lawless jungles. Often, in many parts of Pretoria’s townships for example, one finds young people manning a barricade across a road, claiming they are fixing potholes, and demanding a financial “contribution”.
These are the things we have normalised. It started with tolerating piles of dirt in the Joburg inner city. It started with hijacked buildings. Then it spread to the breakdown of bigger things — the national airline keels over because of theft by the president’s cronies, the water infrastructure falters, the electricity grid collapses (we are now warned of something called stage 15 load-shedding), and so forth.
Where is the outrage? Why do we tolerate and then normalise these extraordinary attacks on our humanity, on our very core as a nation?
At its founding in 1994, this renewed SA pledged to build a country where women and children would no longer feel afraid. It swore to turn its back on the sin of apartheid, a system which normalised the dehumanisation of black people. So, what happened to us? Why have we normalised so much that is an antithesis of what we vowed we would fight?
Why aren’t there protests in the streets amid so much inequality, decay, and abuse? Who have we become?
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